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The Second Sex and the First Estate: The Sisters of St-André between the Bishop of Tournai and Rome, 1850–1886

In 1855 the sisters of St André in Tournai (Belgium) openly revolted against their bishop by sending a delegation to the pope. It was the high point of a conflict that had been simmering since 1850, and would continue to reverberate until 1886. This case study illustrates the religious, social and gender fault-lines opened by modernity between authoritarian bishops and a new generation of self-conscious religious women active in society. The field of tension provided Vatican diplomacy with the opportunity for an unprecedented affirmation of its mediating role. The affair of St André was one of the first occasions on which the Curia was directly confronted with ultramontane feminism, and it neatly defines the margins within which the Holy See was hammering out a matrix for the Romanisation and ‘standardisation’ of religious women. At the price of ‘following the beaten track’ to Rome, the second sex could sufficiently escape the grip of the first estate to operate a silent revolution in education, charity and devotion during the nineteenth century.