“Wilhelmina Jones, Come Out!”: Public Reaction to the Reception of Sister M. Stanislaus Jones into Georgetown Visitation Monastery, 1825–1826

Abstract

Abstract:Wilhelmina Jones was the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Commodore Jacob Jones, a decorated hero of the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812. At the age of twenty-three, after converting to Roman Catholicism, Wilhelmina Jones entered Georgetown Visitation Monastery on March 18, 1825, never to return to the secular world. Public reaction to Wilhelmina’s decision, as measured in the response of her father and brother, crowd protests outside Georgetown Convent, and coverage in the secular press demonstrate that many, perhaps most, Americans found her choice to renounce the world to be puzzling at best and suspicious at worst. Close examination of the reaction to the Wilhelmina Jones case provides a lens revealing the ambiguous status of Catholicism, especially its conventual institutions, a decade before the heavy influx of Irish and German immigration triggered the revival of more overt anti-Catholic nativism.