Sisters as workforce: the county frame, and the township's silence

1843–1958 · religious women in the county's institutions

The largest female workforce in the county's nineteenth century wore a habit, and it worked eight miles north of here. Four Sisters of the Holy Cross joined Father Edward Sorin at Notre Dame in 1843, the year after the founding; their motherhouse stood at St. Mary's, on the St. Joseph River in this county, from 1855. For over 115 years the sisters were Notre Dame's invisible staff: they "staffed the laundries, infirmaries, kitchens, and St. Edward's Minims School… They set type in the University Press offices… bound books and periodicals… They were tailors, nurses, gardeners, seamstresses, cooks, and charwomen for thousands of Notre Dame priests, brothers, lay faculty and students. Beginning with only 4 sisters, their numbers grew to 140, then dwindled to only 14 in 1958" (Schlereth, quoted by the University of Notre Dame Archives). In May 1958 virtually all of them departed the campus after 115 years, returning to the motherhouse at St. Mary's; five remained, for the altar linens and the student infirmary. The congregation's foundations ran across the county's towns — Mishawaka among the early ones in the congregation's own annals — and its sisters taught in parish schools, hospitals and orphan asylums at a scale the annals put near a thousand sisters ministering to some ten thousand people by 1905. That is the county frame, and it is large.

The township test is a silence, and it is a searched one. This build's own religion file — sixteen articles, every Lakeville congregation carried — and its women's file together contain no mention of sisters, nuns, or a convent in Lakeville or Union Township at all (grep-verified for this section against the record). No sister-staffed school, convent, or sister-served institution in the township was located in the diocesan or district records searched either: Sacred Heart and the township's other congregations print in the record as priest- and lay-staffed. The article therefore closes the audit's row honestly: the settlement's women are named whole in the banked build; the sisters-as-workforce layer is real, enormous, and county-seated — and at township size it is a tested negative, with the settler standing named for any future claim: the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend's and the districts' sister-staffing records.

Principal sources: University of Notre Dame Archives, "Women & Spirit" exhibit record, quoting Schlereth, University of Notre Dame: Portrait of History and Campus (first-hand); A Story of Fifty Years: From the Annals of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1855–1905 (Archive.org, first-hand); this build's Churches & Religion and Women's History (grep-verified, first-hand).