When the Republic Came for the Nuns: Laicization, Labor Law, and Female Religious Orders.

During its first decades the Third Republic's relationship with the Catholic Church soured. While the Republic notoriously recast itself as a secular regime through removing clerics from the classroom, laicization also drove the development of public welfare. By examining the case of ouvroirs, charitable ateliers run by female religious orders to train and employ young women, this article explores the consequences of new ideas about welfare for working-class girlhood. In the context of rising anticlericalism, the Republic mobilized labor law and sent labor inspectors to scrutinize the nuns' treatment of their charges. The Republic's efforts to regulate these spaces represent a transformation in its treatment of girlhood, a recognition that girls' care could not be left to the private sphere. Instead, not only was it the Republic's responsibility to protect these girls, but this protection had a larger, societal imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]