Habits of Conquest

Among the first white women to make the journey west in nineteenth-century US expansion, Catholic nuns established convents, schools, and hospitals throughout the new territories, contributing vital labor and positioning religion centrally in the borderlands of empire. Habits of Conquest explores the stories of two of these communities: the Sisters of Loretto, who journeyed from Kentucky to Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, in 1852; and the Sisters of Providence, who came from Montreal to St. Ignatius, Montana Territory, in 1864. Historian Danae Jacobson argues that the missionizing labors of these women both supported and occasionally stymied the US settler empire as they relied on government and church support in their efforts to build a Catholic, rather than strictly American, West. Focusing on the households, rituals, and environments the sisters created through their own efforts and their often-exploitive control of others' labor, Habits of Conquest offers a nuanced examination of women as religious drivers of settler colonialism.