Ministries in black and white: The Catholic Sisters of St. Augustine, Florida, 1859--1920.

"Ministries in Black and White: the Catholic Sisters of St. Augustine, 1859-1920" discusses the work of two orders of women religious, the Sisters of Mercy, who taught young white women in a convent school from 1859-1870; and the Sisters of St. Joseph, who came from France in 1866 to teach newly freed blacks after the Civil War, the only white Catholic order to do so. They remain an active order in Florida, with a Motherhouse still in St. Augustine. A significant part of the dissertation is a comparison of the Sisters of St. Joseph's work against that of their major rivals, missionaries from the American Missionary Association. Using letters written by the Sisters back to their Motherhouse in Le Puy, France, the dissertation provides a rare view of the lives of these Catholic Sisters in St. Augustine and other parts of Florida, from the mid-nineteenth century through the era of anti-Catholicism in the early twentieth-century South. It carries the story through the pioneer years of the Sisters of St. Joseph's work in Florida. In the telling of their story, the dissertation addresses the idea of domesticity, the proper role of women, and how it was reinforced in Catholic terms by women who seemingly defied the ideal.