Hygiene, Morality, and Power: The Linen Shift as a Colonial Tool in an Ursuline Convent in Seventeenth-Century Quebec

Abstract

In seventeenth-century colonial New France, an Ursuline convent was established with a mission to convert Indigenous girls to Christianity and assimilate them into French society. The linen chemise, a simple T-shaped undergarment worn across Europe, played an essential role in the nuns’ efforts towards the goals French colonization. Laden with cultural ideas of the body, cleanliness, and purity, the chemise was necessary to make a person Christian as well as culturally and physically French. While ultimately unsuccessful in establishing the physical and cultural uptake of the chemise or French culture in Indigenous communities, the efforts of the Ursuline nuns contributed to the groundwork for imperial justification and future attempts at assimilation of the Indigenous peoples of Canada.