Nuns on the Frontier

An opinion piece about religious women who went to the American frontier came across my facebook feed this morning.  Here's the article.

It's a bit slanted.  First of all, it ignores the social context of the time period.  I seem to recall women weren't to highly held in society at the time.  Women, for the most part, could not own property and could not vote.  Women had one option, marriage and kids.  Catholic women had a second option, religious life.

Second, I don't recall stories of the frontier being all wine and roses.  It was a hard life.  The article fails to mention any of the hardships the lowly priests may have faced.  I seem to recall hearing how the Jesuit novices were made to quarry the stone, tote the stone, and then build their seminary.  I vaguely recall how the Jesuits were sent before the sisters.  I seem to recall the North American Martyrs.   Then you have the regular, normal life on the frontier problems.  Indians, drought, famine, plagues of locusts, and all that other stuff.  And then people just died of diseases.

The article fails to mention that both priests and sisters vow obedience to the bishop.  I don't recall in religion class being told that liking what was in store for you was required.  Isn't that the whole point of obedience?  Doing stuff that you'd rather not do?  If we only did stuff we wanted to do, obedience would be rather a cakewalk...

Where are the positive examples in this article?  You mean to tell me that thousands of religious women were always treated poorly by the priests and bishops?  That the life of a religious sister always sucked?  How bad must life have been outside of being religious sister if you joined an organization knowing you were going to be treated like dirt?