"Habits of Vice:" The House of the Good Shepherd and Competing Narratives of Female

Delinquency in Early Twentieth Century Hartford

Author(s): Jennifer Cote
Source: American Catholic Studies , Winter 2011, Vol. 122, No. 4 (Winter 2011), pp. 23-
45
Published by: American Catholic Historical Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44195372

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 "Habits of Vice:"
The House of the Good Shepherd and
Competing Narratives of
Female Delinquency in
Early Twentieth Century Hartford

Jennifer Cote

Though sisters have been traditionally marginalized in the history of American

women's reform, an examination of the Hartford House of the Good Shepherd
demonstrates how, under the mantle of Catholicism, women religious, with their
unquestionable chastity, claimed a role in mediating over urban female
delinquency in cities like Hartford by creating a new narrative of redemption for
their charges, a narrative challenged by both the inmates and an eager press. The
sisters sought to redeem both the "wayward" and the "fallen," terms which
referred to a wide range of young women in industrial America, from thieves, to,
more commonly, teenagers with sexual experiences, unfit parents, or those who
simply deviated from norms and expectations. These "wayward" women, however,
sought control over their own lives, control that was withheld by the sisters. The
newspaper, on the other hand, sought to exploit the inmates (and occasionally the
sisters), even as they lauded the institution. Taken together, the three
perspectives reveal a multifaceted struggle over the discourse of female
delinquency in the industrializing east.

In 1917, Helen Pratt, a twenty-year-old woman, allowed men to buy

her dinner at Hartford's Venetian Café in exchange for her company
at the theater. What they had was not necessarily a date, but a purely
financial exchange - men essentially bought her time and she was
their escort. Made worse by the fact that she was married, though to a
man she nonchalantly acknowledged as being '"no good,"' Pratt was
charged by the local police court with soliciting. Although they were
supposed to be dependent on their husbands, those women chose a
path for their lives, that eschewed their spouses, and were clearly

Jennifer Cote is an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut.

She is extremely grateful to Sister Winifred Doyle, CSJ, at the Archives of the Sisters
of the Good Shepherd in Astoria, New York, for both her assistance and her
fellowship; she is similarly indebted to Sister Dolores Liptak, RSM, for her
encouragement and advice. She would also like to thank Mimi Cowan, Daniel
Czitrom, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Dolly Smith Wilson, Kevin Callahan, and Cynthia
Krohn for all their thoughtful help. For further comment on this article please contact
the author: jennifercote@sjc.edu.

AMERICAN CATHOLIC STUDIES Vol. 122, No. 4 (2011): 23-45

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24 American Catholic Studies

delinquents, even if the crime they

twenty-first century eyes. Her "dates" were also charged with
solicitation, but they were released in exchange for their use as
witnesses against the cafe's manager, who was accused of running a
prostitution ring. In contrast, the court sentenced young Miss Pratt to
the House of the Good Shepherd, where she would possibly spend
years in the process of redemption.1
Though sisters have been traditionally marginalized in the history
of American women's reform, an examination of the Hartford House of
the Good Shepherd demonstrates that under the mantle of
Catholicism, women religious, with their unquestionable chastity,
claimed a role in mediating urban female delinquency in cities like
Hartford with a new narrative of redemption for their charges, a
narrative challenged by both the inmates and an eager press. The
sisters sought to redeem both the "wayward" and the "fallen," terms
which referred to a wide range of young women in industrial America,
from thieves, to, more commonly, teenagers with sexual experiences,
unfit parents, or those who simply deviated from accepted norms and
expectations.2 These "wayward" women, however, sought control over
their own lives, control that was withheld by the sisters, presenting a
scenario that contradicted the sisters' own narrative. The newspaper,
on the other hand, sought to exploit the inmates (and occasionally the
women religious) even as they lauded the institution. Taken together,
the three perspectives reveal a multifaceted struggle over the
discourse of female delinquency in the industrializing east.

Realigning the Historical Narrative

While "wayward" girls have been the subject of expansive feminist

scholarship in the last twenty years, with Mary Odem's Delinquent
Daughters and Regina Kunzel's Fallen Women, Problem Girls among
the most significant contributions, the work of women religious with
troubled women and girls ("troubled" being a broad term in this

1. "Venetian Café is Closed to Women," Hartford Daily Courant , July 2, 1917.

2. Anne Meis Knupfer discussed the variable definitions of the words "immoral" and
"incorrigible" in this period; the case she makes fits for "wayward," as well. She writes
that, "both terms [were] often masking sexual behaviors. Indeed, the expansive legal
definitions of these terms included such practices as standing on a street corner,
accepting a car ride from a male stranger, or flirting with a boy in the corner
drugstore or confectionary." This broad definition of poor behavior clearly informed
Hartford's patterns of criminalization. Anne Meis Knupfer, "'To Become Good, Self-
Supporting Women:' The State Industrial School for Delinquent Girls at Geneva,
Illinois, 1900-1935," Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (October 2000): 422.

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 25

context) has emerged more slowly.3 Suellen Hoy's two ar

House of the Good Shepherd in twentieth-century Chicag
the few works that focus particularly on religious sisters
lay cohort; Maureen Fitzgerald explores the Good Shephe
New York, as well as the active Sisters of Mercy.4 Along
historians, they address the question of why the work of
sisters has been neglected in much of the women's reform
historiography, even though they did as much social and educational
work as Protestant women who are much more intently covered in the
scholarship.
For most historians, the sisters' absence from the narrative of
American women's history involves a perceived lack of agency. Carol
K. Coburn and Martha Smith point to the perception that nuns were
"historically seen as docile handmaidens and submissive
subordinates."5 Kathleen Sprows Cummings's interpretation of th
omission of women religious revolves around the patriarchy inher
in the Catholic Church; she notes that there was a "widespread
assumption that women who were faithful members of a patriarchal
church were largely incapable of genuine work on behalf of women."6
Only recently have scholars begun to argue that sisters had a great
deal of power within the church; earlier historians doubted such power
existed. Assuming sisters to have been so trapped within their own
religious tradition that such work was impossible means that the
many institutions, schools, and colleges they built for other women are
invisible. In actuality, their experiences and creations are a significant
part of the history of American women.

3. Mary Odern, Delinquent Daughters : Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female

Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1995); Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and
the Professionalization of Social Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
4. Hoy's two articles are found in the collective volume, Good Hearts : Catholic
Sisters in Chicago's Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) and originally
appeared in journals. The article I will be using here is Hoy, "Caring for Chicago's
Women and Girls: The Sisters of the Good Shepherd, 1859-1911," Journal of Urban
History 23 (March 1997): 260-294. See also Maureen Fitzgerald, "'The Perils of
Passion and Poverty': Women Religious and the Care of Single Women in New York
City, 1845-1890," U.S. Catholic Historian 10 (Winter 1992): 45-58 and Habits of
Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Social Welfare
System, 1830-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
5. Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic
Culture and American Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3.
6. Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New Women and the Old Faith: Gender and
American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2009), 4.

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26 American Catholic Studies

The historiography has long suppor

women were able to claim and manipulate the mantle of moral
authority in most American cities, thereby influencing the contested
definitions of delinquency and controlling many methods of reform in
America. Catholics, feared by many Americans for decades as seeking
converts to a cultish, pope-worshipping religion, have been on the
sidelines of the narrative. This particular framework omitted
"nondominant" women from the story, regardless of their work.7 The
numerous reasons for the omission of Catholic women, both lay and
religious, from the narrative suggest avenues for further research that
may prosper by looking at countries where Catholicism and the work
of sisters have long been discussed.8
This work seeks to expand our understanding of the Sisters of the
Good Shepherd by positioning them at the top of a narrative triangle,
where they competed for authority over delinquency not just with
other reform organizations but with the newspaper industry and the
inmates themselves. The way the sisters depicted their work
contrasted dramatically with the known reactions of the girls and the
accounts of the press. This further moves our understanding of the
work of sisters beyond their interactions with municipal offices, states,
and courts, and introduces another locus. Centering the story in
Hartford, Connecticut, rarely a subject in histories of New England or

7. Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion , 7.

8. This discussion becomes complicated, however, by the history of the European
Good Shepherd sisters. Historians in the last several years have included the Good
Shepherd houses as part of larger studies of "Magdalene Asylums" or "Magdalene
Laundries," particularly those in England and Ireland. These studies have branded
the sisters as part of a rather cruel means of social control in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Authors such as Frances Finnegan have emphasized the lack of
justice "victims" of the system received, while another historian, Rebecca McCarthy,
argues that the sisters were abusive and brutal, colluding with an equally brutal state
system that punished transgressors of gender norms with life sentences and "slave"
labor. See Frances Finnegan, "Do Penance or Perish": A Study of Magdalene Asylums
in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes
(New York: Routledge, 1990); Rebecca Lea McCarthy, Origins of the Magdalene
Laundries: An Analytical History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); and James Smith,
Ireland's Magdalene Laundries (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
The bulk of the historiography of European women religious focuses on the Early
Modern period; on nuns in Europe more generally, see JoAnn Kay McNamara, Sisters
in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard, 1996). Other
regional explorations of nineteenth-century European nuns include Mary Peckham
Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change
in Ireland, 1750-1900 (New York: Oxford, 1998); Susan O'Brien, "French Nuns in
Nineteenth- Century England" Past and Present (February 1997): 142-180; and
Barbara Walsh, Roman Catholic Nuns in England and Wales, 1800-1937 (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 2002).

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 27

Catholicism, creates another locus, different from the we

New York or Boston reform scenes, both heavily covered in the
literature on women's work with women. The Sisters of the Good
Shepherd in Hartford performed substantive work within their
diocese, work in need of recognition and exploration.

Industrial Hartford and the Good Shepherd

Hartford in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was

a burgeoning city with a growing white-collar labor force ensconced in
insurance, and a developing working-class population that labored in
the increasing number of factories. Unlike cities such as New York
and Boston, which had been industrializing and crowded since the
early 1800s, or Chicago, which grew tremendously just prior to the
Civil War, Hartford only began to industrialize and grow in later
decades. Hartford "for its size [was] the richest city in the United
States," according to historian Peter C. Baldwin. The plush homes of
middle- and upper-class executives testified to this fact. Though it
never quite reached the volume or density of other cities, Hartford
developed urban problems like slums and red light districts within the
last years of the century. In 1890, some 53,000 residents lived in a
small radius of developed land; outside the city's borders were open
acres, many of which would disappear in the following decades as
companies built factories further away from the city center and
working-class housing, mainly in the form of New England's "triple-
deckers," lined new streets.9
Immigrants clustered in the southern and eastern sides of town,
where tenement apartments could be had cheaply. Working in local
factories - the Colt firearms company, Hartford Rubber Works, and
the Royal typewriter company, among others - working-class
employees could afford little else but shoddy, overfilled housing.
Tenement districts and slums came quite close to the city center by
the early twentieth century, their condition, according to Baldwin,
among some of the worst in the nation. The juxtaposition of wealth
and poverty was hardly unique to Hartford, and as in many American
cities, by the early twentieth century wealthier citizens began to
agitate for reform of their districts, their city, and its residents.
Coalitions of the upper classes fought for cleaner streets, better
housing for the poor, and an end to prostitution. Police, who had
previously looked away from red-light districts (though they arrested

9. Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in

Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 34-35.

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 28 American Catholic Studies

women soliciting on the street), came

and local pastors to crack down on p
on the city, not the necessary evil peop
As Hartford industrialized, more wo
This sudden increase in female workers
department stores that dotted downto
past. Whether laboring in the Royal
Fox and Company, women earned bot
many desired to spend their leisure t
as respectability might decree.11 As
Joanne Meyerowitz have demonstrate
after-hours amusements very different from those of earlier
generations, some of which were offensive to middle-class sensibilities.
Attending dance halls, restaurants, theaters, and other venues,
particularly in the company of men, and being on the streets at night
could all be construed as criminal - wayward or vice-provoking -
behavior in court.
The work of the House of the Good Shepherd with delinquent
young women, a mission the sisters had undertaken in various forms
for decades, can be understood as a part of middle-class reform
agitation that desired to clean up neighborhoods (the East side was
particularly notorious for brothels and streetwalkers as well as petty
crime) intersected with the impulse to police the sexuality of young
women.12 Since the development of the modern order in France by
Sister Euphrasia Pelletier during the 1830s (it was originally founded
in the 1650s), the mission of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd has
been to minister to those rejected by society - women who were
downtrodden, outcast, and perceived as damaged goods.13 Their initial

10. Baldwin explored this anti-vice campaign in some detail in his book, see chapter
three.
11. Baldwin, 45.
12. The House of the Good Shepherd was not the only resource for reforming women
accused of vice. It joined the Protestant Women's Aid Society (1878) and the Women's
Shelter (1891). Baldwin discusses these in his work, and argues that the three were
flawed for their condescension to those in their care. While I acknowledge
condescension in the House and discuss the infantilization of inmates in later
sections, this point has been explained in detail in Suellen Hoy's work. I seek to
broaden the discussion of women's sexuality and the House beyond this particular
point alone. On amusements, see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women
and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1986) and Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in
Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
13. This story has been recounted in the historical literature numerous times and so
will not be examined in detail here. See Hoy, Good Hearts. See, too, the histories of
the order written by Katherine Conway in the early twentieth century, particularly In

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 29

goal was to take in and reform prostitutes who sought t

that most Americans understood as an example of unredeemable
sexual deviance and degradation.
This rehabilitative aspect of the sisters' mission was usually the
most difficult to fulfill. The sisters received their inmates from
Catholic parishes or families, and later from courts. Women rarely
came to their door to ask for reform. The church hierarchy,
furthermore, tried to pretend that the problem of prostitution could
not possibly exist among their number. Archbishop John Hughes
(1842-1864) of New York most famously insisted that the problem was
both non-existent among Catholics and too large for the sisters to
handle.14
With outposts as far away as Australia by the 1860s, the order's
ministries included numerous houses in North America.15 The
Hartford House opened in the West End in 1902, a quiet subur
section of town, away from the temptations of the city, at the
invitation of Bishop Michael Tierney (1894-1908). He asked the
congregation's provincial house in Brooklyn to send some sisters to
begin the work; the order had been ministering in New York since the
mid-nineteenth century and had set up various Houses in the
northeast, including Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts. Five
sisters made the journey northward, with Sister Mary of Saint Alicia
at their helm as the new convent's prioress. Their beginnings were
inauspicious. The sisters arrived in December and found little in the
home when they got there: "a soapbox formed the first chair, and a
lamp borrowed from neighbors gave light for their first night. The
weather was extremely cold. A poor draft in the stove made it
impossible to roast their dinner of fowl."16 Over the next several days,
local ladies, asked by Tierney, brought over linens, silver, and other
necessaries for life in the convent to begin.

the Footprints of the Good Shepherd (New York: The Convent of the Good Shepherd,
1907), and A.M. Clarke's biography of Sister Pelletier, The Life of Reverend Mother
Mary of St. Euphrasia Pelletier (London: Burns and Oates, Limited, 1895).
14. This aspect of the Good Shepherd's apostolate was usually only vaguely alluded
to in Conway's writing, though she did recount the story of Hughes on page vi. She
mentioned work with "fallen women" intermittently, and preferred to talk about the
girls taken in who were in danger of becoming "fallen." The story about Archbishop
Hughes can also be found in Hoy, 51 and Fitzgerald, 73.
15. Charles Hebermann et al, eds., The Catholic Encyclopedia volume VI (New
York: The Encyclopedia Company, 1913): 648. Many of the congregations in Africa
and Asia still exist, providing services to women and children more often than
rehabilitating the wayward.
16. Binder, "History of the New York Province," 34. Archives of the Sisters of the
Good Shepherd, Jamaica, Queens, New York.

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30 American Catholic Studies

That Tierney was directly responsible for the sisters'

establishment of a Home fit within his vision of change for the city of
Hartford. The Irish-born Tierney permitted the development of ethn
churches, and Polish, Lithuanian, French Canadian, and Italian
parishes grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
despite resistance from other sectors of the Catholic populace.17 For
Tierney, Americanization was not the church's primary objective;
making sure parishioners could attend Mass in a language they
understood was more important.18 Caring for working-class women
and girls, many of whom were likely Catholic immigrants themselves,
in a range of undesirable situations, can be seen as a part of Tierney's
provision for his (often immigrant) flock, though Protestant women
were also welcome in the House. Establishing a Good Shepherd House
meant Catholic women offenders would not necessarily end up
inculcated with Protestant values or compelled to participate in non-
Catholic forms of worship, a not unimportant concern for church
leaders in the early twentieth century.

Bishop Michael Tierney

Courtesy of the Archives of the Archdiocese of Hartford

17. Sr. Dolores Liptak, RSM, is the foremost historian on Connecticut Catholicism
and the Hartford archdiocese in particular. See European Immigrants and the
Catholic Church in Connecticut, 1870-1920 and Hartford's Catholic Legacy:
Leadership (Hartford, CT: Archdiocese of Hartford, 1999). See, too, Reverend Thomas
Duggan, The Catholic Church in Connecticut (New York: The States History
Company, 1930).
18. See Margaret M. McGuiness, "Body and Soul: Catholic Social Settlements and
Immigration," U.S. Catholic Historian 13 (summer 1995): 63-75, on the difficult issue
of immigration in American Catholicism in the early twentieth century.

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 31

The Work of the Sisters

Women have assumed the mantle of moral authority in America

since the eighteenth century, and in the process have taken
responsibility for scores of reformatories, industrial schools, and
orphanages. The rhetoric of women's moral authority became codified
in the nineteenth century and hinged on a middle-class prerogative of
chastity, piety, and respectable womanhood.19 These expectations
applied to Catholic women as well as Protestants.20 Sisters, however,
occupied a liminal space in terms of ideal womanhood. The ideal
woman of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a wife
and then a mother, reserving her sexuality for the confines of
marriage. Sisters, of course, by virtue of their vows, did not fulfill
these requirements in traditional form. They did, however, see
themselves as wedded to the church; their chastity was beyond
question.
The Sisters of the Good Shepherd were particularly well- suited to
reforming wayward women because their status as women religious
represented an extraordinarily high ideal of social and sexual purity
unharmed by years of working with "fallen" women. This fact was not
lost on Hartford Daily Courant reporters, who noted the piety and

19. While the literature on women's moral authority has become quite extensive,
the seminal work that combines that concept with "rescue" work with prostitutes is
Peggy Pascoe's Relations of Rescue : The Search for Female Moral Authority in the
American West, 1874-1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1993).
20. Colleen McDannell's writing, contained in the volume American Catholic
Women, examines Catholic domesticity in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and Karen Kennelly's introductory chapter also points to the gendered
expectations for women both lay and religious. McDannell argues that the church put
forth an Eve versus Mary dichotomy: women should be like Mary - virtuous, good,
selfless, and above all, mothers - and when they were not, they were liable to be
troubled like Eve, the cause of humanity's fall. She notes that many Catholics could
not live up to the ideal and settled somewhere in the middle. The church encouraged
women to embrace dependence and a patriarchal figure in their lives, a figure that
many of the offenders who ended up at the House did not have. The sisters were,
according to Hoy, fully aware that their wards could not likely aspire to the heights of
domestic piety encouraged by the church, and helped them to work to support
themselves and become pious. On the theme of domesticity, Kennelly points to
published writing of the era - the works of Bernard O'Reilly in particular, who wrote
extensively on woman's need to stay at home and be loyal servants of God. Kennelly's
writing on the difficult position of women religious and the church across the decades
is essential reading for those interested in the experience of sisters. Colleen
McDannell, "Catholic Domesticity, 1860-1960," in American Catholic Women, ed.
Karen Kennelly (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1989): 48-80, and Kennelly,
"Ideals of American Catholic Womanhood," in American Catholic Women: A Historical
Exploration ed. Karen Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 1-16. Hoy, "Caring for
Chicago's Women and Girls," 275.

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32 American Catholic Studies

chastity of the sisters when they pai

Alicia, one reporter noted, "has been
years, not having mingled with the
except when making the trip from Brooklyn here. Some of her
associates have been isolated as many as a dozen years, their subdued
demeanor and gentleness of speech indicating their absolute devotion
to their life work."21 The author understood the work of the House as
a function of its sisters' chastity, which he exoticized even while
respecting it as the foundation of their moral authority. This
interpretation of the sisters' chastity was mirrored by the Daily
Courant's evocation of the inmates' sexuality, as we shall later see.
The mission of the sisters in Hartford was broad and reflected the
adaptations made by the order over the years: they would open a
"Home of Correction for Wayward Girls" and take in a wide spectrum
of young women who had violated gender and sexual norms, and, as
the local paper noted, those "who are incompetent to provide for their
own moral and social welfare," including daughters of abusive
parents.22 In 1905, when the Hartford Good Shepherd House received
corporate status (which did not come easily and evidently required
much arm-turning by the sisters' well-connected friend, diocesan
chancellor Father John G. Murray), the document attested that "Such
corporation is formed for the charitable purpose of providing and
maintaining, in the city of Hartford, a home to afford protection and a
retreat for females who have had the misfortune to fall into crime and
who may wish to reform their lives, and also for those whose evil
surroundings expose them to the danger of falling into crime."23 This
document, which gave the sisters the ability to buy and sell property
among other rights, suggested that the House was a place away from
the city crowds where a woman in a broad range of potential troubles
could find solace.
By using the word "retreat," the document of incorporation implied
that the House was not an institution or reformatory, but an escape
for young women in moral danger. This phrasing marks the first
element in the sisters' creation of a narrative of redemption - theirs
was a private, peaceful space to help young women transition from
iniquity to useful citizenship.24 However generous the phrasing, the
reality was rather different. In 1905, the House had fifty-two inmates:

21. "Wayward Girls Cared For," Hartford Daily Courant, October 8, 1904.
22. "House of the Good Shepherd," Hartford Daily Courant, May 22, 1903.
23. Annals of the Hartford House of the Good Shepherd. Registry, book 2. RGS 4.02.
Archives of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Jamaica, Queens, New York.
24. To some extent, this, and the infantilzation of charges discussed later, reflect a
form of maternalism. See Pascoe for further discussion of this topic.

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 33

city courts sent and paid for the care of seventeen; relativ
some support committed nine; and twenty-six others were of
indeterminate commitments, their upkeep paid by the House, most
obliged to stay for lengthy durations.25 The House provided women
with a safe space in which to reform, but the sisters intended that
transformation would come through months, if not years, of hard
work. This concept was not always well-received by those sent to the
House: young women had other ideas of what they would like to do
with their time.
Resistance to commitment to the House stemmed from various
issues. One woman arrested for streetwalking in 1913 was given the
option of jail or the Good Shepherd - she chose jail, and she was not
the only one to do so. The House of the Good Shepherd worked to
produce redemption, and the days spent there were intensely
regulated. Periods of prayer and domestic industrial work, such as
sewing or doing laundry - occupations traditionally performed by
women - filled the hours.26 The sinfulness of the act that landed a
woman in the House might be amplified by the presence of the sist
with their vow of chastity.27 Terms in the House were often far longe
than sentences in jail - this particular woman faced thirty days in
or three months in the House.28 One can see why jail's shorter term
less-intense schedule, and lack of emphasis on personal reform cou
be preferable to a woman who wanted to return to her life.
Connecticut law stipulated that young women over sixteen in
"manifest danger of falling into vice" who were unmarried could be
committed until they turned twenty-one.29 The lengthy duration of
any committal could be very unappealing to a potential inmate, and
several given the option chose to go elsewhere. For some, anti-

25. Annual Reports of the Board of Charities to the Governor for the Years Ending
September 30, 1905 and 1906 (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor Press,
1907), 223. People who left before their terms concluded were hauled back to the
House and could face additional charges.
26. Industrial work served to give a woman a set of skills so that she might not have
to resort to prostitution again, and also helped pay the House's bills, which were
otherwise covered by income from the court system, families, or inmates, and the
generosity of benefactors.
27. Maureen Fitzgerald suggests this point about the mid- nineteenth century House
in New York. Sisters "derived their authority in the Catholic community at least in
part through their vow of celibacy . . . [which] highlighted the deviance of other
women's illicit sex all the more." Fitzgerald, "'The Perils of Passion and Poverty,"' 51.
28. There are no extant entry records for women and girls who ended up in the
House of the Good Shepherd in Hartford. My sources include the Hartford Daily
Courant, which reported regularly on police court cases and which loved a sensational
story. This particular case was reported on February 10, 1913.
29. Annual Reports of the Board of Charities to the Governor .

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34 American Catholic Studies

Catholicism encouraged resistance, as

"living in an immoral house" declared
no use for Catholics, and if you are g
me to a Protestant institution.'" When sent to the Sisters of the Good
Shepherd despite her protests, she cried, insulted the judge, and
informed the court that she had no intention of staying there. Though
religious bias was rarely mentioned in the records, it was clearly a
factor for some women as they faced commitment to the House.30
Those who did come to the House found themselves segregated
according to their degree of sexual impropriety. Actual prostitutes (few
in number) were kept separate from the other young women. While
sisters were sensitive to the complex cycle of poverty that might land a
woman among the "fallen," they still saw such women as potentially
infectious to impressionable girls likely to be impacted by the
prostitutes' presence.31 In 1911, the Hartford sisters further divided
the House. Young people between ten and sixteen were classified as
"intermediates" and had their own quarters, dining space, and other
facilities, distinct from the class formally called "penitents," which
included young women over sixteen.32 The fear of contamination of the
younger by the older, of those more hardened by those perhaps still
naïve, suggested this partitioning. A way for the sisters to assert their
control over the reform process, the presence of such division points to
flaws in their narrative of redemption which presented all young
women as restored to a state of purity.

The Preemptive Sentence and The Newspaper Narrative

A 1914 case that resulted in two new "penitents" for the House of
the Good Shepherd demonstrates the complicated reasons the sisters
had for keeping prostitutes from other residents and points to
preemptive sentences used as preventative measures. Mabel
Hotchkiss, whose behavior was "unparalleled in the annals of vice,"
was arrested for "keeping a disorderly house" - likely a brothel. More
significantly, the court suspected that she "had for a considerable time
been engaged in peddling her 14-year-old daughter." While this was

30. "Cried when Committed," Hartford Daily Courant, May 30, 1906.
31. Hoy, "Caring for Chicago's Women and Girls," 275.
32. Annual Reports of the Board of Charities to the Governor, 223; Annals of the
Hartford House of the Good Shepherd. The 1910 federal census illuminates the
numbers of women who lived in the house in the era, if not specifically in 1911. In
1910, fifteen sisters supervised 124 inmates. Six were African American and five were
married. Nine hailed from another country. U.S. Census Bureau, 1910 Census of
Population, Connecticut, Hartford County Enumeration Schedules.

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 35

certainly an appalling action, the prosecutor saw it not si

criminal but as evidence that she was "mentally diseased."
Odem has ably demonstrated, the courts showed little sensi
why a woman might resort to prostitution, and indeed of
the activity as pathological rather than part of a larger p
poverty and limited opportunities. Because she was too old to be
forcibly committed, the court granted her parole (that or a stay of
sentence was necessary for commitment to the House - it was not a
formal penal institution) and arranged for her care there.34 Though
the court saw Hotchkiss as utterly reprehensible, its perception of her
mental instability allowed her to avoid prison and instead spend a
period of time with the sisters.
This story becomes more complicated, because the court also
committed Mabel Hotchkiss's teenage daughter, the true victim, to the
House of the Good Shepherd. In the modern world, this young woman
would receive years of psychotherapy for the manipulation and sexual
abuse she endured under her mother's control. In 1914, however, the
judge "charged [her] with being in danger of falling into habits of
vice."35 While this move may have been intended to protect the girl,
who otherwise may have had no home to go to and little option besides
returning to prostitution, a life she knew, to earn an income, in reality
the judge labeled and stigmatized her by formally charging her as he
did and sending her to an institution. She was not placed in an
orphanage, but a reformatory; her previous sexual experiences, though
undoubtedly caused by her mother's coercion and likely not always
with her consent, were enough to lead to her placement.36 Women's
sexuality in any guise outside the middle-class norm was clearly a
dangerous matter. As historian Barbara Meil Hobson explains in
Uneasy Virtue, turn-of-the-century reformers shifted from the
nineteenth-century belief that women who were prostitutes - and
women like the young Hotchkiss girl, by extension - were victims of
male lust and poverty. Instead, they saw such women as treacherous

33. "Fined for Having Diseased Hogs," Hartford Daily Courant , March 25, 1914.
34. "In the Police Court," Hartford Daily Courant, April 1, 1914. The House of the
Good Shepherd accepted committals only up to age thirty, though much older women
sometimes resided there. The 1910 federal census lists one woman who was 50 and
another who was 83!
35. "Fined for Having Diseased Hogs."
36. According to Anne Meis Knupfer, treating a victim of abuse as though she were
the cause for it - and placing her in an institution because of her own "immorality" -
was not uncommon. She notes that one young woman had been placed in the Geneva
Industrial School by the court "for protection" after neighbors brought the girl to the
court following an assault by her brother-in-law. Knupfer, 423.

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36 American Catholic Studies

agents who could lead others to social

teen to the House, the court affirmed t
posed a threat to the rest of Hartford
As in the case of the Hotchkiss you
often took in young women who face
preventative measure. Wayward girls
category, as did women in their early
being classified as "fallen." Families
many came from the courts, which d
by the police. In these cases, the char
in the risk of, rather than condemna
young woman charged, as Hotchkiss
of falling into habits 0/ vice," was six
her parents in Windsor, about eight m
Perhaps she was merely in the area t
little else, though they did note she w
the judge reason to charge her is un
Ryan, was arrested and initially char
later changed to "being in danger of
shift demonstrates how the punishm
essentially the same as for being at
nineteen-year-old woman had also lived in a rooming house.40 Her
appearance and her residence, which was not a home and was
traditionally a place of transience (hardly ideal for virtuous women),
set her up for the charge of potential for criminal behavior.
The issues in these cases were the same as those that underlay the
more obvious cases of prostitution. The charge "being in danger of
falling into habits of vice" implied that women, traditionally
understood as dependents, did not have authority over themselves,

37. Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: Prostitution and the American Reform
Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990).
38. In many cases, a fear of female sexuality led to a double standard in
punishment for sex-related crimes. The courts acknowledged and expected men to
indulge in sexual activity and to have sexual knowledge before marriage. Women, on
the other hand, faced altogether different expectations. This belief system created a
tremendous inconsistency: male lust could find an outlet in willing women, but those
same women underwent much sterner prosecution and endured harsher punishments
for their participation. Sexuality was a male prerogative. As Mary Odern argues, this
situation reflected a profound unwillingness to acknowledge female sexuality as
something women shared outside of marriage, even as men sought it out with the
court's tacit acceptance. Several girls found themselves under the care of the Sisters of
the Good Shepherd through behaviors that demonstrated the sexual double standard
prevalent in justice systems in America.
39. "City News in Brief," Hartford Daily Courant, June 11, 1909.
40. "Turns her Back on Detective," Hartford Daily Courant, August 5, 1913.

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 37

and that there was no one else exerting proper control over
phrasing of the charge also suggests that "vice" - a relativ
term with sexual connotations - was not something a woma
indulge in once. These were women in danger of cultivatin
vice: perpetual, frequent occurrences where women broke f
and/or sexual standards. While stealing was surely an exam
Catherine Ryan was not charged with theft or burglary; th
Daily Courant 's coverage of the trial even described her in
sexual way, noting that she showed up in the courthouse in
with a twelve-inch slit and a very light green underskirt,"
titillating detail newspapers then and now love to report.4
punished (and exploited) for deviating from gender and sex
a woman should not steal, this reasoning suggests, or wear
foot-long slits.
Descriptions of Ryan's dress in the newspaper report r
press's desire for a story with lurid, juicy details, particula
revolved around a "fallen" woman. The model was Joseph
New York World ; dedicated on one hand to impassive obse
demonstration of facts, it was also committed to sensationalizing
stories in order to sell papers. Reporters - or, in the words of one
historian, "scavengers" - performed an important function as the
tellers of "morality tales," holding up those who had strayed as lessons
for others.42 They also sought to "entertain as well as inform," and
women who left the path of womanhood were fodder for such
entertainment.43 Ryan was one of many women thus exploited.
When they described women on trial or reported on those who had
run away, Courant reporters reinforced the perceived distinction
between middle-class women and delinquent, low-class women.
Historian Lisa Duggan, who explored the intersection of gender,
crime, and coverage in her work, Sapphic Slashers, explains how
women involved in trials covered by newspapers were "the focus of
intense visual inspection . . . which] compromise [d] expected female
modesty;" ogling became more appropriate as the woman's station
declined, and newspapers provided details of seemingly inappropriate
dress to alert the audience to the woman's fallen nature, a lesson for

41. "Turns her Back on Detective."

42. See Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American
Newspapers , (New York: Basic Books, 1981), for an examination of the development of
the sensational press in the late nineteenth century. Kevin G. Barnhurst and John
Nerone, The Form of the News: A History (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 17; Lisa
Duggan, Sapphic Slashers : Sex, Violence and American Modernity (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000), 34.
43. Schudson, 64.

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38 American Catholic Studies

other females.44 A woman's sexuality

uncontained, even if it was a form of
woman herself. The House of the Goo
the crowded streets and the boarding
acres at the fringes of town and presid
believed that discipline and routine w
wayward women, even as the press eag
the less-reputable elements of that sol
control over the discourse of delinquen

A contemporary image of the House of th

which is now used as elder housing.
Photo courtesy of author.

The Sisters' Narrative of Redemption

In what little remains of the Hartford House's papers - mainly

handwritten annals, internal documentation of annual events, and
activities handwritten at the end of each year - one would think the
House was a happy orphanage full of eager and excited children, a tale
occasionally corroborated by the Courant. 45 Indeed, the sisters who

44. Duggan, 70.

45. Unfortunately, the Hartford Sisters of the Good Shepherd left precious little
behind in contrast to the well-documented New York branch. The House closed
suddenly in the early 1970s, after the state decided to cease its tax breaks and
funding, leading one historian to speculate that much of what they may have had fo

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 39

wrote the annals always referred to their charges, most o

and some well older, as children. Though the 1910 federal census
enumeration schedules reveal a significant number (26) of young
women under eighteen in the house that year, the youngest being
twelve, the majority of the inmates were in their late teens and early
twenties.46 The reasons for the committal of these "children" are all
but omitted, as are the difficulties the sisters had with them,
difficulties easily found in the local newspaper, which readily reported
them. Having an internal account of events that removed the focus of
the House from the poor choices of the wards both before and after
their commitment to the institution was a way of presenting an
alternate reality: a reality that desexualized and decriminalized the
inmates with only subtle reminders of their sins. In this way, the
young women returned to a nearly childlike innocence, however
disconnected this may have been from their actual lives or the actual
running of the House. This alternate reality contradicts the
rebelliousness present in the House that suggested the unwillingness
of at least some inmates to fit the reform model of the sisters, and
contested their expectations and definitions of behavior, sexuality, and
dependence.
Most years, life at the House of the Good Shepherd followed a
familiar pattern of feasts and retreats featuring visits from clerical
and civic leaders, particularly on holidays. The annals contain details
of those year-to-year events. In many of the festivals, the young people
played key roles as performers, on their best behavior for the bishop,
the provincial superior, and the occasional newspaper reporter.
Christmas celebrations featured, in addition to multiple masses and
the singing of carols and hymns, the giving of gifts to the young
women. The annals report that at Christmas in 1906, two girls hid
behind the tree (including "Little Catherine") and clapped and said
"Merry Christmas!" to all as they entered.47 This kind of description

records was either lost or destroyed in a hurried departure. What does remain is a
collection of annals for the early years, written longhand beside minutes of the first
corporation meetings. The annals contained in a large, bound volume are often not
dated; in fact, it is only through reading them that one can get a sense of where one
year picks up from another. They contain numerous details of House activities such as
masses and feasts, as well as recollections of major events such as when the House's
main building caught fire in 1905 and again in the 1910s. Land purchases are
included in the discussions, as are visits by Tierney (and later John Nilan, who
succeeded Tierney after he suddenly died in 1908) and of the Mother Superior of the
Provincial House, located in New York. Personal communication, Dolores Liptak,
RSM, June 2010.
46. 1910 Federal Census.
47. Annals of the Hartford House of the Good Shepherd.

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40 American Catholic Studies

was common - positive and warm, th

troubled) pasts the girls may have h
House itself indicates that the girls had somehow departed from
gender expectations, the sisters' written record suggests that the
youth were always on a track of reform, a process that created
childhoods they may not have initially had.48 The sisters' Home
served as both reformatory and comforting hearth.
Among the many annual events was the compulsory Children's
Retreat. The title alone is revelatory of the ways in which the sisters
saw their charges, most of whom were over eighteen. Referring to all
inmates as children implied that they were dependent, incapable of
making proper decisions (including earning their own money), and in
need of the sisters' Catholic guidance, which formed a significant part
of the retreats. At most retreats, speakers reminded the women of
their sinfulness, which may or may not have been about their
particular pasts but certainly highlighted their general situations. In
1907 the speaker was a priest, P.H. McLean. The sisters afterward
wrote, "This eloquent preacher placed vividly before them the evil
consequences of sin; the great goodness of God to the repentant sinner
.... [Later, he] said he was very much edified at the manner in which
they followed the exercises and conducted themselves."49 In this
particular case, the message was twofold. Many branches of
Christianity emphasize humanity's inherent sinfulness, and so the
speech fit in well within that traditional dialogue. But given the
circumstances that brought so many of the young women to the
House, the message reinforced the idea that the path for reform and
salvation was through the church. That the priest was surprised at his
reception suggests that he expected poor behavior from the inmates
and that the sisters indeed had them under control, at least for the
time being.
In order to facilitate their reformation, the young women had the
option to make religious proclamations at the Children's Retreats.
Some "made the act of consecration to our Lady of Sorrows, for one
year, and became 'Consecrates.'"50 They could renew their action at
subsequent retreats. Consecrates severed their connections with the
outside world, desired to stay in the House for at least the coming
year, and became assistants to both the sisters and newcomers to the
House. These were clearly young people who were not obliged to stay,

48. If the 1910 census is any indication, most were the children of immigrants and
likely had grown up in working-class households; several of the women's parents were
listed as unknown. 1910 Federal Census.
49. Annals of the Hartford House of the Good Shepherd.
50. Ibid.

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 41

but opted to do so. In 1907, "eight of the children renewe

consecration and seven received the black dress," a clothin
which reinforced the consecrate's status as different from m
other inmates, who wore gray.51 Again, the thread in the
of reformation and repentance, as girls progressed to app
respectable womanhood and contained sexuality under th
and guidance of chaste sisters.52 There was no contested
this perspective.
Some of the most striking stories about inmates in the annals
concern the few who passed away. The sisters wrote of these women
as examples of profound transformation: having been great sinners in
life, they attained a remarkable salvation by the time of their deaths.
In these stories are the few direct mentions of the past lives of the
women. For example:

For the first time in the history of our annals, the Angel of Death
visited us. One of the penitents, our dear Antoinette. This young girl
was committed to our care by the Court in February of the present
year. This dear child had been rescued from the haunts of vice, and
had never received any religious instruction. From the time she
entered the class, she applied herself diligently to learn the catechism
and ardently desired to received the sacrament of Baptism. In June
she had the happiness of being baptized, received her first holy
Communion and also the sacrament of Confirmation. Her conversion
was truly a triumph of grace. About a month previous to her death
she was obliged to go to the infirmary ... 53

where she died, after repenting and receiving last rites.

Another example was the case of Collette, who died in 1910. She
had arrived some years earlier, "a colored girl ... a conquest of grace
when she was committed here by the Court she knew very little ab
religious [sic] but was here only a short time when she expressed th

51. Ibid. For an explanation of the consecrates and the black dress, see Frances
Finnegan, 131-132, and Hoy, "Caring for Chicago's Women and Girls," 268.
52. Many Houses of the Good Shepherd had community of Magdalens, a lay
sisterhood for women who did not want to return to the outside world and preferred
instead to take vows, although women who had been inmates at the House could
never become Sisters of the Good Shepherd. The congregation strictly enforced this
hierarchy, a system that emphasized what the annals obscured: inmates who deviated
from sex and gender norms could never approach the chastity and purity of the sisters
themselves. Baldwin sees this enforcement of hierarchy as an example of
condescension common to moral reforms; Hoy argues that it comes from the
"hierarchical lens" with which they viewed the world, a lens that can be credited to
church structure. Baldwin, 71; Hoy, "Caring for Chicago's Women and Girls," 267.
53. Annals of the Hartford House of the Good Shepherd.

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42 American Catholic Studies

desire of being baptized. She studied the catechism and was

regenerated."54 Collette took ill and died, as did a woman named
Martha, who refused to stay in bed with tuberculosis and insisted on
walking to take communion until the day she passed away. These
young people - still "children" - were examples of the completely
reformed inmate. Chief among the very few residents mentioned by
name in the annals, they achieved true redemption. They came in
downtrodden, from the "haunts of vice," but ultimately embraced the
religion and its sacraments, dying true Catholics before they could
leave the House and face potentially difficult circumstances - poverty,
troubled family, homelessness - which could lead them once again
down a rough path.

Rebels in the House:

Competing Inmate and Press Narratives

Although the stories of triumphant redemption and playful and

obedient children pepper the annals of the Hartford House of the Good
Shepherd, they obscure another history, a tale told only once in the
annals themselves but which, according to the Hartford Daily
Courant, happened far more often. Not all the women and girls in the
House were obedient and eager to change; some thwarted the process
encouraged by the sisters, and ran away or caused public spectacles.
Historically speaking, the residents of the House are generally
voiceless, but their actions, documented in the press, reflect a
determination for the sexual and wage-earning independence that
came with control over their own lives, however illicit in the eyes of
the law and the sisters. Their rebelliousness suggests that reform,
discipline, and sexuality were subject to challenge, beyond the sisters'
moral authority and the press' willingness to exploit.55
The Sisters of the Good Shepherd recorded only a single tale of a
girl who was clearly uninspired to pursue redemption in the House.
"An Italian girl who has been here only a few days made an attempt to
escape," the sisters wrote, and "while the children were at supper
went up to the attic and succeeded in climbing out on the roof." 56 A
search party eventually found her, her feet sticking out of an attic
window, and a sister and a peer coaxed her back inside. This
particular young woman had a seemingly thought-out plan. She
slipped away when she knew she would go unnoticed in the
commotion of readying for dinner, but after climbing on the roof, her

54. Ibid.
55. Knupfer, 429-431.
56. Annals 01 the Hartiord House oí the Good Shepherd.

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 43

plan seemed to end, and she was stuck until found. This
have influenced the sisters' late 1908 decision to erect a wall around
their property.57
Though this "Italian girl" was the singular mention of a runaway
in the sisters' annals, the newspaper printed more tales of attempted
flight. Runaway stories were not common in the Courant when the
House first opened, though a 1906 report noted in its headline that,
"Two More Girls are Runaways," suggesting others had left before.58
Stories typically discussed the way the women escaped, their
appearance, and where the reporter thought they were going.
Sometimes stories detailed a runaway's past. Marjorie Reardon, for
example, "was arrested here in a raid on the Winthrop House last May
and after being found guilty of bad conduct, was sent to the House of
the Good Shepherd."59 The reporter reminded readers of Reardon's
deviant behavior, and her escape served to reinforce a pattern in her
actions. That she was caught in a raid suggests that Winthrop House
was a "disorderly house." Regardless of the questionable legality of
Reardon's acts, she was in fact reclaiming her independence. By
running away she expressed her dissatisfaction with the House and
went back to a life she knew and controlled.
One girl who tried to escape by climbing onto the roof with a rope
that she intended to use to lower herself to the ground was
subsequently committed to the Insane Hospital at Middletown,
Connecticut. The newspaper ran one story on her escapade and
another on her committal to the hospital, noting that an aunt had
initially committed her to the House of the Good Shepherd, and that
the woman in question was twenty years old. Once the girl realized
she was not going to escape, she evidently decided to exercise what
control she had over her life and her choices and just sat there, despite
the "patient waiting" of others, until she came "down of her own
accord and . . . surrendered in the attic."60 Her attempted departure
from the House - and the nine hours she spent on the roof - evidently
signified to her family that something was seriously askew. With
limited outlets for frustration and anger, some girls resorted to

57. Ibid. The wall-building process was fraught with difficulty as the sisters ended
up in litigation for months with their neighbors who complained of obscured views of
their bucolic area and said the wall was "prison-like." The sisters claimed it was just
an enclosure; the neighbors eventually dropped the lawsuit.
58. "Two More Girls are Runaways," Hartford Daily Courant , December 10, 1906.
59. "Margaret Reardon, "Girl Who Ran Away, Caught," Hartford Daily Courant ,
December 22, 1906.
60. "Girl Climbs to Roof Attempting Escape," Hartford Daily Courant , June 12,
1913; "Girl Who Tried to Escape Sent to Asylum," Hartford Daily Courant , June 23,
1913.

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44 American Catholic Studies

rebellious behavior, and in this case t

her doctors) branded rebelliousness a mental illness. Any other
reasons for sending her to the Asylum are obscure. Labeling this
young woman unstable and psychotic made her misbehavior easier to
understand, because she performed acts that a "normal" woman with
a respectable moral compass would not.61 That her acts were
"abnormal" also explains the newspaper coverage she and others
received.
Publication of runaway cases increased in the 1910s, and some
Hartford Daily Courant coverage reveals the way in which the
sexuality of the young women - already suspect - was fair game for
reporters seeking a moral example and sensational tale. One story
featured the tantalizing title, "Girl Who Escaped in Park with Man."62
The report contained all of the sordid details: a police officer
patrolling Bushnell Park, a contested public space under frequent fire
by middle-class reformers, saw a young woman and a man "spooning"
on a park bench. When he came over to them, the man fled. Rather
than chase after him, the officer stayed with the girl whose "bluish
gray dress [is] . . . commonly worn by inmates of penal institutions."63
Staying with the girl served two purposes. It prevented what
appeared to be a prisoner of some kind from getting away, and it
restrained out-of-bounds sexuality on display in the park. Spooning on
a park bench was not simply scandalous or outrageous, but arrest-
worthy. Women's sexuality was a dangerous thing - a potential social
blight and destroyer of family bonds. Absconding to the outside world
and snuggling with a man in such a public way was a claiming of
sexuality and control that was a clear affront to the sisters' mission
and their narrative of transformed sexuality and redemption.
Press coverage of these incidents not only exposed the young
women's deviant behavior, but also discussed the events in terms that
further sexualized those who departed from norms, expectations, and
the law, reasserting the "fallenness" of the escaped inmate. The
Hartford Daily Courant's reporting thus provides a key counterpoint
to the narrative the sisters crafted. It exploited the young women by
offering details - again, as part of creating a morality play for others,
seeing "fallen" women as available subjects for sensational stories -

61. Knupfer's work on the Industrial School discusses how poor behavior was
oftentimes classified as psychosis or hysteria, thus making it grounds for such a
commitment. Knupfer, 429.
62. "Girl Who Escaped in Park with Man," Hartford Daily Courant , November 29,
1914; "16-Years Old Girls Take French Leave," Hartford Daily Courant , December 14,
1915.
63. "Girl Who Escaped in Park with Man."

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 Cote/The House of the Good Shepherd 45

but it also provides the only recurrent indication that som

were determined to return to their previous lives. The Cou
the House when it opened and pointed quite deliberately to the
chastity of its sisters, but it also eagerly discussed and sexualized its
runaway inmates contrary to the sisters' own narrative of events.
Perhaps the loudest voice of the three as they sought to define
delinquency and the process of reform, the press's records are the only
ones that substantially remain.

Conclusion

The history of the Hartford House of the Good Shepherd

demonstrates the pivotal intersection of women religious, women in
trouble, and an eager press as they sought control over a narrative of
female delinquency and redemption. The sisters' function as
redeemers of fallen women allowed them to stake a powerful claim to
a narrative of transformed womanhood, saving the young when they
were in actual trouble or thought to be on the verge of vicious habits,
creating for them instead a tale of a new, chaste life. This narrative,
however, did not go unchallenged. Indeed, the young women often
sought to express their resistance to the sisters by running away, one
of the few ways they could create an independent interpretation of
their initial actions and the reform process. The Hartford Daily
Courant, through stories of these runaways and others on trial,
crafted a third narrative, a morality play for middle-class young
women, warning them of the dangers of industrial modernity linked to
deviant women. Understanding this intersection and competition for
power over the discourse of delinquency adds a deeper layer to our
understanding of the work of sisters in America as a significant part of
the history of American women's reform.

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