Hot over a Collar: Religious Authority and Sartorial Politics in the Early National Ohio Valley

abstract:In 1829 Mother Catherine Spalding of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, allowed her community of Catholic women religious to wear a white collar as a part of their habit. The decision provoked a brief but passionate dispute between Spalding and her local bishop, Benedict Joseph Flaget of nearby Bardstown, Kentucky. Bishop Flaget feared the seemingly anodyne garment revealed Spalding's vanity and unruliness. Spalding insisted on her obedience to proper religious authority, but she nonetheless defended her conduct and the collar's merits. Her spirited defense of the collar shows that a skillful mother superior could marshal the gendered language of authority and propriety to her order's advantage. Moreover, the contest between Spalding and Flaget demonstrates that as Catholics sought to define their presence in the early United States, influential women religious like Spalding emerged as the "public face" of nineteenth-century American Catholicism.