A new book praises the Catholic Church for helping immigrants -- especially women -- become political activists.

08:20 AM EST on Monday, March 29, 2004

BY SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writer

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl Evelyn Sterne, a history professor at URI who lives in Newport, says she enjoyed studying Providence because the city "was a very happening place at the turn of the 20th century."

NEWPORT -- It is practically an axiom of left-wing labor history to cast the Roman Catholic Church as an ememy of working-class political activism, an institution that put the brakes on Catholic immigrant political aspirations.

Evelyn Sterne was a graduate student at Duke University when her study of Rhode Island's immigrant history and ethnic politics led her to challenge that stereotype.

"The Catholic Church doesn't really enter into the story of working-class ethnic politics except in a negative way," says Sterne. "I decided I wanted to bring it into the center of the story by arguing that at the turn of the 20th century, Catholic parishes were the most important instutitions in ethnic neighborhoods.

"The image is that poor immigrant workers rejected communism and labor unions because they were Catholic," says Sterne. "I wanted to ask why. . . it turns out that the Catholic Church provided an amazing range of opportunities for immigrants, particularly immigrant women."

Parishes sponsored English lessons and lectures, and provided charity, job training and placement, athletic teams and fellowship for the newly arrived. Church groups pushed voter registration and lobbied against child labor and barriers to voting.

Sterne's recently published book, Ballots and Bibles: Ethnic Politics and the Catholic Church in Providence, makes the case that Catholic parishes were springboards to political action in the early years of the 20th century, when Rhode Island became the first state to have a majority of citizens identify themselves as Catholic.

The church was especially important to women, who had few other social outlets, writes Sterne, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island who lives in Newport.

The book, an offshoot of Sterne's doctoral dissertation, brings to life such political activists as Isabelle Ahearn O'Neill, who was born in Woonsocket in 1881. Born to Irish immigrants, O'Neill was the youngest of 13 children. After college in Boston, she moved to Providence and taught parochial school, became involved in church groups and in 1922 was the first women elected to the General Assembly. After eight years in the House of Representatives, O'Neill moved on to the Senate, where she became the deputy Democratic floor leader -- the first woman in the United States to hold such a position.

Between 1880 and 1920, Providence was a bastion of Roman Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy and French Canada. The state's flourishing textile and machinery factories gave Providence the reputation as the nation's most prosperous city.

Yet Rhode Island was a state driven by class, ethnic and religious antagonism. In the words of writer John Gunther, the state's "glacially aristocratic" old families and a corporate elite ran Rhode Island as their private preserve.

Old stock Protestant Republicans held fast to their political power long after they became a numerical minority. The foundation of Republican control rested on a malapportioned legislature and left control in rural districts and laws that made it difficult for poor and immigrant Rhode Islanders to vote.

Even by the 1930s, in the state Senate each community was alloted one senator. This gave Jamestown, with a population of less than 2,000, as much influence as Providence, which had a population of more than 200,000.

It was a state where ethnicity was destiny; one's ancestry dictated one's lot in life. Until 1888, immigrants couldn't vote unless they owned real estate. Rhode Island was the last state in the North to eliminate property qualifications for voting; it wasn't until 1928 that the threshold of owning at least $134 of taxable property was abolished as a requirement for voting in city elections.

"By the mid-19th century, every other state had liberalized voting and Rhode Island was the only state that has these strong restrictions," says Sterne.

Most histories have credited labor union organizing and the immigrant takeover of the state's Democratic Party as forces that defined modern Rhode Island. But Sterne notes that Democrats do not gain a strong political foothold until 1934, under the Depression-era administration of Gov. Theodore Francis Green.

"We think of the Catholic church as a conservative institution and in many ways it was; it was against birth control for women and against an attempt in the 1920s to pass an Equal Rights Amendment," says Sterne.

"On the other hand, the church provided an institution where women were encouraged to become active in public life," said Sterne. "For many women the church was the only institution it was acceptable for women to belong to. Women were seen as society's moral guardians, a natural extension of the role they played at home.

"Church wasn't just a place to worship," said Sterne. "For women, who were seen as the moral guardians of society, church was an acceptable place to go to get outside the stresses of family life and meet with other women. Women pushed the church to get involved in public life."

Modern feminists would not look fondly on some of the issues these immigrant women grasped -- such as opposition to birth control. Yet, on economic and political issues, Catholic women were in the forefront of organizing against child labor, and in favor of increased voter registration, old-age pensions, and geting rid of property requirements to vote.

The catlysts for activism, Sterne writes, were local chapters of the National Council of Catholic Women and local parish groups that attracted women.

Catholic women were also "very resistant to state encroachment on religion," says Sterne, fighting in particular a 1922 law called the Peck Act, which limited bilingual instruction in parochial schools. This law, pushed by the Protestant Yankee establishment, especially upset French immigrants, who sought to preserve their language and culture via parochial schools.

In her research, Sterne drew from newspapers, parish records and histories of local and national Catholic organizations and the work of other historians, such as the Rev. Robert Hayman, a longtime Providence College history professor who has written extensively on Rhode Island Catholic churches.

Sterne, 36, jokes that her background makes her an unlikely historian of Providence Catholics. An Episcopalian, Sterne was a child of New York City's Upper East Side.

The daughter of a New York Times reporter and editor, Sterne attended private Chapin School, then went off to Yale University. "I studied Shakespeare and art history. . . I didn't know anything about labor history."

After Yale, Sterne became a newspaper reporter at the Manchester (Conn.) Journal-Inquirer, covering several working-class communities in central Connecticut, where she became interested in labor and ethnic history.

At graduate school at Duke, Sterne discovered Providence and found it to be a good model for studying how immigrant Catholics assimilated into a larger society with institutions forged by Protestants.

"Providence was a good case study," said Sterne. "It was a very happening place at the turn of the 20th century."

Sterne now lives in Newport with her husband, James Garman, who heads the Historic and Cultural Preservation Program at Salve Regina University.

"After I started studying Providence, it became clear to me that there was a strong connection between religion and ethnic politics."

Browse a collection of historical stories showcasing the achievements of women in Rhode Island, at:

http://projo.com/specials/women/