Habits in the classroom: A court case regarding Catholic sisters in New Mexico

This dissertation is a study of Catholic sisters who taught in American public classrooms in the 1940s and fifties, and of the legal controversies that erupted around their presence there. During the two decades after World War II, between 1200 and 2500 sisters were employed at any one time as public teachers in school districts across the United States. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's precedent-setting 1947 decision in Everson v. Board of Education, these cooperative situations between dioceses, religious communities, and public officials entered the national spotlight, and the imaginations of non-Catholic Americans troubled by the influence of the Catholic Church on the nation's democratic institutions. A new organization, calling itself Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU), made exposing sister-taught schools its mission. Through the 1950s, POAU promoted the arrangements it found as examples of institutions taken "captive" by the Church, and it partnered with local citizens' groups to bring many of them before the courts. Between 1940 and 1960, high courts in a half-dozen different states heard cases involving Catholic sisters teaching publicly. Although these courts never reached consensus on the issue, most deliberated upon a common legal question---whether the distinctive, highly visible habits that sisters wore comprised an undue religious influence upon the children who saw them everyday.;This project offers a history of sister-taught, or "captive" schools, woven within a narrative account of the era's most famous captive school lawsuit, filed by a group of citizens in New Mexico in 1948. The "Dixon case," as it became known nationally, implicated over one hundred and thirty Catholic sisters. Most of these women were teaching in schools in the heavily Hispano-Catholic northern part of the state, where members of Catholic religious orders had predominated as teachers since public schooling began in the mid-nineteenth century. POAU became involved in the Dixon case's litigation, and anecdotes about New Mexico's troubled schools were soon splashed across the pages of national journals. The lawsuit went to trial in the autumn of 1949, and highlighted some three-dozen sisters, who took the witness stand to speak publicly about their work. The case culminated two years later, when the state's Supreme Court determined that sisters wearing religious garb were constitutionally prohibited from teaching in New Mexico's schools.;The dissertation pays attention to the significance--or lack thereof--that different participants involved in, and impacted by, captive school litigation assigned to the principle of church-state separation, as they confronted it during the legal process. These included legal advocates, both Catholic and non-Catholic, who engaged in public debates over the import of the First Amendment during these years. They also included people, whether residents that relied upon contested schools or sisters who taught in them, whose understandings of separation were tacit and tenuous. Because these actors, especially the Catholic sisters at this story's center, were reticent to speak systematically about the legal principle, this study integrates the meaning-based approaches of intellectual history with a methodology that gives weight to practice--in particular the daily activities by which sisters assembled their classrooms, and instructed the children within them. The hybrid spaces these women created, between the divergent expectations of public and parochial authorities, speak persuasively to the unique position Catholic sisters held in mid-century American conversations about the separation of church and state.