Nuns are pioneers of women"s education, not oppressors | Mary Kenny

Mom Superior at a Dominican convent in France for former prostitutes and criminals greets a new “small sister” (1946). Photograph: Walter Sanders/Time &amp Lifestyle Pictures/Getty Image

I cannot picture who’d want to be a nun these days. Tiny wonder they go around in disguise – most orders have ditched the habit and in France, total convents are garbed in jeans. The benign wimple wearers of the BBC’s Call the Midwife, returning to our screens this Christmas, are the exception. The rule is that, whether or not in fictional renderings or the most current information about the ongoing reparations for Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, nuns are portrayed as hateful and heartless shrews.

This is the situation in the movie Philomena, about 1 woman’s search for the son she was forced to give up for adoption by nuns in the 50s. There are sisters who say they are nervous they may possibly be spat at in the street. And some critics have warned that devout Catholics should not go to Mary O’Malley’s hilarious play When a Catholic now on at Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre, because the nuns portrayed are such horrors.

It is accurate, some nuns have been oppressive and narrow-minded but there is also a case for such as religious sisters in the canon of feminism, definitely when it comes to the schooling of women. It was Germaine Greer who pointed out that if Irish nuns hadn’t tramped across the broiling Australian desert in the 19th century, young women in Australia would have had practically no training.

And which is one thing I have noticed between numerous females of my personal generation: even the place they rebelled against the strictures of the Catholic church, or dropped the faith altogether, they have continued to value the nuns who schooled them and encouraged their ambition. Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president, so admired the Sacred Heart nuns who taught her in Dublin that she critically considered getting to be 1 herself. Dear Maeve Binchy lost her faith as a young lady but, until finally the finish of her life, spoke with gratitude of the nuns who educated her at the Holy Kid convent, and visited them often as an adult.

The late novelist and philanthropist Josephine Hart said the St Louis nuns opened her eyes to literature and poetry. Similarly, Nuala O’Faolain – who was an Oxford don at the age of 24 and had contempt for priests – felt a debt of gratitude to the St Louis nuns. Certainly, when I believe of the Irish feminist motion with which I was concerned in the 1970s, practically all of individuals girls had been prompted in their spirit of independence by distinct nuns. Sister Benvenuta, also known as historian and scholar Margaret MacCurtain, remains a stalwart of Irish feminism.

It is a staple of feminism that young women in the past grew up with few alternatives or expectations. Marriage or the stigma of lifelong spinsterhood were noticed as the primary options. But at my convent school, marriage was seldom described. These teachers have been consecrated virgins – why would they exhort us to marriage? The role the nuns held before us was not wedlock but pioneering sainthood, this kind of as St Catherine of Siena, who drank a cupful of leper’s pus to display she wasn’t afraid, or St Angela de Merici, who travelled all in excess of Italy on horseback in the early 16th century tutoring ladies. Fortitude and backbone were upheld as womanly virtues, rather than the pursuit of frivolities.

Surely, there had been ladies unsuited to convent existence, and perhaps especially unsuited to the care of younger single mothers – unconscious sexual jealousy need to enter into the equation in between a consecrated virgin and a pregnant teenager. It is also probable that nuns had a class bias. The convents that educated young ladies were high-minded and cultured, whereas the sisters who dealt with the lower orders frequently slapped the kids into submission.

But I am sorry for nuns when I see them being relentlessly portrayed as “the Gestapo in wimples”, as Dave Allen as soon as half-joked. I still have before me the picture of bad Mother Peter Claver, a medieval scholar unsuited to educating, who was driven to a nervous collapse at the St Trinian’s-like carry out of our fourth kind. Nuns, no doubt, can be cruel, but children can be cruel as well, and I consider the lesson I took from my personal convent education was the immense variability of the human situation.

Nuns are pioneers of women"s education, not oppressors | Mary Kenny