Escaped Nuns

Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery sold over 20,000 copies. By “escaped nun,” Maria Monk, the book provided a shocking exposé of convent life, from licentious priests to tortured nuns to infanticide. Despite Maria Monk’s unveiling as an imposter, her book went on to become the second bestseller before the Civil War, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Far from representing a curious aberration, Monk’s book was part of a larger phenomenon, involving riots, propaganda, and politics. The campaign against convents was intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and in particular the role of women in the republic. At a time when concern for “female virtue” consumed many Americans, nuns were a barometer of attitudes toward women. The veiled nun stood as the inversion of the true woman, needed to sustain the purity of the nation. She was a captive for a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a “white slave,” and a “foolish virgin.” In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers, both male and female, crafted this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns and women more broadly in America.