Though my dissertation is embargoed* while I work on the manuscript, I can’t stop talking about and thinking about and writing about Jane, my best dead friend. Here’s the abstract so you know where we are.

Jane Minot Sedgwick II and the World of American Catholic Converts, 1820-1890

When Jane Minot Sedgwick II (1821-1889), the daughter of an elite New England Unitarian family, joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1853, she joined a new faith culture while remaining embedded in the social world of her birth. This dissertation argues that friendship with other female converts of a similar class was the most important factor in leading her to the Church and smoothing her transition to Catholicism. As a young woman, she was largely uninterested in her family’s religious activities and uncomfortable with their religious zeal, but after developing friendships with several elite women who had recently converted, she came to see Roman Catholicism as a viable religious option.

Throughout Sedgwick’s childhood, her family had emphasized usefulness, rooted in Unitarian theology, as life’s central goal. Yet she and her family members struggled to understand the relationship between usefulness and happiness as Sedgwick sought usefulness but craved happiness. Family members fretted over the impetuous, independent behavior Sedgwick exhibited during her search for usefulness, but hoped that eventually finding it would bring her emotional stability. In light of her emotional struggles and the suicide of her cousin, Sedgwick’s family began to concede that perhaps happiness had to precede usefulness. After studying Catholicism for ten years, Jane made the decision to convert, a decision she described as rational, and one that she believed would bring her happiness. Her family members came to accept her decision because they thought it would provide her with the happiness and emotional stability to
become a settled, useful woman.

In Sedgwick’s new life as an unmarried Catholic laywoman in a transnational community of elite converts, friendship took on an increasingly important role. Confronted by family members who were uninterested in her efforts at Catholic philanthropy and priests whose ideas about gender and authority conflicted with her own, she sought support from others who understood her experiences as she endeavored to establish a Catholic school in her hometown. Inspired by scholarship on physical and cultural borderlands, this study illuminates the ways that converts inhabited borderlands between their several cultures, supported and consoled by others who shared their status.

*Yes, I embargoed, and no, I have no idea if it was the right choice. It was a choice made in the final days before the dissertation was submitted and I think we’ll all agree no one can really be held responsible for the choices they make in those days.