This book brings together the work of eleven leading international scholars to map the contribution of teaching Sisters, who provided schooling to hundreds of thousands of children, globally, from 1800 to 1950. The volume represents research that draws on several theoretical approaches and methodologies. It engages with feminist discourses, social history, oral history, visual culture, post-colonial studies and the concept of transnationalism, to provide new insights into the work of Sisters in education. Making a unique contribution to the field, chapters offer an interrogation of historical sources as well as fresh interpretations of findings, challenging assumptions. Compelling narratives from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Africa, Australia, South East Asia, France, the UK, Italy and Ireland contribute to what is a most important exploration of the contribution of the women religious by mapping and contextualizing their work. Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950: Convents, classrooms and colleges will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social history, women’s history, the history of education, Catholic education, gender studies and international education.

This edited collection addresses the nexus of gender, power relations, and education from various angles while covering a broad spectrum of the history of education in both time and geographic space. Taking the position that historians of gender and education find the concept of transnationalism very useful for a deeper understanding of historical change and situations, the editors and their contributors employ a transnational perspective to explore the complex and entangled dimensions of a history of education that transcends regional and national boundaries through a variety of approaches (e.g. through exploring new fields of research, sources, questions, perspectives for interpretation, or methodologies). In doing so, they also undertake to open up a transnational global perspective for the historiography of education.

This book draws on recent deconstructions around the idea of ‘femininity’ as a social, racial and class construct and explores the diversity of spaces that may be defined as educational that range from institutional contexts to family, to professional outlooks, to racial identity, to defining community and religious groupings. It explores how notions of femininity change across time and place, and within individual lives. Such changes take place at the interface of external forces and individual agency. The application of the notion of ‘femininity’ that assumes a consistent definition of the term is interrogated by the authors, leading to a discussion of the rich possibilities for new directions in research into women’s lives across time, place, and individual life histories.

This is the first in-depth study of post-war female religious life. It draws on archival materials and a remarkable set of eighty interviews to place Catholic sisters and nuns at the heart of the turbulent 1960s, integrating their story of social change into a larger British and international one. Shedding new light on how religious bodies engaged in modernisation, it addresses themes such as the Modern Girl and youth culture, ‘1968’, generational discourse, post-war modernity, the voluntary sector and the women’s movement. Women religious were at the forefront of the Roman Catholic Church’s movement of adaptation and renewal towards the world. This volume tells their stories in their own words.

The chapters in this book offer a range of impressive new studies on the history of education in Ireland, based on detailed research and drawing on important sources. This book also serves to show the healthy state of the history of education in Ireland. In particular, the book also seeks to understand how both teachers and pupils in Ireland experienced education, and how they ‘received’ education policies and education change. The lived reality of education is woven through the chapters in this book, while the impact of policy on education practice is illuminated many times, and with great clarity. This book is a very important contribution not only to the history of education, but also more widely to social history, women’s history, church history and political history. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal History of Education.

This book offers an in‐depth historiographical and comparative analysis of prominent theoretical and methodological debates in the field. Across each of the sections, contributors will draw on specific case studies to illustrate the origins, debates and tensions in the field and overview new trends, directions and developments. Each section includes an introduction that provides an overview of the theme and the overall emphasis within the section. In addition, each section has a concluding chapter that offers a critical and comparative analysis of the national case studies presented. As a Handbook, the emphasis is on deeper consideration of key issues rather than a more superficial and broader sweep. The book offers researchers, postgraduate and higher degree students as well as those teaching in this field a definitive text that identifies and debates key historiographical and methodological issues. The intent is to encourage comparative historiographical perspectives of the nominated issues that overview the main theoretical and methodological debates and to propose new directions for the field.

This book explores the experience and understanding of Roman Catholic sisters of their vocation to the apostolic form of religious life as they age.Based on interviews with twelve religious women, it draws on the practice of Lectio Divina to explore how these women describe their call to service and activity at a time in life when these might be curtailed by physical diminishment and increasingly reduced social interaction and influence.As the very institutions of religious life are themselves under threat, the book identifies new emerging forms of ministry through presence, to each other and to their carers.