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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN WELL-TRODDEN WAYS A BRIEF
BIOGRAPHY OF CATHOLIC JOURNALIST KATHERINE
ELEANOR CONWAY

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN WELL-TRODDEN WAYS
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF CATHOLIC JOURNALIST
KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY
By

Denyse Lynne Smith

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
School of Journalism

2004

ABSTRACT
BY

Denyse Lynne Smith

Katherine Conway was a journalist, editor, author, poet and artist who
lived at the turn of the last century. Her accomplishments as a writer were
significant, but she also made a huge contribution to the future of women in
journalism as the first and only female editor of the Boston Pilot, a Catholic
newspaper published today by the Archdiocese of Boston.

Conway had edited secular newspapers in New York in the 18803, and
became managing editor of the Pilot in 1905.

Interestingly, Conway, who never married, was an advocate of marriage
and family. Although she opposed the suffrage, she thought that women should
be lauded for their accomplishments, not because they were women, but
because they were individuals. She was against the suffrage but stood for
equality.

As editor of the Pilot Conway editorialized against “Woman Suffrage,” and
spoke out against women in the workplace, all the while living the life she so
staunchly railed against. Access to information about Conway is available
through an archive held at the John Bum’s Library of Boston College, as well as

microfilmed newspapers archived at Notre Dame University.

DEDICATION

To Whitney, Joe, Emily and Wayne. I couldn’t have done this without you!

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the librarians at the John Burns Library of Boston College for
their assistance in researching the Conway Archives, Margaret Gonsalves,
Associate Archivist at the Archdiocese of Boston, Sr. Connie Derby, Archivist at
the Diocese of Rochester New York, my committee members, Brett McLaughlin

and Dr. Kim Piper-Aikin, and especially my advisor, Dr. Lucinda Davenport.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

Introduction .................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 2

Katherine Eleanor Conway - A Woman of Her Time ................................... 6
CHAPTER 3

Katherine Eleanor Conway - A Woman Before Her Time ............................ 14
CHAPTER 4

Katherine Eleanor Conway - the Pilot Years ................................................ 22
CHAPTER 5

Training the Future Journalist ...................................................................... 40
CHAPTER 6

Katherine Eleanor Conway - A woman beyond her time ............................. 45
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................... 54

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

It’s been nearly a century since the one and only woman held the position
of editor-in-chief of the Boston Pilot, began publishing in 1836. The Pilot, the
official publication of the Archdiocese of Boston, was once a privately owned
newspaper in Boston, publishing Irish American-Catholic news.

A century ago when most women struggled to gain recognition in the
newsroom and society and the Catholic Church dictated that women stay home,
raise their Children and submit to their husbands, fathers or brothers as the case
may have been, Katherine Eleanor Conway nearly single handedly ran one of
Boston’s premier Irish American-Catholic newspapers for over a decade.

Even though her name never graced the masthead, and her by-line was
seldom on its pages, Conway’s heart and soul were on nearly every page of the
Pilot from the day John Boyle O’Reilly hired her in 1883 until May of 1908 when
Archbishop William O’Connell dismissed her from her duties.

Hired by O’Reilly as an editorial assistant, Conway and James Jeffrey
Roche assumed editorial control of the Pilot when O’Reilly died suddenly of an
accidental overdose of sleeping medication in 1890.1 Although Roche was

officially editor-in—chief and held stock in the Pilot, Conway carried the bulk of the

 

1 Pioneer Catholic Journalism, Paul J. Foik, 1930, p. 179

load for publishing the weekly paper because of Roche’s ill health and then his
assignment to the American Consular Service in Genoa in 1904.2

Although she remained single and was a career woman, Conway wrote
and spoke about the virtues of womanhood, taking the Catholic Church’s position
that women had two choices in life: 1) wifehood and motherhood or 2) the
convent.3

Conway was unique in her achievements in the newsroom, at a time when
other women tried to make their way into the man’s world and failed. The few
women who were hired as reporters ended up writing society columns or
features. Hard news stories, matters of politics and managerial duties were
strictly a man’s job.

Women journalists such as Helen Winslow of Boston and Elizabeth
Cochrane (Nellie Bly), did outrageous things to get their feet through the doors of
the newsroom. Cochrane “feigned insanity” to get her job at the New York World,
while others waited for editors to return their calls or wrote outrageous stories, or
“make news” to get noticed in the newspaper business. Male counterparts
usually didn’t take the women reporters seriously,4 yet Conway and her
contemporary Louise Guiney who both worked for O’Reilly, seemed to have
commanded respect unmatched by many women of their time.

Conway’s career as a journalist began when she was 15 years old and

ended with her final editorial column the week before she passed away at the

 

2 lbid, p. 180
3 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman. Eleanor C. Donnelly, 1894, p. 152

4 Amen'can Journalism, WInter 2001, Grit Your Teeth, then Learn to Swear: Women in
Journalistic Careers, 1850-1926, Agnes Hooper Gottlieb

age of 74. In direct conflict with her convent education, Conway never married
nor did she have any children of her own yet; she spent most of her creative
energies extolling the virtues of motherhood and wifehood and calling women to
abandon the idea of entering public life in deference to their true vocations.5

Although Conway’s career was vast and varied, this paper looks at a brief
period of time during which she not only trod in man’s footsteps, but she dared fill
his shoes as managing editor of the Boston Pilot, an Irish-Catholic publication
owned by the Patrick Donahoe family.

Conway’s life and work were fraught with irony. She was a career woman
who considered women in the workplace a threat to home and family life. She
was the founding member of the John Boyle O’Reilly Reading Circle and the New
England Women’s Press Association, but she railed against women becoming
too involved in social clubs. Conway's lack of putting into practice what she
preached made for interesting research and was the objective of this study.

One overriding factor that seems to have made itself plain in the research
is that Conway railed against the suffrage because she believed women and men
were equal in intelligence and capability in most respects. In conflict with what
she had been taught, Conway believed that woman, as woman, had no place in
public vocations, but woman as human did.

Conway was also an interesting subject because not much had been
written about her in the past, other than short entries in journalism and Catholic

biographies.

 

5 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, 1894, p. 149

Paula M. Kane, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University
of Pittsburgh, wrote the most comprehensively about Conway. She has a
lengthy biography in her book, “Separatism & Subculture: Boston Catholicism
1900-1920"6 Conway was also the focus of Kane’s paper “ The Pulpit of the
Hearthstone: Katherine Conway and Boston Catholic Women, 1900 - 1920' in
the US. Catholic Historian.

Conway is mentioned briefly in Professor Patrick W. Carey’s 1993 book,
The Roman Catholics, Paul Foik’s 1969 Pioneer Catholic Journalism, and her
name is mentioned in Apollinaris W. Baumgartner's 1967 thesis, “Catholic
Journalism, A study of its development in the United States, 1 789-1930,”
however in Baumgartner's study there is a greater history of the Pilot.

Other brief biographies about Conway have appeared in US Catholic
Historian, and The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History. Conway's friend
and contemporary Annette Driscoll wrote a memorial to Conway after her death
in January 1928, which was published in Catholic World.

This paper looks cumulatively at Conway’s work as well as what has been
written about her by other biographers, her diary entries, and personal
correspondence.

Biographical and historical information on Conway, O’Reilly, O'Connell,
the Pilot and the Republic were available in original and archival documents from
Boston College and the Archdiocese of Boston, and the University of Notre

Dame.

 

6 Separatism 8. Subculture: Boston Catholicism 1900-1920, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press: 1994

Looking at this brief period of Conway’s life opens a window to a when
women journalists were not welcome in the newsroom. Furthermore, in the
Catholic press they also struggled with the Church’s doctrine that women should
stay home with their families or enter the convent.

Conway found an ally in her friend and mentor Bishop Bernard McQuaid in
her hometown of Rochester New York, and her letters to him were an additional
window into her life that couldn’t otherwise be seen.

Conway broke through the barriers of the newsroom and worked in
defiance of the Catholic Church, at the same time touting the Church and
society’s doctrine. The main focus of this paper will be to look at how her
Catholic view of life affected her professional view of life, and also how she was
treated as a woman working in a man’s world.

Her correspondence with both Archbishop William O’Connell and Bishop
Bernard McQuaid shed some light on the latter, while her diary entries, articles
and clippings from her scrapbooks gave perspective to the former.

Conway’s Catholic-ness dictated much of her life, but it was also a
contradiction to the way she lived. This paper takes a brief look into her life and
work as a Catholic woman working in a man’s profession.

Her life and work shed an interesting light on what it was like to be a
journalist at a time when women weren’t welcome in the newsroom, and as a
Catholic writer worked against the male establishment, but also the male

dominated Church as well.

CHAPTER 2
Katherine Eleanor Conway - A Woman of Her Time

Looking back about a hundred years, one at first sees a simpler day.
Women were mothers and wives, training the next generation. Their jobs were at
home, not in the public arena, unless out of necessity. Men headed off to the
workplace every day leaving their wives to tend the household and keep up
social appearances. It was the turn of the twentieth century. Women were
expected to keep the home and raise the children.

On close examination, one sees women who weren’t content with the life
of servitude to men that society demanded. A growing number of women were
beginning to enter colleges and the professional workforce as teachers,
bookkeepers, accountants, secretaries and cashiers. And, despite our founding
father's refusal to give women equal citizenship or even human status, (a woman
was her father’s property until she married, then she became her husband’s
chattel,) it was a time when many women fought on both sides of what was
known as “The Woman Suffrage.”7

When the United States was born, the newly drafted Declaration of
Independence contained a phrase that almost immediately started an uprising
among the “gentler” sex. The phrase, in the opening lines of the document
reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”

[emphasis mine] but made no provision for women. Beginning with the wives of

 

7 Although referred to also as Women’s Suffrage the Library of Congress reference is Woman
Suffrage.

 

 

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the founding fathers, demands were made for change. The wife of John Adams,

Abigail Adams, was one of the first suffragists, and the movement continued from
the eighteenth into the early 20th century.8 Still today, women fight for equal pay

for equal work.

In addition to societal norms, church norms dictated the behavior of
women. The Catholic Church taught that a woman was a man’s companion and
“must so remain — under the power of love and affection, but always under his
power.”9 With that, there were women who fought on both sides of the issue -
from the perspective of freedom vs. the pulpit of their religious leanings.

Conway, a prominent Catholic journalist, poet and author in Boston felt
that Woman Suffrage would serve only one purpose: to destroy the dignity of the
family, particularly those of a Catholic persuasion. Her life was so steeped in
Catholic tradition that she believed as she would have been taught by her religion
that there was only one place in society for women: at home.

Conway, who never married or had children of her own preached from a
self made pulpit of the virtues of womanhood and family. She spoke often and
wrote oftener that women should find their dignity in changing society from within,
rather than from without, the home.

As a journalist on the opposing side of one of the largest women’s issues
of the day, Conway and her contemporaries were criticized for their views.

She argued against the notion that the church oppressed women. She

wrote in her essay published in “A Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman,” compiled by

 

8 www.historychannel.comlexhibitslwoman

9 Separatism and Subculture, Paula M. Kane, Chapel Hill Publishing, 1994, p. 146

Eleanor C. Donnelly: “What doors indeed, has the Church closed on intelligence
and ability as manifested by women, but the doors of the sanctuary and the
pulpit?”10 She wrote that although divine law prohibits women from becoming
priests or preachers, “women may have free scope in philosophy, law, medicine,
letters, the liberal arts, the trades and industries.“ However in earlier paragraphs
she wrote, “The vocation of the overwhelming majority of women is to wifehood
and motherhood; and their bodily and mental sensitiveness and timidity, and the
fixed aversion, or at least indifference, of most of them to public work, are
safeguards raised by God’s own hand about the sanctuary of life.”

Described as a frail, “small woman with dark complexion, eyes and hair,
and a very animated way of talking,”11 Conway believed that it was God’s divine
plan that women be stay-at-home mothers. They weren’t built for the labors of
the working world or the rigors of public office. The Church taught and still does
to this day that the family is the sanctuary of life. She believed in a natural law
theory about the complementarity of the sexes, that God has different purposes
for men and women, and that it was important for the different genders to be
committed to the purpose God set before them.

Among anti-suffragists Conway’s arguments were not dissimilar, but the
irony is, she didn’t practice what she preached, and in an 1894 article published
in the Suffragist publication, The Woman’s Journal Conway’s views were
attacked. “Miss Conway claims that the suffrage movement ‘fosters disesteem

for private life, and for that vocation which is down in the divine plan for the

 

1° A Girlhood’s Handbook of Women, 152
11 Miss Katherine E. Conway, Biographical sketch in scrapbook

overwhelming majority of women.’ This is a common idea among those who
have little inside acquaintance with the suffrage movement, but it is an entire
misapprehension.”12 Meaning the author didn’t subscribe to Conway’s belief in
complementarity of sexes.

The same author disputed Conway’s claim that ”the movement for
suffrage was mainly a movement of, by and for unmarried women.” The author
wrote that the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association had only 8 unmarried
women, while it had 20 married women and a handful of men.

Conway also wrote editorials and features often about the social
ramifications of allowing women to vote or hold office. As member of the
Women’s Press Association, founding member of the John Boyle O’Reilly
Reading Circle and other clubs, Conway also spoke often on the topic. Into the
early 19003, she urged women to stop flooding the newsrooms in search of
careers, and stop looking toward elected office.

She claimed that giving women the right to vote would prompt them to
want to hold public office, a job for which women were not well suited. “I fear the
emotional nature by which we are inevitably partisans,” she told an interviewer in
the 18905. “I don’t doubt for a minute our ability to grasp political topics so as to
discuss them intelligently, but I doubt the power of our poor little bones and
muscles to withstand the strain of campaigns.”13 Although this article, found in
her scrapbook, omitted the newspaper citation and by-line, Conway's own

editorials and other writings reflected the same attitude about women working in

 

12 Woman’s Journal: Boston, on April 21, 1894
‘3 A Decoration for Miss Conway, Scrapbook, Boston College Archives

the public arena.“ including her editorial in the Pilot, “Woman has No Vocation to
Public Life,” among others.

But, in The Normal Christian Woman, as in much of her other work, there
always seemed to be an acknowledgement that the writer wasn’t doing what she
told her reader to do - more or less a “do as I say, and not as I do“ statement.
The following paragraph Conway wrote seems to be more about her own choice
to be a career woman and follow her own path than the one she believed was
pre—ordained by God.

“While believing that woman, as woman, has no public sphere, she
believes also that the woman as an intelligence, a rational creature, responsible
for her own deeds, and free to Choose her own state of life, may be, or do, what
she can; that some women by virtue, not of their womanhood, but of their strong
individualities, marked ability, and the demands of unusual environment, may
have as special call to some public duty.”15

The Woman Suffrage was not only a movement to gain women access to
the voting booth, but also equal access with men to education, safe working
environments, equal pay for equal work, and the ability to keep what they earned.
Up until the passage of the equal rights amendment in 1920 women were

considered part of their husband’s property, and everything a woman had

belonged to her husband, father or, in some cases, a son."5

 

14 “Woman Has No Vocation to Public Life,“ the original title of her essay published as “The
Normal Christian Woman” in a Giithood’s Handbook of Woman reflected what she had been
taught about women taking on work outside the home.

‘5 Girthood’s Handbook of Women, 152
‘6 www.historychannel.com/exhibitslwoman

10

Conway’s arguments were largely against the right to vote issue, and the
notion that women hold public office. In an article published in the New York
Times, Conway is quoted as saying that the suffrage movement would cause a
breakdown in the family and “cause many divorces.” She called for women to
return to “the virtues of yester-year - the virtues of our foremothers, their
kindness, sweetness, forbearance, and devotion to their children which called
forth the respect of men.”17

Conway also thought that women should seek professional careers only
as a necessity to support themselves. Fifth of 13 children born to James and
Sarah Conway, Katherine spent nearly 60 years as a career woman at a time
when few women were allowed through the hallowed doors of the newsroom.
She began her career at 16 when her first work was published. But, she hadn’t
planned to make a career of journalism.

Conway's parents were political activists, having fled Great Britain and
immigrating to Rochester, New York, after the Chartist movement deteriorated in
his homeland. The Chartists was a political group in Victorian England who
sought social reform in parliament and was also known as a workingman’s
suffrage.18 In America, James Conway embraced the Democratic Party platform,
which at the end of the 19'” century befriended the immigrant families as they

flooded into America, helping them gain access to the American mainstream.

Ironically, the Democratic Party was also a strong supporter of the Woman

 

17 New York Times Article from archives scrapbook, “College Women on Dr. Abbott's Trail, Equal
Suffrage Leaguers to Argue for Ballot at Meeting on December18”, December 12, 1908

www.britainexpress.com/history/victorian/chartism.htm

11

Suffrage movement, but that didn’t dissuade Katherine from her political leanings
even as she followed lockstep in her father’s shoes.

By trade, James Conway was a bridge-builder and railroad contractor, but
his political conversations with friends gave Katherine insight into the outside
world. In an interview with the Boston Post, she told her interviewer, “My father
was a good thinker and to him I owe my interest in public affairs. The
atmosphere of our home was literary; there were books, papers, magazines;
there were grave discussions on topics of the day by my father and his friends.”19

Her mother, Sarah was a homemaker, but is referred to as “cool-brained
and expressive.”20

Conway’s home and school life were filled with books. She was exposed
to great works through her friend and mentor Bishop Bernard McQuaid of
Rochester, who “was a friend of the family, and interested himself very kindly in
me and in an informal way directed my reading.”21 Throughout her career she
kept close contact with McQuaid up to his death in 1909.

Prior to her tutelage with McQuaid, Conway was a student at St. Mary’s
Academy in Buffalo, New York, where her teacher exposed her to the great

writers of the time. “She was a singularly gifted woman, accomplished, earnest,

who had known personally many of the famous people of the Dickens-Thackaray

 

19 Scrapbook article, Boston Post, circa 1900
20

Ibid
2‘ Ibid

12

Era, and the glimpse she gave her young pupil into that golden time was a not to
be forgotten delight,"22 according to “The Story of the Irish in Boston”.

It’s possible that through her love of books and reading she became such
an advocate of education, especially the education of women, and a staunch
supporter of Catholic schools for girls.

Conway, who helped start a Catholic Summer School in Boston, wrote to
McQuaid in 1907 supporting Rome’s proposal for a girls’ school “under distinctly
Catholic direction at Oxford.” She asked McQuaid to work at turning a hall at
Cornell into a “distinctly Catholic Hall.”23

Conway credited the Suffrage movement with raising the standards for
women’s education. “This reflex action has been good in so far as it has
accelerated the opening of new and befitting avenues for the woman wage-
earner on the industrial or intellectual lines; or stimulated the ambition of the

woman capable of taking it, for the higher education.”24

 

22 The Story of the Irish in Boston, edited by James B. Cullen & Company, 1899
23 Letter to McQuaid, April 27. 1907
2“ Githood’s Handbook of Woman, 151

13

CHAPTER 3
Katherine Eleanor Conway - A Woman Before Her Time
From her first published work, she moved into the publishing world, writing
and editing a “modest little Catholic monthly“ paper in Rochester, New York,
called the West End Journal, before embarking on her professional career.
When her father fell on financial hardship she joined the editorial staff the
Rochester Daily Union and later joined The Catholic Union and Times of

Buffalo”.

Although it isn’t stated anywhere in the research, from Conway’s view of

IF :

motherhood and wifehood, she had probably aspired to that and herself. She
told an interviewer for the Buffalo New York Morning Courier in August of 1889
that she hadn’t intended to write as a means of self-support. “It was because I
felt like writing. I felt as if I must write, but I have supported myself in this way
since my early twenties, but for three or four years at the start I had no thought of
doing anything for myself in that way.”27
She also hadn’t planned to join the staff of the Boston Pilot, which became
the cornerstone of her career. After working for the smaller The Catholic Union
and Times, Conway was invited to work on the Pilot by editor and publisher John
Boyle O’Reilly, who became her mentor and close friend. The story of how

Conway came to O’Reilly’s attention varies depending on the source, but by all

accounts her work impressed him and she was invited to a position on his staff.

 

as In Memoriam - Katherine E. Conway, Catholic World, Fall, 1927, Annette S. Driscoll p. 481
26 Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, Glazier/Shelly, p. 376
2’ Scrapbook article, 1889

14

Driscoll wrote, “It was he who had given her the first check for a poem, and who
now invited her to join the editorial staff of The Pilot, which he and James Jeffrey
Roche were brilliantly conducting.”28 She took a position as editorial assistant. It
was her steerage of the Boston Pilot that gained Conway the most notoriety.

Conway wasn’t the first female newspaper editor, but she was the first and
only to ever manage the Boston Pilot. Before her there were many pioneer
women journalists, though few in the Catholic press.

Agnes Hooper Gottlieb wrote extensively on women in newspapers during
the late 19‘“ century, particularly in her book Women Journalists and the
Municipal Housekeeping Movement 1868 — 1914. Gottlieb gives a historical
overview of women’s struggle to get their feet through the doors of the male
dominated newsrooms. She wrote that women were hired primarily to write the
“women’s page,“ which was added to newspapers and magazines to increase
readership among women to attract them to the advertisements.

The women’s pages also helped boost advertising among department
stores, but despite the fact that they helped bring in more revenue for the papers
they didn’t elevate the status of women in the newsroom.”

Unlike Winslow and Elizabeth Bisland, Louise Malloy and others in
Gottlieb’s “Grit Your Teeth...” article, who seemed to be met with more barriers to
the newsroom doors than they were with paychecks, Conway didn’t have the
same disesteem. Her stories weren’t just coverage of the women’s clubs and

latest fashions, but the politics and news of the day. Many women journalists

 

28 In Memoriam - Annette Driscoll, Catholic World, 1927

29 Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement 1868 — 1914, Agnes Hooper
Gottlieb, Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., NY, 2001

15

became “disillusioned and dissatisfied with newspaper work,” because it seemed
they could never gain the respect of their editors. There were those who didn’t
give up, though, and found a way to keep pushing their agendas.

Elizabeth Cochrane, also known as Nellie Bly, opened a whole new door
to women journalists, taking them off the society and “women’s pages” and into a
whole new level of journalism, called “stunt journalism,” where the journalist
became part of the story. Bly and other women like her posed as beggars,
servants and sometimes lunatics to get a good story, and the racier the story the
better.30 Bly’s stunt journalism became the investigative journalism of today.

Gottlieb wrote that the numbers of female journalists rose significantly
between 1890 and 1900. In 1870 there were “only thirty-five persons, less than
0.6 percent of all working journalists.” But by 1900 there were 2,193 women who
claimed journalism as their profession?“1

Conway worked for a conservative Irish Catholic newspaper where she
wrote editorials and stories about the ideal Catholic society, and had the respect
of her editor.

Early in her career, Conway, like most other female journalists32 wrote
under a pen name. She used the name Mercedes33 until she went to work for

O’Reilly at the Pilot.

 

so .

Ibid
31 Gift Your Teeth, then Learn to Swear. Women in Journalistic Careers, 1850 - 1926, Agnes
Hooper Gottlieb. American Joumalism, 2001.

Up to 1900 the use of pen names by female journalists was not uncommon, particularly among
stunt journalists, and were used as a way to preserve the joumalist’s anonymity - Gottleib
33 Separatism and Subculture. Kane, p. 221

16

Conway also wrote often from her apartment, as was the case of many
women journalists. For most women journalists “writing could be done at home
and was seen as a more genteel way of earning a living,” as Gottlieb wrote in
“Grit Your Teeth...” But, for Conway writing from her apartment was more or less
a necessity. She was often stricken with fitful coughing and bronchitis, and
sometimes wrote from her bed. She was frail and unhealthy throughout most of
her life, writing once to Archbishop John O’Connell that she’d been diagnosed
with “a very rare condition — one to one hundred thousand in troubles of bones
and muscles — a species of maI-nutrition which has left those wretched little
bones in a state resembling those of an underfed adolescent.”34

She also suffered long, unrelenting bouts of insomnia but managed to
keep up her own as well as the workload of James Jeffrey Roche for several
years.

For Conway, writing from home also presented a means to living her
Catholic faith. She had been taught that even though she was not married or
raising her own family, she still had responsibilities to the Church family. As an
unmarried woman she was expected to live the cloistered life, and avoid
competition with men. One way she did that was by working from her small
apartment.35

Despite having all the responsibility of editing and publishing the paper for

three years, Conway’s name didn’t appear on the masthead, and though he had

 

34 Letter to Cardinal William O’Connell, July 1, 1921, Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston
35 Separatism and Subculture, Kane, p. 228

17

left the paper in 1905, James Jeffrey Roche was still listed as editor and
publisher until well after the archdiocese took over its steerage.

Conway’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin would have given her the piety
and humility to write anonymously for the Pilot. Like most Catholics of the time,
Conway would have been schooled in a devotion to Mary that would have called
her to be like the Blessed Virgin.

In her paper on “Editorial Work,” Conway explained, “It has always
seemed to me to be a magnificent thing to feel behind one’s written word the
momentum not only of one’s own strength, but of the strength of all one’s equally
unseen associates.”36

Unlike other female journalists of the time, Conway didn’t seem to have
the same struggle in the newsroom. She had found in O’Reilly an editor who
saw in her a talent, and who trusted her not to allow her feminine sensibilities to
bias her work. She was also loyal enough to her Catholic and Irish beliefs that
O’Reilly trusted that her conservative view would remain constant.

“She has the heart of a woman, and the brain of a man,” O’Reilly is
quoted as having said of Conway, giving her an advantage the Suffragists and
women journalists with social agendas didn’t have. Conway could walk in a
man’s shoes if she believed in and spoke the same language as a man, but in
the end, even though she had “the brain of a man,” she still couldn’t wear the

pants of one.

 

36 Article from scrapbook, “On Editorial Work"

18

In the 1880’s when Conway had her foot firmly planted in the Pilot
newsroom, other women struggled to get through the newsroom doors. It would
be another decade and a half before women were finding themselves more
accepted in the male dominated world of the newsroom, and by then Conway
was on her way to editing.

By the time other women journalists were making their names known in
the New England Women’s Press Association, Conway’s name was already
becoming known in wider Circles. In 1893, Conway was invited to help in
planning the Catholic Congress in Chicago. The following statement was used to
describe Conway: “An active, assertive, and unmarried career woman, she
extolled the importance of marriage for women and strenuously opposed Woman
Suffrage initiatives in Massachusetts.” 37

William J. Onahan asked Conway to help organize a “Women’s Day,” as
part of the Catholic Congress that year in hopes that it would draw a larger
female contingent, but Conway objected, saying that men wouldn’t attend if there
were a women’s day “because it would seem a ‘dreary bore’ to them.”38

Conway wanted equal representation for women at the congress, but
didn’t want them to be exploited just because they were women. Despite the fact
that Conway believed women were subordinate to men, she also believed they
were equal to men in many ways, including intelligence. “Conway implied that

women should not raise issues of particular interest to their sex but should

 

37 American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era, Deirdre
M. Moloney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002 p. 10

3° Ibid

19

 

instead demonstrate their intelligence only on general topics in forums alongside
men.”‘°’9

In objecting to the “Women’s Day” part of the Catholic Congress, Conway
told Onahan, “I have always had a horror of the exploiting of women as women in
any public gathering.” She also didn’t want to open any discussion to the
feminist or suffragist viewpoint, which she disagreed with so vehemently."0

Conway wasn’t successful in keeping the “Women’s Day" off the agenda,
but she was able to keep it from being named such. The paper she presented
“Woman Has No Vocation to Public Life,” was published as part of a book titled
“Girlhood’s Handbook of Women,” compiled and edited by another of Conway’s
contemporaries, Eleanor C. Donnelly. When it was published the title of
Conway’s essay was changed to “The Normal Christian Woman.”1

Conway also wrote editorials about what was known as the “woman
question.” The “woman question,” as it was called, was a notion that focused on
whether gender should be a factor in granting rights or not, particularly when it
came to voting, education and holding property. In an unattributed editorial,
titled only “Written for Congress of Women Journalists, World’s Fair,” and signed
by hand, Conway explained she thought the focus should be less on women, and
more on individuals.

“If I may venture to interpret the suggestions which it was my pleasure and

my profit to hear, I would say rather, that she would have us for one thing to

 

3" Ibid
4° Ibid
‘1 Girihood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 151

20

eliminate from the consideration of our “woman’s work,” the “woman’s,” and think
simply of the work.” She wrote further that, “The patient study of such work, the

persistent aspiration to equal excellence, must marvelously develop the ability of
the woman who has ability to develop."42

It seems that Conway would rather avoid the “woman question” all
together, than allow debate on the Suffrage, which to Conway was the antithesis
of womanhood. Conway’s view of “the woman question," also seemed to be a
contradiction to her belief in gender complementarity.

A regular column in the Pilot was news briefs pulled from European
papers. The opening paragraph in the column “FrivolitY’ for January 11, 1908,
would have summed up Conway’s feelings about why discussions about the
Suffrage in America were best avoided. “An English suffragette visiting in the
United States says that the American woman is generations behind the English
woman in ‘emancipation’. Suffragette is a good word to designate the person to
whom it is applied for it conforms to no law, means nothing, and is ugly, and it is
to be hoped that it will be many generations before the comparatively quiet
female suffragist of the United States developed not the brawling, booing English

suffragette who deliberately disturbs the peace and is ‘removed’ from political

meetings.”43

 

42 Written for Congress of Women Journalists, World’s Fair, Scrapbook page

43 Boston Pilot, January 11, 1908 - The brief paragraphs in “Frivolity' were typically Mitten about
European gentry, including on this particular day, the German Emperor, and Prince Olaf of
Norway among others.

21

CHAPTER 4
Katherine Eleanor Conway - the Pilot Years

During her school years Conway received numerous awards for her
poetry, and had edited a little monthly newspaper in her hometown called the
West End Journal then going to work as a writer for The Catholic Union and
Times of Buffalo.

John Boyle O’Reilly, an outspoken Irish-Catholic conservative, and
publisher of the Boston Pilot had seen Conway’s work and asked her to join his
staff. In 1883 at the age of 21 as an editorial assistant, the young journalist, who
hadn’t planned to be a writer for the rest of her life, accepted the position, and
began a journey that would span the next four and a half decades.

O’Reilly was a well-respected publisher in Boston who was politically and
religiously outspoken. He used the Pilot as a vehicle to forward his agenda,
which was to promote the Irish and Catholicism in America.

Professor Paul J. Foik offered a brief biography of O’Reilly in his book,
Pioneer Catholic Journalism. He was an escaped political prisoner, who had
been charged with treason and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for his
activities in the Fenian Brotherhood, a group whose mission was to eradicate the
British from Ireland. O’Reilly fled the island in a rowboat from a penal colony in

Western Australia before finishing his sentence. After some time he was

22

rescued: “At last an American whaler signaled to him. In utter exhaustion he
sank on the deck of the Gazelle.”44

A year after arriving in America in 1870, O’Reilly took the helm of the Pilot,
owned by Patrick Donahoe. Under O’Reilly the Pilot was read by the Catholic
population nationwide. By the time Conway took over as managing editor, some
two decades after O’Reilly’s death in 1890 readership had fallen off and the
paper became largely a local Catholic publication.

Founded in 1836, the Pilot survived three fires and financial turmoil before
being bought by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in 1908.45 “The
older generation that supported the Pilot had died out, and with changes of years
and customs and the growth of other diocesan weeklies, the Pilot lost its national
circulation and prestige.”6 By 1930, weekly circulation was 50,000 but the paper
was no longer a private enterprise.”

Conway’s tenure with the Pilot spanned thirty-five years, from 1883 until
Cardinal John O’Connell dismissed her in early 1908. Under O’Reilly, Conway
flourished as an author and journalist. Her first assignment as a reporter for the
Pilot was to cover the Catholic Centenary Congress of 1889."8

Quite possibly the reason she attracted the attention of O’Reilly, and
seemed to have such a thriving career at the Pilot, was because of her devout

Catholic faith and her staunch adherence to the teachings of the church. That,

 

‘4 Pioneer Catholic Joumalsim, Paul J. Foik, Greenwood Press, 1969

‘5 Ibid

‘6 Ibid

47 Catholic Journalism in the United States, Apollinaris Baumgartner, AMS Press, NY, 1967 -
circulation statistics for prior years are not available.

48 Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, Glazier/Shelley, p. 376

23

along with a gift for writing, gave her the advantage she needed to secure and
maintain her position on one of Boston’s most highly recognized Catholic
publications.

Because most of the articles were unsigned and without by-lines, it is
difficult to tell what exactly Conway wrote, although some of her work is archived
in personal scrapbooks in the John Burns Library of Boston College.

In trying to determine what Conway would have written for the Pilot, it was
necessary to get a sense of her writing style by reviewing the editorials she
contributed other newspapers and the books she published. While employed at
the Pilot, Conway wrote a series of books entitled The Family Sitting Room
Series, so it is highly possible that the column “In the Family Sitting Room” in the
pages of the Pilot is also her work.

“In the Family Sitting Room” was a regular column that appeared weekly
even after Conway left the Pilot. However, after Conway‘s departure the column
took a different tone. In her analysis, Kane concluded that Conway could have
written the column, saying, “subject matter and stylistic evidence support the
theory."9

In the column, the writer, presumably Conway, wrote Often about issues
concerning women and issues in the Catholic Church. In the weeks before
Conway’s dismissal, she wrote a series on “Some Heroic Women of Today,” and

“In Answer to Many Questions,” and finally, ”The Argument of Example.” Each

 

49 Separatism and Subculture, p. 227

24

series of columns stretched for five to six weeks and dealt with matters of faith or
family.
Conway, who had been raised with a convent education and taught in the
Catechism that girls should aspire to motherhood and wifehood, wasn’t
interested in forwarding the agenda of the Suffragists. Her books, titled A Lady
and Her Letters, Making Friends and Keeping Them, Questions of Honor in the
Christian Life, Bettering Ourselves and The Christian Gentlewoman and the
Social Apostolate, were were filled with the sentiment that she’d been taught as a Id
conservative Catholic Christian girl. It was a conservative view that served the L
Pilot, O’Reilly and Donahoe. I
Women such as Ida Tarbell, Elizabeth Cochrane, lshbel Ross and Helen
Winslow were using their journalistic talents to affect social change, but Conway
used hers to keep the status quo. Conway’s religion taught that a woman's place
was, if not in the convent as spiritual mother, then in the home as mother and
wife, training the future leaders of society and their wives.
“Their intellectual force has ordinarily been expended in the training of
their own children,“ Conway wrote in The Normal Christian Woman, or, “in the
training of the future congenial wives of intelligent men.”50 This was exactly the
conservative thinking that O’Reilly and the Archdiocese of Boston would have
revered in a newspaperwoman. As a trusted journalist, Conway would have had
the audience that her male counterparts couldn’t reach. Much like the editors of

the large city dailies who wanted to increase their female readership byIadding

 

5° Girihood’s Handbook of Women, 151

25

the “women’s pages,” it made sense that O’Reilly would add women to his staff
to “preach to the choir."

Katherine Conway worked and mentored under O’Reilly until 1890. Then
her world was shaken, but not so immeasurably as to be taken off course. On
October 10"“, O’Reilly, who, like Conway suffered from unrelenting bouts of
insomnia, took a sleeping potion that proved fatal.'51 When O’Reilly died
suddenly of an accidental poisoning, the staff of the Pilot, and the readers of the
Catholic Northeast mourned. “He was gone,” Conway later wrote to Bishop
McQuaid, “and the earth rocked under me.”52

O’Reilly seemed to have a strong influence over Conway, just as he did
over all of his staff. Conway wrote to Bishop McQuaid in December of 1886 that
he is a “generous and considerate employer — a man to be thoroughly respected
as well as liked by all who are associated with him.”53

The front page of the next issue was taken up with a lengthy biography of
O’Reilly and his accomplishments as a publisher, poet and journalist the week
after his death. And, the Pilot continued, without a misstep,.

Conway, also a poet, wrote a poem that could presumably have been
about her relationship with the late Pilot editor and close friend. After his death
she wrote the forward to a book of O’Reilly’s poetry called, “Watchwords.”

Seventeen years later, Conway’s poem entitled “Not Out of Sight,” and

was published in the Pilot.

 

51 Pioneer Catholic Journalism, Folk
52 Letter to McQuaid, April 10, 1907
53 Letter to McQuaid, 12/14/1886

26

So sad in life, even when thy lips were smiling,
Those comforting, compassionate eyes of thine;
So eloquent, another’s pain beguiling,

“Lo, my friend grieves, and all his grief is mine.”
Who knew thee came to thee to trust unbounded -
Was ever depth thine own soul had not sounded?

I wonder is it joy to thee in Heaven,

Oh, loving, helping, giving - now to know

The love and grief to they dear memory given.

Thou art not gone — we cannot let thee go —

Beyond our reach — ah yes! - and crowned with light,

But still in sight - oh, never out of sight!

And shall it be in vain, oh, dear befriender?

Nay, ours the blame, if thou no blessing bring.

Thou art unchanged - man-brave and woman-tender

And Christ-like merciful and pitying.

Look with remembering eyes to God, while we

Look on thee and grow faintly like to thee.54

Although it was published years after O’Reilly’s death, in light of Conway’s
seeming adoration of him, it fits that the poem would have been about him and
the loss she felt at his death.

James Jeffrey Roche took over the editorial responsibilities of the Pilot.
Roche, like Conway had been an assistant editor at the Pilot under O’Reilly, and
held many of the same conservative views. But, in the years after O’Reilly’s
death, it was Conway, and not Roche, who ran the paper. Roche made editorial
decisions, but she handled the day-to-day operations.

Throughout her years at the Pilot Conway kept in contact with Bishop
McQuaid, chronicling her life and work through letters. From 1886 to 1907,

Conway wrote to the bishop frequently. The letters, archived at the Diocese of

 

5” Boston Pilot, March 1907

27

Rochester in New York, offer a glimpse of Conway that can’t be seen in her
editorials, and are more detailed than her diaries.

The research doesn’t speak to directly to the nature of her relationships
with either McQuaid or O’Reilly, only to say that Conway was devoted to both as
teachers and mentors. She met McQuaid as a girl in Rochester, New York when
he was her parish priest, and continued a close relationship with him until he died
in 1909.

The letters reveal that throughout her life, Conway was troubled with
illness. She was frail as a girl, and many of her adult winters were spent
bedridden, with her nights fraught with the sleeplessness of insomnia. In her
diaries she wrote of taking veronal powders to help her sleep, but to the bishop,
she asked for prayers and mentioned that she was “seemingly on the verge of
the grave” quite often.

Somehow despite her “wrecked” health Conway managed to publish the
16- to 24—page broadsheet newspaper every week. Whether from her bed, or
whether she managed to get into “headquarters,” this was an admirable feat for
someone who suffered illness frequently enough that “brought me to death’s
door" or suffered rare maladies that made her bones as brittle as a

“malnourished teenager’s5

 

55 Letters to McQuaid, 1886-1907 - In the Roman Catholic Church the Bishop is the chief priest
of a diocese. Bishops are responsible for the pastoral care of their dioceses. In addition, bishops
have a responsibility to act in council with other bishops to guide the Church.

28

Conspicuously, there is a lapse of about two years between letters, from
June of 1890 to February of 1892. Conway presumably didn’t write after
O’Reilly’s death because of her grief, the constant workload and her own
mother’s death in early 1892.
The friendship she had with Bishop McQuaid was one of the closest she
had in her life, second only to her parents. “I never forgot — but I never fully
realized till I came hereto Boston - how much I am indebted to you for whatever
good there is in my life,”56 she wrote in the first of the archived letters in July of ,1-1
1886. I
Although McQuaid was her teacher and mentor, Conway’s letters reflected ’ I
a special friendship with the Bishop of the Diocese of Rochester. Very often she
wrote to him when either she would be traveling to Rochester or in anticipation of
his visits to Boston. “Counting on taking every minute you can spare for me,”57
and “looking forward to the happiness of seeing you soon, as ever.”'58 There is
no mistaking that there was nothing untoward in her friendship with the bishop,
just that it had been long and close.
Conway seemed content with the way things progressed at the Pilot after
O’Reilly’s death, and didn’t mention him to McQuaid in all of the 15 that years
she corresponded with the bishop (1892 to 1907.) In her letters to McQuaid, at
least there were no mentions that she was unhappy in her work, or that things

weren’t going well.

 

5” Ibid, m sea
57 Ibid, 1/2/1893
58 Ibid, 1/17/1899

29

Whether in praise of his work or discussing church politics, Conway
continued to write to McQuaid until 1907. The last letter was written just before
she received the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame.

It was during the last few years between 1904 and 1907 that Conway had
taken over or was in process of taking over as Managing Editor of the Pilot. Up
to that point, Conway didn’t write much about her circumstances on the Pilot,
except to occasionally write about an upcoming vacation or an editorial she’d
written.

From O’Reilly’s editorship to the death of owner Patrick Donahoe in 1901,
the Pilot was a conservative Democratic, Irish-Catholic publication. But in 1904
Conway voiced her concern that Roche was endorsing Roosevelt in the election:
“No one objected to a good word for Roosevelt. What was deplored was the
abuse of the party through whom the fathers and grandfathers of most of us won
their own civic standing and ours.”59

Conway grew up in a democratic household, and was a friend to many
Democrats in Boston. “When the Change was foreshadowed, I thought it meant
that the Pilot would be an ‘lndependent. ’ I never expected that its friendship for
Roosevelt would involve an aggressive Republican campaign; and l protested
with all candor to the editor against the first page articles of Joseph Smith; who

six months ago was assailing Roosevelt in one of our dailies.”60

 

5" Ibid, 12/4/1904
6° Ibid - Joseph Smith was the founder and president of the Mormon church.

30

Conway assumed that Roche supported Roosevelt because of his own
political ambitions. She was right. That same year Roche was appointed to the
American Consular Service in Genoa.

“If he is to have an office, it must be an easy one, because his health is
poor, and long hours and severe labor would be beyond him,” Conway wrote to
McQuaid on December 4, 1904.61

Because of Roche’s ill health Conway took on the task of editing and
publishing the paper nearly single handedly, a burden she bore in near silence,
except in correspondence to Bishop McQuaid and in her diary pages. In early
1905 Roche left for his position to the American Consular Service at Genoa,
leaving Conway fully in charge of the Pilot, which was also a relief.

“He spoke of his prolonged ill-health as the cause of his anxiety to get out
of the Pilot,” Conway wrote to McQuaid on December 29, 1904, “and, as to my
long upholding of the paper during his protracted illnesses and absences,
informed me that I could not have done differently, that it was, in affect, all in the
day’s work, and that as a matter of regard for public opinion, I could not have left
him while he was sick?”

Prior to Roche’s departure Conway feared that Roche would sell his stock
in the company and she would lose her job all together. Once Roche left the
Pilot, Conway kept up the weekly publication of the paper, sometimes working
without pay, and oftentimes paying employees out of her own savings. She

wrote to Bishop McQuaid on September 13, 1905, just nine months after Roche’s

 

“I Ibid
‘2 Ibid, 12/29/1904

31

leaving, that “the Pilot is in better shape in a business way than it was a year
ago.” She also added a comment from Archbishop Williams, of the Archdiocese
of Boston, “which amused me not a little: ‘Well, you have a position now; you are
free from that man’s dictation or interference.”63

During that time Conway toiled without vacations and “a load of work and
detail that one of my daily paper brethren calls ‘cruelty to animals. ”’ Conway
wrote to McQuaid that despite the workload and lack of time off, “my head never
aches, but I seemed to get strained about the heart.”64

Conway had enjoyed the support of Bishop McQuaid and Archbishop
John Williams. Then in 1907 her friend and confidant Williams passed away,
leaving Conway vulnerable to the new Archbishop of the archdiocese, William
O’Connell.

According to Kane’s biographical sketch in her book Separatism and
Subculture, O’Connell was self-serving and power hungry.65 Other recorders of
Boston’s Catholic history, including Professor Thomas O’Connor of Boston
College and Professor Patrick Carey of Marquette University, wrote of O’Connell
in a more favorable light. “Although he was never popular among the American
bishops, and although his national leadership in American Catholicism decreased

after the death of Pius X in 1914, he had a significant conservative impact on the

 

”3 Ibid, 9/13/1905
”4 Ibid, 4/27/1907
”5 Separatism and Subculture, p. 17

32

Archdiocese of Boston throughout his reign and was a forceful public figure
there.“66

After he was appointed Archbishop of Boston in 1907, O’Connell bought
the Pilot from the remaining shareholders, including the heirs to Patrick Donahoe,
and brought it under the auspices of the Archdiocese. Conway was told in March
1908 that she would have a place on the paper, but if she were offered another
job she shouldn’t turn it down.

Conway wrote the following in her diary on March 31, 1908: “The last day
of St. Joseph’s Month and the old Pilot has crashed down in ruins — a friend told
me after mass of the selling of the Pilot stock at Mr. G’s67 office - after a brief
consultation -- I went down to headquarters. News cautiously confirmed but not
a date set.”68

There was no date set for the take over, and it was all done quietly
enough. Archbishop William O’Connell took over editorial control of the Pilot in
May of 1908 and dismissed Conway without fanfare or recognition of her efforts.
There was no change on the front page, no front-page story, and the masthead
didn’t reflect any change in ownership of the paper for several more months.
Conway's name had never been on the masthead as managing editor, so she

had never been given recognition within its pages for her work.

 

66 The Roman Catholics, Patrick Carey, Greenwood Press, 1993, p. 289

In Conway’s diaries she often used only initials or sometimes -- to identify people she was

writing about. Mr. G. could have been Mr. Gargan she refened to later in a letter to Bishop
O'Connell.

3" Diary page, 3/31/1903

33

During that year, it seemed as though Conway had developed a good
working relationship with O’Connell, but it is evident through her correspondence
with him later that their relationship was more of a convenience than a friendship.

Staunchly conservative and educated in a school that taught there were
two categories of women, “nuns, who were revered and laywomen, who were
dangerous”69 Archbishop O’Connell practiced what he preached. He also
believed in gender complimentarity and thought women had no place in society,
other than as wives and mothers, or nuns. Conway, in her editorials and writing
for the paper probably would have repeated O'Connell’s mantra as a way of
appeasing him to an extent because for many years, even before O’Connell was
appointed head of the Boston Archdiocese, Conway believed the same thing.

It is not inherently clear what happened or why, but somewhere within the
weeks prior to her leaving the Pilot, Conway’s thinking appeared to have
changed. Perhaps it was because of distaste for the new Archbishop, or
mourning the prior Cardinal of the Archdiocese and her friend, Cardinal Williams,
but, just before the Archdiocese took over the Pilot, Conway published in the
Pilot a paper she gave before the New England Women’s Press Association that
might have sealed her fate.

Kane wrote in Separatism and Subculture that Conway wasn’t dismissed
because of any “personal or budgetary reasons,”7° So perhaps it was something
else. On Saturday, March 14, 1908, just two weeks before the Pilot stock was

sold to the Archdiocese, Conway wrote, “The spread of democratic ideas, the

 

‘9 Separatism a Subculture, p. 170
7° Ibid, p. 223

34

diffusion of popular education, the opening of new opportunities for women's
abilities, have not revolutionized women. They have merely given fresh
demonstrations of a truth already proved, that women can do many things as well
as men can, and some a little better.”71

Up to this point Conway had railed against women in the work place and
preached that women should find their satisfaction as wives and mothers, or
spiritual mothers, in keeping with the teachings of the Catholic Church. However,
in this paper, Conway wrote something completely converse to what she had
spoken of in the past. “American women of today have conquered a field
undreamed of anywhere until a comparatively recent date - scope full and free
on the newspaper press. A woman can enter on journalism more easily than on
any other intellectual work.”

It seemed interesting that a woman who believed that God had ordained
specific gender roles for men and women would further write, “Not only can she
do some newspaper work as well as a man can, but she has created lines of
work in which she can have no masculine competitors. The occupation by which
she lives enables her to help in the social uplift. But to this latter good end, she
must respect herself and her calling.”72 Perhaps this is when Conway found it
appropriate to voice the opinion she’d long held, that women, as humans did
have a place in public vocations.

Compared to Conway’s 1893 essay, “The Normal Christian Woman,”

Conway may seem in 15 years, to have changed her mind about women working

 

:; Boston Pilot, Women and Newspapers, Vol. 71. No. 11. Mar. 14, 1908
Ibid

35

outside the home. In the early days she wrote, “Woman being after man, and
from man, does not represent the full and complete sense that man does. It
cannot be necessary, nor even useful, that she should try to do what she cannot
do.”

Also the sentiment in her early book The Christian Gentlewoman and the
Social Apostolate, published in 1899, reflect a longing for the days of the “old
fashioned gentlewoman.“ She wrote, “The reflex action (of the Suffrage) is bad
again for it fosters disesteem for private life, and for that vocation which is down
in the Divine plan for the overwhelming majority of women.”73

In her later life, Conway contradicted herself and the things she so clearly
taught and believed for many years. Perhaps it had to do with knowing that her
days as editor of the Pilot were numbered, so she decided to write what she
actually believed, or perhaps she realized that the numbers of women in the
newsroom were growing faster than she could dissuade them, and if she couldn’t
stop them, why not encourage them?

Conway’s emancipation speech was published on March 14, 1908. One
week later, in the column titled “The Family Sitting Room,” Conway, wrote about
the Catholic Church and the Education of Women. It continued the mantra that
Conway chanted throughout her career - that the Catholic Church didn’t oppress
women. “After all there is not much prohibitive ecclesiastical legislation in regard
to women. They are interdicted from the offices of priest and preacher by the

divine, not by the ecclesiastical law. In the Old Dispensation, women of force of

 

73 The Christian Gentlewoman and the Social Apostolate, Katherine Conway, Pilot Publishing,
1 899, p. 14

36

character and great mental ability cut their own channels of activity as they do
today; without reprehension.”74
As Kane noted, the columns are unsigned, but comparing the above with
Conway’s earlier work shows that the paragraph nearly mirrors a paragraph she
wrote 15 years earlier in her “Normal Christian Gentlewoman,” essay at that time
where she wrote, “What doors indeed, has the Church closed on intelligence and
ability as manifested by women, but the doors of the sanctuary and the pulpit?
And here, the ecclesiastical law but emphasizes the Divine law against women
as priests and preachers. Women may have free scope in philosophy and
theology, law, medicine, letters, the liberal arts, the trades and industries, as
students, and teachers — their own ability and opportunity alone determining their
limitations.”75
Upon closer examination, the two similar essays show that Conway
changed her mind not about women’s roles in the church, but about in the
workplace, and as individuals. She seems to have given in to the notion that
women would be leaving home despite the Church’s teaching to the contrary.
The question could be asked: why did she choose to publish her essay on
Women and Newspapers at just the time when Archbishop O’Connell was
planning the take-over of her beloved Pilot? At a time when it would have been

crucial for Conway to consider losing her position and her livelihood, Conway

chose to toss before O’Connell a bone of contention.

 

7‘ Boston Pilot, March 21, 1908
75 Girihood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 152

37

And, was it her words about a woman being able to do anything a man
can do, and sometimes better, which would have riled the archbishop, or farther
into her speech, where Conway called on women journalists to have their own
minds in their work?

“I know the newspaper woman cannot often choose her tasks; but her
opportunity to serve her paper and herself will come through, keeping the
freshness of her sympathies and doing a common thing in an uncommon way.”76

Within this speech to the Social Education Congress of Boston in 1908,
Conway seemed to be calling women journalists to social reform, in much the
same way the suffragists tried to in years previous. “We are on the eve of
perhaps the most thrilling epoch in our country’s history,” she wrote. “It has been
tried before in conflict with royal rule; in the ’brothers’ war’ over the evil legacy of
slavery; by its sudden development into a world power; by its immense material
prosperity. In all these tests, liberty has far held its own. But now true liberty is
menaced by its worst foe - license.”77

It isn’t clear what the cataclysm is that she wrote about, but she called on
the women journalists to make a difference in the future of newspapers. “And
here the conservatism of women in private life, and as exponents on the press of
all life, will be potent in saving the home and the nation.”78

Based on limited knowledge of Conway’s relationship with Archbishop

O’Connell, it would seem her speech had bearing on her dismissal as managing

 

7" Boston Pilot, 3/21/1908
7° Ibid
73 Ibid

38

 

editor of the Pilot in May of 1908. Her diaries only attest that she left the Pilot
with an offer to work for John F. Fitzgerald on his newspaper, The Republic.

Kane alluded that O’Connell dismissed Conway solely because he wanted
complete control of the paper, and not because of financial concerns or his
personal feelings about women in the workplace.79

Just a year earlier, O’Connell had praised Conway as a journalist and as a
Catholic when she received the Laetare Medal of Notre Dame University. The
Laetare Medal is an annual award given to Catholic Laity by the University of
Notre Dame for distinguished service to the Church or humanity. O’Connell
called Conway a “valiant woman. A quarter of a century of noble work done with
no fitting recompense is tonight in some measure rewarded.”o

O’Connell, in his speech before 1,500 people at Boston College on May
17, 1907, lauded Conway for her work as a journalist and for her devotion to her
faith. “First of all, and above all, her work is her own life. Without that her work
would mean much less. Let me sum it all up in a word - she is a Catholic lady;
Catholic in her true piety, a lady in her true gentleness. Here indeed is the
foundation of whatever she has done,” and “her sex is a debtor to her pen, for in
all her volumes she has given women the noble place with which Christianity
endowed her, near the alter and the fireside. No modern fad, no new phrase of
the feminine has moved her from that true standpoint. And she could write about

what a good woman ought to be because she was one herself.”1

 

79 Separatism and Subculture, p. 223
3° Boston Pilot, 5/25/1907
8‘ Ibid

39

CHAPTER 5
Training the future journalist

During her tenure with the Pilot, Conway had the opportunity to speak and
write often about what a good, female journalist should be. In many of her
unsigned editorials she wrote about journalistic excellence, and how to compete
with men in a male dominated profession, and also why women should not take
up the pen as a means of support.

As a young student at Sacred Heart Convent, Conway hadn’t intended to
write as a means to earn a living. While in school her poetry and essays won her
praise and an occasional prize. She later put those talents to use to help her
family when her father suffered a financial loss in the late 1870s. Conway went
to work for The Catholic Union and Times of Buffalo. She later told an
interviewer, “I did not begin to write as a means of self support; it was because I
felt like writing.”82

Conway was outspoken about women as professionals, especially those
who thought the writing life would be an easy way to make a living. She took her
profession seriously, and asked other women entering the newspaper business
to do the same.

She worried about the effect that the suffrage would have on women trying
to enter the newsroom, especially those who worked hard to achieve success. In
“The Christian Gentlewoman,” Conway wrote of the “bad reflex action” of the

suffrage, “when it fosters disesteem for private life, and for that vocation which is

 

82 Scrapbook article - Boston Post

40

down in the Divine plan for the overwhelming majority of women; - and also,
when by incessant clamor over occasional feminine successes on unusual lines,
it stimulates an army of women with slight qualification save conceit and
inordinate ambition for a hazard of new fortunes on the same lines.”83

Her fear was that while some women might work hard to succeed, and
after months or years without any recognition, finally find some fame, there would
be a “hundred strike out for a short cut to the same eminence, without thought of
the need of similar qualifications and similar long apprenticeship.”84

Conway advocated that if a woman should take up the pen or come to the
printer’s case, she should have “a standard of excellence, and that which
conforms thereto must be not ‘good - for a woman’ - but good on general
principles.”85

In 1890 she wrote an editorial on “Editorial Work” for the Congress of
Women Journalists, World’s Fair, in which she educated her reader about
editorial principals. “Still another and most important aspect is the sense of
relation and proportion in the editorial writer: to understand clearly her own
relation to her newspaper, and her newspaper’s relation to the public. She must
believe earnestly and absolutely that her personal opinion is a small matter, but

that her newspaper’s opinion or policy is a very grave affair, with a strong

shaping influence on individual destinies and public events.”86

 

83 Christian Gentlewoman and the Social Apostolate, Conway, p. 14
8" Ibid

“5 Scrapbook article “Editorial Work”

8" Ibid

41

For Conway, journalism was more than a career, it was her life. Her

writing was a much a part of her life as her Catholic faith, and through her

editorials she sought to educate the public about the Catholic faith, and influence

Catholics in their daily lives.

“Journalism, when held true to its ideal possibilities, is ministry as well.
And, the true journalist is one in whom professional zeal and personal love for
humanity meet and find their reconciliation. It is much to write; it is perhaps,
more to live,” wrote a biographer of Conway in the Boston Traveller in June of
1896, for an article on Newspapervvomen in Boston Journalism. “To a
remarkable degree Miss Conway illustrates in her own life this high truth.”87

On a visit to Rochester, presumably in 1900, she told an interviewer,
“Since I began, I have been turning out ‘copy’ so continuously, that I would not
know how to get along without writing. Really, if anything prevented me from
using my pen, I should get grave ideas and look for a tombstone.”88

Through the many articles written about Conway and the editorials she
wrote, one understands that Conway believed what she wrote. She went on to
say that working as a journalist was hard work, and that “if it is in one to write,
she will attain her end by and by. But, there must be hard work; no amount of

inclination or aptitude will take the place of hard work in the case of man or

woman.” 89

 

87 Scrapbook article - Boston Traveller, 1986
”8 Ibid, Her Old Home, 1900
”9 Ibid

42

:2!

.7: 1‘3"“: :5.

As a reporter and editor for the Catholic press, she wrote to Bishop
McQuaid, “I try to use for good my opportunities in journalism. Achievement,
alas, must always fall far short of aspiration!”9°

As a journalistic role model she was consistent, hard working, and
pursued her writing with an untiring passion. Excellence, to Conway wasn’t just
cliche, it was paramount, and that made her a writer worth emulating.

Conway had a strong work ethic, probably handed down by her father. “I
am sure that in newspaper work as elsewhere, good work done earnestly will
bring its reward.”91

Education was something else Conway believed strongly in. Even though
she didn’t believe that women should join men in the workforce, she did advocate
that women be educated and judged not as intellectual women, but as
intellectuals. “This higher education - we use the word education in its fullest
sense — will produce not a more abundant yield of women publicists, but of noble,
intelligent, and virtuous women for the home and social life.”92

After leaving the Pilot in 1908, Conway was offered a position on the
faculty of St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame University in Indiana, teaching
women journalists. No doubt she passed along the things she had learned as an
editor and reporter during the three decades she spent working on the Pilot.

While on staff at the Pilot, Conway wrote some 20 books. While on the

Pilot staff she wrote the five books in the Family Sitting Room Series; A Lady and

 

9° Letter to McQuaid, 12/14/1886
91 Scrapbook article - Her Old Home
92 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, Donnelly, p. 154

43

Her Letters, Making Friends and Keeping Them, Questions of Honor in the
Christian Life, Bettering Ourselves, and The Christian Gentlewoman and the
Social Apostolate. She also published two works of fiction through Pilot
Publishing, Lalor’s Maples and The Way of the World and Other Ways. New
Footsteps in Well Trodden Ways is a travelogue on her trip through Europe and
the Vatican. She also wrote The Footsteps of the Good Shepherd, and several

volumes of poetry.

44

CHAPTER 6
Katherine Eleanor Conway - A woman beyond her time

“In all this ‘Woman question,’ the partisans of alleged progress seem to
forget one foundation fact: that, as between men and women, it is not so much a
question of greater or less, or better or worse, it is a question of different.”93

Katherine Conway spent the better part of a 60-year career extolling the
virtues of wifehood and motherhood. Even though women were taking their
places alongside men in the newsroom, and in public vocations throughout the
working world, Conway continued to rail against the suffrage and career women.
She had been taught that a woman’s true vocation was in the home.

In the “Christian Gentlewoman,” Conway wrote, “No observant and
sensible man doubts today that women may have as well-defined vocations to
certain professions as men may have. But when the private history of the
exceptional women who have succeeded in letters, art, or what you will, is lade
bare, how often is it discovered that the secret of their success lay largely in the
necessity of providing for the dependent parent or household, which forced them
to their best work, for the sake of the larger money returns, and made them value
their widely-known names as an important part of their capital stock.”94

Conway’s notion was that women only had one reason to work outside the

home: necessity. Like her, women should have a reason to need to leave the

Cloister of their homes. Although the Woman Suffrage was successful within 12

 

9" ibid, p. 155
9‘ Ibid, p. 152

45

years of her departure from the Pilot, Conway remained true to her faith
convictions. Her belief that the suffrage would harm home and family came not
from any stubborn political leanings, but from her Catholic faith.

It may seem an old fashioned notion, but Conway was taught, as were
many Catholics that social regeneration must come from within — not from
without. “Regenerated society will draw its pure life from the guarded well-
springs of those homes whence women trained and developed on normal lines
diffuse high motives, refined tastes and virtuous examples through the Channels
of ordinary domestic and social opportunity - where the old-fashioned Christian
gentlewoman exercises the social apostolate.”955

Conway’s Catholic view of life and her professional view of life intersected
every day during her tenure at the Boston Pilot, and continued to intersect while
she wrote and managed the Boston Republic. As evidenced by her editorials
and columns in the Pilot, so steeped in Catholic teaching was Conway that she
could do nothing less than forward her beliefs in her writing, and she seemed
perfectly content in it.

In an article signed simply “F.” in Catholic School and Home Magazine,
the author asks the reader questions that could be asked of any aspiring young
Catholic journalist, who dreams of one day filling the shoes of an editor: “Young
woman, you who read these lines, and think you have within you that which
would justify your entrance upon a literary life, can you, like Miss Conway, look

upon hard work, ceaseless work, without flinching? Can you bear up under

 

95 Christian Gentlewoman and the Social Apostolate, Conway, pp. 20-21

46

disappointments, discouragements, and wait patiently for success long delayed?
And, can you through it all keep your woman’s heart as uncorroded, your
woman’s faith in God and good as unwavering, and your woman’s endowment of
delicacy as fresh and pure as in the springtime of your days? If you can, then in
God’s name go on and follow in Katherine Conway's footsteps. The world and
the Church have need of women like her and thee.”96

Conway enjoyed a relatively secure career on the Pilot both as editorial
assistant and as managing editor from 1905 until 1908 when the Catholic

Archdiocese of Boston bought the Pilot and for its official publication. Although I

 

supposedly Archbishop O’Connell had no personal or financial reason for II
dismissing Conway, he dismissed her after 25 years of loyal service.

In reading his speech at Conway’s Laetare Medal conferral, it was easy to
see what he thought of women, and it left the distinct impression that he not only
wanted complete control of the paper, but also didn’t want a woman running it.
After lauding Conway’s accomplishments as a journalist, author and well rounded
Catholic, he describes the “true Catholic editor, “His attitude, to be potent and
efficient... sure of his position, for he speaks not for himself, but for truth. And
that security and sureness come only to him who has toiled for years in acquiring
them.” [emphasis mine].97

Not only was Conway loyal to the Pilot. She was loyal to Archbishop
Williams, whose job O’Connell was stepping into. So, it also made sense that he

would be eliminating loyalists to his predecessor.

 

9° Scrapbook article
97 Boston Pilot, May 25, 1907

47

When Katherine Conway left the Pilot in 1908 she took a year off from
newspaper work to rest before going back to work. For a short time she taught
journalism classes at St. Mary’s University at Notre Dame in Indiana before her
health forced her back to Boston in 1915. She continued to work for The
Republic from then until the paper ceased publication in 1926.98

From 1910 to 1920 Conway wrote letters to Cardinal O’Connell asking for
consideration for back pay. It took two years after she left the paper before she
received any correspondence from O’Connell, then another ten years to receive
all of the pay she was due. In 1910 she was paid $1,432.00 for part of what she
was owed. “Much of the money due dates back nine years, and even longer.”99

“It has often come to me during the past few months that Your Grace
could not know that the late Manager of the Pilot, Mr. James T. Murphy, never
did anything towards the settlement of my long-standing account with the Pilot
Publishing Company,” she wrote. “Mr. Gargan got all of his; Mr. Murphy took
care of his own interest as is well known in Boston business circles; but there
was not thought of the poor little editor, who nearly destroyed her life in trying to
hold things up until Your Grace came in.”‘°°

The tone of her letters to the Archbishop seem almost patronizing, and

conciliatory. “Pardon me for troubling you about this matter, but I‘don’t know to

whom else I can appeal. All my hope is in Your Grace, and I beg to remain in

 

9° Separatism and Subculture, Kane, p. 224
99 Letter to O’Connell, 1/31/1910
1°” Ibid

48

continued hope,” Conway wrote.101 Conway finally managed through years of
such correspondence to be repaid for the years she took no salary, as well as the
money she loaned the Pilot to make payroll.

In the 1920’s the Archbishop sent Conway extra money, which may or
may not have been out of guilt for his earlier mistreatment of her. “The
chivalrous felling of Your Eminence. impels you to say “back pay’, but truly I feel
this substantial help to be a free gift.”102

After an absence of nearly two decades, at the age of 73, Conway
resumed writing unsigned editorials for the Boston Pilot, submitting her last entry
one week before she died, January 2, 1927.

Despite her years of unwavering loyalty to the Pilot, when Conway died
she wasn’t afforded the same full front page biography as her predeceased
contemporaries, John Boyle O’Reilly, James Jeffrey Roche, and Patrick
Donahoe. Conway was recognized simply with a small five paragraph epitaph in
the middle of the front page headlined “Hold Funeral of Catholic Writer.”‘°3
Following two paragraphs of information on her funeral, the third paragraph read,
“Miss Conway was born in Rochester, NY. in 1852. In the days of John Boyle
O’Reilly she was an editor of the Pilot, holding that position through the nineties
and then taking up other literary work.”104

The brief obituary speaks to the respect, or lack of it, that O’Connell had

for Conway. In her life he didn’t recognize her for the servant of both the Church

 

101 Ibid

”2 Letter to O'Connell, 8/25/20
”3 Boston Pilot - 1/6/1927

104 Ibid

49

and the press that she was, and in her death he also couldn’t recognize her for
what she had done so many years earlier to keep the Pilot a viable weekly
publication. His belief in gender roles wouldn’t permit O’Connell to hold any
esteem for a woman in a leadership role in the public sphere.

Conway was a woman before her time, of her time, and beyond her time.
As a woman editor, especially of a Catholic newspaper she was before her time;
as a Catholic woman, she was a woman of her time, but as a woman in society
she was a woman beyond her time. Despite that she was an unmarried career
woman, Conway never gave up the notion that women should find their fulfillment
at home. And, she never spoke out against the Church that taught her that.
Other women in society were Changing and evolving, finding fulfillment outside
the home, while Conway continued to rail against it.

For further research it would be interesting to read, as Kane noted in
Separatism and Subculture, Conway’s unpublished papers that she presented
before the various clubs and reading circles. A handful of the papers were
published in the Pilot and Republic, on occasion, but many were not. Some of
those papers, like the one published in the Pilot in March of 1908 may have
revealed more of the irony and contradictions in Conway’s life.

It might also be interesting to try to discern through her writing style and
content, just which editorials in the Pilot Conway wrote. Those dealing with
women’s issues can often be attributed to her, based on style and content, but

there were other women working at the Pilot as well, who might have contributed.

50

 

There is also correspondence from Conway to Rev. Fr. John Cavenaugh
and Rev. Daniel Hudson at the University of Notre Dame Archives that have yet
to be explored. Reading the letters Conway wrote to McQuaid were very helpful
in teaming how she felt about a number of individuals and issues in her work and
personal life. Correspondence with these other two individuals may offer a view
into the period after the correspondence with McQuaid ended when he passed
away in 1909.

The present research was enlightening in that it offered the opportunity to
explore, however briefly, the lives of other pioneer female journalists, like
Cochrane and Winslow.

As a Catholic, I learned more about my faith through this study, and I
found Conway to be an interesting subject, as both a Catholic and as a writer.
She didn’t deny her faith to follow her career path. She found a way to use her
career to foster her faith and weave it into the fabric of the community she lived
and worked in. Too often there are writers who put aside their faith to write so as
not to offend, but Conway kept her faith in the forefront no matter whether she
was on the side of right or not — an admirable feat. Too often today we change
our opinions based on trends or fads, but Conway stayed with her convictions,
even as she watched more and more women flood the newsrooms and take on
public roles.

Although I don’t believe, since she was on the opposite side of a losing
battle, that Conway had much to contribute by way of changing society’s norms,

but, when she had the opportunity to offer her expertise to a new generation of

51

journalists, she did. And, after the Suffrage passed in 1920, Conway told women
that if they were to go into the voting booths, to make sure they voted
responsibly. I think she could see that the times were changing and she and her
contemporaries had little control over it.

There is a definite struggle between what Conway was taught and the way
she lived her life, though, and I don’t believe she was alone in her plight. There
were probably any number of women who struggled with the notion that their
place was at home with a husband and children, but their hearts were
somewhere else. Conway was fortunate enough to have been thrust into the
workplace because of circumstance and never found herself in a situation or of
the desire to get married and raise a family. Even though she was taught that
women had specific roles, ordained by God, Conway didn’t fit the mold. She may
have tried, but her lifestyle was in conflict with the church and that could have
been the catalyst behind her fall from O’Connell’s grace.

She may have found some relief from the conflict in her own life by
believing that she was an individual working to support herself in a world full of
individuals, rather than a woman working in a man’s world, as well. Conway
lived a contradictory life, and believing that woman, as woman, had no public
vocation, she was in conflict with her own moral beliefs, but believing that as
individuals we are all called to a vocation, she, as a working journalist, was just
answering that call.

If I had the opportunity to do this research again, I would spend more time

at Boston College reading through Conway’s diaries archived in the John Bum’s

52

Library, and recording more of them. I would also have saved more pages from
her scrapbooks, and studied more of the other characters in Conway's life, such
as O’Reilly, O’Connell, Williams and McQuaid to get a better understanding of
just how they all fit into Conway’s life.

Several pages were missing or had been pilfered from scrapbooks in the
archives, making it difficult to do much of the research, but her diaries and the
pages left behind were invaluable. I would also make a trip to Notre Dame to St.
Mary’s College to obtain any archival information available there.

I found the two trips to Boston most helpful, especially the time spent at
John Burn’s Library and the Archives at the Archdiocese of Boston, but I would

have liked to be able to access the documents stored at the Boston Athenaeum.

53

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Pioneer Catholic Journalism, Paul J. Foik, 1930, p. 179
2 Ibid, p. 180
3 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, Eleanor C. Donnelly, 1894, p. 152

4 American Journalism, Winter 2001, Grit Your Teeth, then Learn to Swear:
Women in Journalistic Careers, 1850-1926, Agnes Hooper Gottlieb

5 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, 1894, p. 149

6 Separatism & Subculture: Boston Catholicism 1900-1920,_Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press: 1994

7 Although referred to also as Women’s Suffrage the Library of Congress
reference is Woman Suffrage.

8 www.historvcha_nnel.com/exhibits/woman

9 Separatism and Subculture, Paula M. Kane, Chapel Hill Publishing, 1994, p.
146

1° A Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 152

1‘ Miss Katherine E. Conway, Biographical sketch in scrapbook

‘2 Woman’s Journal: Boston, on April 21, 1894

‘3 A Decoration for Miss Conway, Scrapbook page Boston College Archives

‘4 “Woman Has No Vocation to Public Life,” the original title of her essay
published as “The Normal Christian Woman” in a Girlhood’s Handbook of
Woman reflected what she had been taught about women taking on work outside
the home.

‘5 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 151

‘6 www.historychannel.com/exhibits/woman
'7 New York Times Article from archives scrapbook, “College Women on Dr.

Abbott’s Trail, Equal Suffrage Leaguers to Argue for Ballot at Meeting on
December18”, December 12, 1908

54

‘8 www.britainexpress.com/histog/lvictorianlchartism.htm

‘9 Scrapbook article, Boston Post, circa 1900

2°lbid

21ibid

22 The Story of the Irish in Boston, edited by James B. Cullen & Company, 1899
23 Letter to McQuaid, April 27, 1907

2‘ Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, pp. 151

25 In Memoriam — Katherine E. Conway, Catholic World, Fall, 1927, Annette S.
Driscoll p. 481

26 Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, Glazier/Shelly, p. 37626 Scrapbook
article, 1889

27 Scrapbook article, 1889
28 In Memoriam — Annette Driscoll, Catholic World, 1927

29 Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement 1868 - 1914,
Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., NY, 2001

3° Ibid

3' Grit Your Teeth, then Learn to Swear: Women in Journalistic Careers, 1850 —
1926, Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, American Journalism, 2001.

32 Up to 1900 the use of pen names by female journalists was not uncommon,

particularly among stunt journalists, and were used as a way to preserve the
joumalist’s anonymity - Gottleib

33 Separatism and Subculture, Kane, p. 221

34 Letter to Cardinal William O’Connell, July 1, 1921, Archives of the Archdiocese
of Boston

35 Separatism and Subculture, Kane, 228

3° Article from scrapbook, “On Editorial Work”

55

37 American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the
Progressive Era, Deirdre M. Moloney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002, p. 10

3" ibid

39 Ibid

4° lbid

4‘ Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 151

42 Written for Congress of Women Journalists, World’s Fair, Scrapbook page

43 Boston Pilot, January 11, 1908 - The brief paragraphs in “Frivolity” were

typically written about European gentry, including on this particular day, the If”
German Emperor, and Prince Olaf of Norway among others. h
‘4 Pioneer Catholic Joumalsim, Paul J. Foik, Greenwood Press, 1969

45 Ibid

4° Catholic Journalism in the United States, Apollinaris Baumgartner, AMS Press,
NY, 1967 — circulation statistics for Conway’s tenure are not available.

47 Ibid

‘8 Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, Glazier/Shelley, p. 376

‘9 Separatism and Subculture, p. 227

5° Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 151

5‘ Pioneer Catholic Journalism, Folk

52 Letter to McQuaid, April 10, 1907

53 Letter to McQuaid, 12/14/1888

54 Boston Pilot, March 1907

55 Letters to McQuaid, 1886-1907 - In the Roman Catholic Church the Bishop is
the chief priest of a diocese. Bishops are responsible for the pastoral care of their
dioceses. In addition, bishops have a responsibility to act in council with other

bishops to guide the Church.
5“ Ibid, 7/1886

56

 

57 Ibid, 1/2/1893

5" Ibid, 1/17/1899

59 Ibid, 12/4/1904

6° Ibid - Joseph Smith was the founder and president of the Mormon church.
5‘ Ibid

62Ibid, 12/29/1904

P Ibid, 9/13/1905

5“ Ibid, 4127/1907

65 Separatism and Subculture, p. 17

6° The Roman Catholics, Patrick Carey, Greenwood Press, 1993, p. 289

67 In Conway’s diaries she often used only initials or sometimes -- to identify
people she was writing about. Mr. G. could have been Mr. Gargan she referred
to later in a letter to Bishop O’Connell.

6" Diary page, 3/31/1908

6" Separatism & Subculture, p. 170
7° Ibid, p. 223

7‘ Boston Pilot, 3/14/1908

72 Ibid

73 The Christian Gentlewoman and the Social Apostolate, Katherine Conway,
Pilot Publishing, 1899, p. 14

74 Boston Pilot, March 21, 1908

75 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 152

76 Boston Pilot, Women and Newspapers, Vol. 71, No. 11, Mar. 14, 1908
77 Ibid

78 Ibid

57

79 Separatism and Subculture, p. 223

8° Boston Pilot, 5/25/1907

8‘ Ibid

82 Scrapbook article - Boston Post

83 Christian Gentlewoman and the Social Apostolate, 14
84 Ibid

85 Scrapbook article, “Editorial Work"

86 Ibid

‘37 Scrapbook article - Boston Traveller, 1986

88 Ibid, Her Old Home, 1900

89 Ibid

9° Letter to McQuaid, 12l14l1886

9' Scrapbook article — Her Old Home

92 Girlhood’s Handbook of Woman, p. 154

93 Ibid, p. 155

9“ Ibid, p. 152

95 Christian Gentlewoman and the Social Apostolate, Conway, pp. 20-21
96 Scrapbook article

97 Boston Pilot, May 25, 1907

98 Separatism and Subculture, Kane, p. 224
99 Letter to O’Connell, 1/31/1910
‘°° Ibid

‘°‘ Ibid

58

"’2 Letter to O’Connell, 8/25/20
"’3 Boston Pilot — 1/6/1927

1°“ Ibid

59

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