On the evening of November 15, 1800, the tourière (gate keeper) of the monastery of the Augustinian nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec opened the convent door to find, there on the cold stone of the threshold, an infant girl swaddled loosely against the winter chill. Scooping the baby up into her strong arms, the tourière pressed the creature against her chest and folded it into the deep pleats of her tunic before turning back into the convent and closing the door behind her. The infant girl, Catherine Henriette, would be placed within days with Charles Cardinal dit Leroux and his (presumably lactating) wife in the faubourg of Saint-Roch, Lieutenant Governor Robert Shore Milnes having pledged a government pension to the family for the costs incurred in caring for her. By May 15, 1801, Catherine Henriette had become a ward of the state, the first of 1388 foundlings received by the Hôtel-Dieu between 1800 and 1845 and subsidized by the parliamentary Commission for the support of abandoned children.
In most cases the illegitimate offspring of single mothers too poor, too ashamed, or too isolated to assume the burden of motherhood alone, the vast majority of foundlings arrived at the Hôtel-Dieu by way of the tour, a rotating turnstile embedded within the cloister wall that surrounded the monastery of the Augustinians de la Miséricorde de Jésus and the hospital they administered and staffed. The tour, a feature of foundling hospices throughout Catholic Europe meant to facilitate anonymous abandonment, opened up into a small room adjacent to the chapel on the grounds of the Hôtel-Dieu and was inhabited by a resident wetnurse whose warm embrace and milky breasts would have been, in each case, the infant’s point of first contact with the institution of the Hôtel-Dieu. Within twenty-four hours of arriving at the Hôtel-Dieu, foundlings (in most cases) were baptized at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Quebec, sponsored by godfathers and godmothers who pledged to ensure their religious instruction “in the absence of their fathers and mothers” (Grand Catechism de Québec), and then assigned to wetnurses who undertook to foster them in exchange for modest monthly pensions. Among the 1388 foundlings received by the Hôtel-Dieu between 1800 and 1845, 744 (54%) died within months of being fostered out to wetnurses. Of the 644 who survived, 112 (8%) were returned to their biological parents or close kin; 532 (38%) were placed, the vast majority with the fostering families to whom the foundlings had been assigned in the first instance, many bound to those families through legal contracts known as brevets de confiance which functioned, effectively, as certificates of adoption avant la lettre. The responsibility for supervising the administration of the entire operation rested with the Augustinian sisters, a nursing order of Catholic women who had emigrated to Canada in 1639 to found the Hôtel-Dieu, the first hospital in the Americas north of Mexico. Deeply saturated in theologies of spiritual motherhood and shaped by devotional practices attentive to both the symbolism and materiality of the Virgin Mary’s maternal status, the Augustinian sisters brought to the foundling program a cognitive apparatus that primed them to conceive of their charitable work in a maternal idiom, and at the same time their maternal work in a spiritual idiom that disentangled motherhood from biology and the enfleshed realities of sexual reproduction.
I propose to examine the phenomenon of the foundlings of Quebec’s Hôtel-Dieu as the dense site of cooperative and collaborative maternal practices. As a point of confluence where disparate streams of maternal practice converge—biological motherhood, sacramental motherhood, nutritive motherhood, and spiritual motherhood—the foundling program administered by the Augustinian sisters of Quebec’s Hôtel-Dieu between 1800 and 1845 provides a useful test case for interrogating the historical contingencies of ideologies of motherhood. What, for instance, does the case of the foundlings of the Hôtel-Dieu illuminate about nineteenth-century ideologies of motherhood (particularly against the historiographical background of the emerging cult of domesticity)? About nineteenth-century maternal practices? About the role of Catholic religious devotion and theology in shaping—or resisting—those ideologies and practices? What does the phenomenon of the foundling program as the dense site of a range of cooperative and collaborative maternal practices reveal about our own contemporary ideals of intensive mothering (Sharon Hays)? What might taking seriously the phenomena of sacramental motherhood (expressed in rituals of baptism) and spiritual motherhood (enacted in consecrated religious life) add to our theoretical conceptions of both motherhood as institution and mothering as practice? And what might a sustained consideration of this particular historical instantiation of motherhood(s) contribute to the elaboration of maternal thinking (Sara Ruddick) as methodological approach to the study of religion?
This paper interrogates the historical phenomenon of the foundling program administered by the Augustinian nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec between 1800 and 1845 as the dense site of cooperative and collaborative maternal practices. As a point of confluence where disparate streams of maternal practice converge—biological motherhood, sacramental motherhood, nutritive motherhood, and spiritual motherhood—the foundling program provides a test case for interrogating the historical contingencies of motherhood. What does this case illuminate about nineteenth-century ideologies of motherhood and maternal practices? About the role of Catholic devotion and theology in shaping—or resisting—those ideologies and practices? What does it reveal about our own contemporary ideals of intensive mothering? What might taking seriously the phenomena of sacramental motherhood and spiritual motherhood add to our theoretical conceptions of both motherhood as institution and mothering as practice—and to the elaboration of maternal thinking as methodological approach to the study of religion?