I would like to thank David Hackett, Roger Finke, Phyllis Moen, and members of the Culture and Society Workshop at the University of Chicago, especially Wendy Griswold, Harriet Morgan, Grant Blank, Fred Kniss, and Steve Ellingson, for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

1. This view of ideology is developed in Swidler, Ann, “Culture in Action: ‘Symbols and Strategies,’” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 273-86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and is similar to the view developed by Thompson, John in Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar and by Wuthnow, Robert in Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar See also Kniss, Fred, “Toward a Theory of Ideological Change,” Sociological Analysis 49, no. 1 (1988): 29–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Raymond Williams was one of the first to articulate this view. See Williams, Raymond, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), 152-53Google Scholar; and Williams, Raymond, “Beyond Base and Super structure in Cultural Analysis,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 3149.Google Scholar Wolff, Janet, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 26ff.Google Scholar, applies the same Interpretation specifically to the relationship between texts and gender ideology For important recent empirical studies that embody this view, see Gorsky, Susan R., Femininity to Feminism: Women and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Twayne Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Goshgarian, G. M., To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Kaplan, Deborah, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Rosalind, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Showalter, Elaine, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar See also Nancy Pell's analysis of Jane Eyre in “Resistance, Rebellion, and Marriage,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 4 (1977): 397-420. In this view, any critical distance from the dominant ideology is achieved not within formulaic, popular texts themselves but only through the subverting interpretations of audiences. The classic work here is Morley, David, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: BFI Television Monographs, 1980).Google Scholar For a good overview, see Clarke, John and others, “Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview,” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Hall, Stuart and Jefferson, Tony (London: Routledge, 1993), 9–74.Google Scholar

3. See Kennelly, Karen, “Ideals of American Catholic Womanhood,” in American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration, ed. Kennelly, Karen (New York: Macmillan, 1989)Google Scholar; McDannell, Colleen, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Taves, Ann, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).Google Scholar

4. Wolff, , Feminine Sentences, 26.Google Scholar For the strongest theoretical statement of this sentiment, see Scott, James, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

5. See Hackett, David, “Gender and Religion in American Culture, 1870-1930,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 5, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 127-57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carnes, Mark, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Orsi, Robert, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

6. This is particularly true of the British cultural studies tradition. For excellent reviews, see Clarke and others, “Subcultures, Cultures and Class”; and Abercrombie, Nicholas, Hill, Stephen, and Turner, Bryan S., Dominant Ideologies (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).Google Scholar Simon During's “Introduction” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1-28, critiques the adequacy of approaches that concentrate on dominance and resistance while reviewing the centrality of these concerns in cultural studies. See also John Fiske's Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. This view is also found in feminist studies and sociology. See Wolff, Feminine Sentences; and Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs, Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order (New Haven: Yale University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).Google Scholar Lamont, Michele and Fournier, Marcel, Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–20 Google Scholar, find “dominance” and “resistance” to be useful but emphasize that resistance is rare, partial, and usually reincorporated into the dominant ideology and System of production, as does Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture.

7. Williams, “Beyond Base and Superstructure in Cultural Analysis,” 38-39.

8. In this, Foucaultian feminist scholars are close to those who place subversive intention or resistance in the hands of the one doing the reading of the cultural object; instead of the audience, however, it is often the committed scholar who is the agent of resistance. See Welch, Sharon, “The Truth of Liberation Theology,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Diamond, Irene and Quinby, Lee (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 212-14Google Scholar, for a particularly clear account of this interpretation of resistance. See also Bartkowski, Frances, “Epistemic Drift in Foucault,” in Feminism and Foucault, ed. Diamond, and Quinby, , 43–60.Google Scholar

9. During, Cultural Studies Reader, 10.

10. McDannell, The Christian Home. Suleiman, Susan, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, and Messbarger, Paul, Fiction with a Parochial Purpose: Social Use of American Catholic Literature, 1884-1900 (Brookline, Mass.: Boston University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, argue that those who write fiction that is intentionally oriented toward reproducing an authoritative tradition for didactic or moral purposes are intentional agents of ideological reproduction.

11. The following authors provide the most clear discussions of this chain of reasoning: Kaplan, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, 1-17, esp. 5-8; Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 178ff.; and Pell, “Resistance, Rebellion, and Marriage.”

12. See Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, esp. 159ff. In this line of argument, he is concurring with other recent work that seeks to reframe the question of dominance and resistance as an empirical and sociological one. See Wolff, Feminine Sentences, for example. In general, it would be fair to say that this reframing is more important for cultural sociologists than it is for critical theorists or those in cultural studies, who may seek to understand, for example, the conditions that produce ambiguous and contradictory (“rich”) texts or the conditions that make alternative readings possible as a form of committed scholarship. That is to say, this problem may be one of attempting to import insights from cultural studies and critical theory into the sociology of culture and may, therefore, be at heart a problem of translation, particularly as the sociology of culture is occupied at the moment with developing more adequate theories to explain the central problem of our field—the interrelationship of culture, structure, and agency For a formative early Statement of this concern, see Griswold, Wendy, “A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture,” in Sociological Methodology, ed. Clogg, Clifford (Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association, 1987), 1–35.Google Scholar At the same time, the critiques within cultural studies of the term “resistance” indicate that this analytical strategy might have some use within that approach as well.

13. The following discussion draws heavily on the conclusion of Marshall Sahlins's Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), esp. 136ff. It also draws upon theoretical discussions on the relationship between cultural and social change in Sewell, William, “A Theory of Structure,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992): 1–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Archer, Margaret, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

14. It is not surprising for scholars to identify yet another middle-class domestic ideology in the nineteenth Century that promoted both separate spheres of activity for men and women and ideas about essential differences between them. Many studies have looked at specific historical variations on this general ideological theme, both in the United States and in England; see Hackett, “Gender and Religion”; Cott, Nancy, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Womans Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Ryan, Mary, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975)Google Scholar; Stubbs, Patricia, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, 1880-1920 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979)Google Scholar; and Welter, Barbara, Dimity Convictions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

15. Kenneally, James J., The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990).Google Scholar See also Kennelly, ed., American Catholic Women; Hackett, “Gender and Religion”; and Thomas, Samuel J., “Catholic Journalists and the Ideal Woman in Late Victorian America,” International Journal of Women's Studies 4, no. 1 (1991): 89–100.Google Scholar

16. See Rev. Guilday, Peter, ed., The National Pastorals of the American Hierarchy, 1792-1919 (Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Welfare Council, 1923), 114, 213, 252, 291Google Scholar, for several references to the didactic purposes of Catholic publishing. See also Taves, The Household of Faith, 55-65; McDannell, The Christian Home, 52ff., 100-108; and Thomas, “Catholic Journalists.”

17. See Burns, Gene, The Frontiers of Catholicism: The Politics of Ideology in a Liberal World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Kellog, Gene, The Vital Tradition (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1970), 146ff.Google Scholar; and Olson, James S., Catholic Immigrants in America (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1987), 45.Google Scholar For a good general history, see Dolan, Jay, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 1985).Google Scholar

18. This group eventually found their position bolstered when, in 1899, Pope Leo XIII condemned the excessive pragmatism and the “spiritual shallowness” of American liberal Catholicism. See Burns, , The Frontiers of Catholicism, 22–46 Google Scholar; and Kellog, , The Vital Tradition, 156-57.Google Scholar McAvoy, Thomas, The Great Crisis in American Catholic History, 1895-1900 (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1957)Google Scholar, has a thorough account of this episode; see also Kurtz, Lester, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar

19. While the Catholic ideology emphasized some things particular to the Catholic Community—for example, giving an important role to devotional practices directed to the Virgin Mary and the saints—most historical accounts stress that the official version was essentially similar to earlier Protestant and secular versions of the True Woman ideology. See McDannell, The Christian Home, 52ff.; Taves, The Household of Faith, 47ff.; Kenneally, , The History of American Catholic Women, 13–22 Google Scholar; and Thomas, “Catholic Journalists.” McDannell writes that “the domestic ideology writers presented to American Catholics showed only minor Variation from the Protestant or ‘secular’ ideology seen in ladies' magazines, sentimental literature, and advertising. As Catholics became more literate, economically stable, and in control of their physical environment, they embraced middle-class domestic attitudes” (The Christian Home, 72). My analysis shows that this is true in part but that it may have had as much to do with religious as with class interests, assimilation being an issue that encompassed both aspects of many American Catholics' identities. Cf. Diner, Hasia, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

20. Williams, Writing in Society.

21. Wuthnow, , Communities of Discourse, 14.Google Scholar

22. See McDannell, , The Christian Home, 52ff., 100–108 Google Scholar, and Taves, , The Household of Faith, 55–65 Google Scholar, for discussions of the role the Ave Maria and The Sacred Heart (a similar devotional/family magazine) played in middle-class Catholic homes of this period. See Guilday, , The National Pastorais, 114, 213, 252, 291Google Scholar, and Thomas, “Catholic Journalists,” for the didactic purpose of such magazines. See John Michael Debitetto, “The Ave Maria” (B.A. thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1941), for a good background on the founding period of this magazine and its editorial stance.

23. See Schneirov, Matthew, Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and Mott, Frank Luther, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1905 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938)Google Scholar, for good general histories of American magazines.

24. Ave Maria, May 1, 1865, 1-2. For ease and clarity, I will use a shortened in-text citation format for all further references to this magazine, for example: AM, 5-1-1865:1-2; or, where the reference to the magazine itself is obvious from the context, I will simply provide the date and page numbers.

25. Likewise, editorials and advertisements in such publications as Donohue's, an Irish newspaper out of Boston, recommended the Ave Maria as a wholesome Catholic alternative to trashy fiction and secular family magazines. Pastoral letters of the American hierarchy, from as early as the 1830's, contained a similar message about buying and reading Catholic periodicals as opposed to secular magazines and newspapers. For example, see the letters of 1837, 1866, 1884, and 1919 in Guilday, , The National Pastorals, 114, 213, 252, 291, respectively.Google Scholar

26. Debitetto, ‘The Ave Maria,” 4; introduction to the March 1, 1873, issue of Ave Maria, 873; Daniel E. Hudson to H. F. Brownson, January 4, 1886, Henry F. Brownson Papers (CBRH), University of Notre Dame Archives; Sister Mary Magdalene MacDonnell to Daniel E. Hudson, December 18, 1891, Daniel E. Hudson Papers (CHUD), University of Notre Dame Archives.

27. The children's department (later renamed “Youth's Department”) was composed mostly of short morality tales, poems, and simple editorial admonishments that emphasized such virtues as obedience to parents and religious instruction. Throughout the time period, a typical issue included editorials, lives-of-saints accounts, instructions for observing religious holidays, short Catholic news items, poetry, short stories, and serialized fiction. It also included advertisements for Catholic goods and Services like boarding schools, other Catholic magazines, and benevolent societies.

28. See Taves, The Household of Faith, 14ff., 98ff. A subscribers' list in the University of Notre Dame archives includes many Catholic boarding and parochial schools, and the advertisements in the Journal are targeted to a middle-class audience (cf. McDannell, , The Christian Home, 54–55 Google Scholar). The January 4, 1868, issue gives the subscription prices: $20 for a lifetime subscription (one had a year to pay this amount), $10 for five years, $5 for two years, and $3 for one year.

29. Sponsorship of the Ave Maria cut across liberal and conservative lines. Bishops Martin J. Spalding of Baltimore, John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria, Bernard McQuaid of Rochester, John Keane of Richmond, and Peter J. Muldoon of Rockford, Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, and James Cardinal Gibbons were among those endorsing the Journal, their names appearing on lists inside the front cover of each issue. See also Debitetto, “The Ave Maria,” 4-5. Also, there is reference to these endorsements in the biography of the journal's editor. See Rev. Cavanaugh, John W., C.S.C., Daniel Hudson, C.S.C. (South Bend, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1934), 26.Google Scholar In 1866, Pope Pius IX wrote an approbation to the Ave Maria, published in the Journal.

The labor provided by the Congregation of the Holy Cross, Indiana Province, was vital to the success of the magazine. At first, the brothers set the type, but, by 1873, the sisters had taken over this task. The brothers canvassed for subscriptions, greatly increasing circulation. See Beirne, Brother K., From Sea to Shining Sea: The Holy Cross Brothers in the United States (Valatine, N.Y.: Holy Cross Press, 1966), 190ff.Google Scholar; see also University of Notre Dame Archives Video #C2077, The Holy Cross in the United States.

30. The Very Reverend Edward Sorin, C.S.C., founder of the University of Notre Dame, also began the Ave Maria. He placed emphasis on historical tales and devotion to the Virgin Mary. See Debitetto, “The Ave Maria,” for a general history of the magazine, which includes discussion of each editor's distinct contributions. Father Neil Gillespie was editor from 1867 to 1874. He continued Father Sorin's didactic emphasis, as did the committee that edited the Journal at the end of 1874, the year of Gillespie's death. See McAllister, Anna Shannon, Flame in the Wilderness (South Bend, Ind.: Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1944), 240-42.Google Scholar Rev. Father Daniel Hudson, C.S.C., became editor in 1875, increasing the emphasis on Catholic fiction. See Debitetto, “The Ave Maria,” 8, 9.

31. See Debitetto, ‘The Ave Maria,” 2-10, and McAllister, , Flame in the Wilderness, 220-40.Google Scholar

32. McDannell, , The Christian Home, 136.Google Scholar Compare with general discussions of women in editorial, publishing, and journalism work in Barrett, Michele, “Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender,” in Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Newton, J. and Rosenfelt, R. (New York: Methuen, 1985)Google Scholar; and in Tuchman, Gaye, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

33. Anna Hanson Dorsey to Daniel E. Hudson, February 8, 1891, Daniel E. Hudson Papers (CHUD), University of Notre Dame Archives. See also Dorsey to Hudson, August 13, 1879, Daniel E. Hudson Papers. Cf. Debitetto, “The Ave Maria,” McAllister credits Mother Angela with agency in the founding of the Ave Maria, stating that “in 1865 she carried out a project long visioned by Father Sorin: the establishment of the Ave Maria,” after he had made a proposal to publish the magazine at a class meeting of the sisters at St. Mary's Academy ( McAllister, , Flame in the Wilderness, 229 Google Scholar). Cf. Cavanaugh's biography of Father Hudson, Daniel E. Hudson, 18-30.

34. She founded St. Catherine's Normal Institute in Baltimore to train Catholic teachers, compiled the Metropolitan and the Excelsior series of Catholic textbooks, and was a field nurse in the Civil War, besides her years of work at the Ave Maria (McAllister, Flame in the Wilderness, viiiff.).

35. A testimonial in the form of a letter from a reader to the works of Anna Dorsey reads as follows: “Grace of sentiment, purity of thought and diction are her chief characteristics. In these days, young people and old folks, too, will read novels… . It is therefore a wise provision that works like those of Mrs. Dorsey should be available” (AM, 6-2-1882). This is similar to the text of advertisements that appeared in the Ave Maria for the novels of Christian Reid, which were also serialized in the magazine. Clearly, the magazine was the vehicle for what Messbarger has called “parochial fiction.” He provides a good description of the role of magazines in distributing this didactic fiction (Fiction with a Parochial Purpose, esp. 50-79).

36. For a Statement of the method, see Wendy Griswold, “A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture.” For two examples, see Griswold, Wendy, “The Writing on the Mud Wall,” American Sociological Review 57, no. 6 (1992): 709-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Griswold, Wendy, Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).Google Scholar

37. I ended the sample in 1889 because archival evidence, including letters from readers, suggests that the character of the magazine changed after that, with increasing emphasis on news and political articles and less emphasis on fiction and serving as a family magazine.

38. Fiction in this magazine can be understood as “authoritarian fiction” or fiction that is placed within the context of and is consciously referential to an explicit, articulated ideology. See Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions.

39. Baumgartner, Mildred Florence, Index to the Ave Maria (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1947).Google Scholar

40. It is impossible to give adequate detail on 161 articles. The summaries in each of these five sections consist of describing the features that caused me to place the articles into each group: the common character traits of the women portrayed; for fiction, the common plots that illustrate how women are to conduct themselves vis-a-vis the three discursive poles; for editorials, authoritative Statements about women s proper sphere of activity and mode of conduct.

41. For a description of the formal elements of the romance plot, see Cawelti, John, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 37–50.Google Scholar

42. Mannard, Joseph, “Maternity of the Spirit,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5, no. 2 (1986): 241-72.Google Scholar

43. It was the lead article in four issues, the second or third article in the last three installments.

44. Blair, Karen, The Club Woman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988).Google Scholar

45. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.

46. Messbarger, , Fiction with a Parochial Purpose, 96–113.Google Scholar

47. This is similar to the point that Colleen McDannell makes in “Catholic Domesticity, 1860-1960,” in American Catholic Women, ed. Kennelly, 48-80.

48. Cf. Kenneally, James, “A Question of Equality,” in American Catholic Women, ed. Kennelly, , 125-51.Google Scholar

49. See Diner, Erin's Daughters, for the most complete discussion to date on the lives of working-class Irish immigrant women in the 1800's.

50. Ibid.

51. See Diner, , Erin's Daughters, 101-5Google Scholar; and Campbell, Debra, “Reformers and Activists,” in American Catholic Women, ed. Kennelly, , 152-81.Google Scholar

52. See Kenneally, “A Question of Equality,” 129ff.

53. He was joined in this view by Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul. Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester, although a conservative, was in favor of higher education for women and, eventually, for extending to them the vote. He thought that women were brilliant educators and that they had a moral courage that they would use when voting. See Kennelly, “Ideals of American Catholic Womanhood,” lOff.; see also Kenneally, “A Question of Equality,” 130.

54. See Diner, Erin's Daughters, 70-105, 139ff.

55. Baxandall, Michael, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

56. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Compare the discussion in chap. 3 (45-69) with the discussion in chaps. 5 and 6 (108-82).

57. For this view, see Thomas, “Catholic Journalists”; and McDannell, “Catholic Domesticity,” 48-80.