The research has been accomplished through explorations in numerous archives, the collection, examination and interpretation of sources, and extensive work with state-of-the-art literature on the turn of the century interest in a routinized conduct. The project demanded reaching out to scholarship from several disciplines; informed mentorship by the project’s supervisor; consultations with scholars at the host institution and beyond. During the fellowship I widened my research capacity by acquiring new areas of expertise, improved my teaching skills by conducting seminars, and gained practice in executing a research project independently through regular checking on progress, risk assessment, identifying and reaching out to potential collaborators, designing its financial parameters, and organizing international events.
The pious activists I studied did not propose a separate theory of a habitualized action, but rather drew on selected elements of conceptualizations that were circulating at the time while enriching those with a perspective rooted in lived female experience. Their engagement with the concept of habit was significant for the reformers in two major ways. First, the contemporary pedagogical theories that employed habitual behaviour as a tool of upbringing envisioned a human being as consisting of corporal, intellectual, and emotional capacities that could be put in constructive alignments to assist the individual in self-improvement and completing intended goals. Many of these theories had built-in gender (and racial) prejudices. But when critically modified, they allowed Catholic reformers to argue that differences between sexes were not of an unbridgeable nature, and that characteristics like an aptitude for logical reasoning or a leaning towards intense feelings were shared by men and women alike. Consequently, both sexes, the reformers argued, could be taught to gain command over their inclinations, which might be excessive. Appropriate corporal and mental routines became main instruments for shaping and reshaping the characters of individuals and populations in Catholic reformers’ pedagogy. Catholic activists favoured these theories of habit (e.g. of W. James, J. Dewey, F.W. Foerster, A. Eymieu, J. Payot) that conveyed an optimistic view of a human being as capable of change, but equally appealing was their proposition of (self)development as an accumulative process of gradual alternations, which reduced the occurrence of a rupture or revolution. In this way it was possible for reformers to reconcile a conceptualisation of human (female) character as instilled in time, and therefore open to intervention through personal exertions, with both Catholic dogma as well as the conservative agenda of the social groups they belonged to.
Second, the engagement with the notion of routinized conduct triggered investigation into the persistent presence of forms of religious expression that had arisen in different historical contexts and remained popular among turn of the century laywomen. This investigation led reformers to conclude that numerous women habitually reached out to pious practices that had long since lost relevance for contemporaries’ sensibilities, or societal and economic problems. The unearthing of the ambiguous powers of habit, its potential for bringing about stagnation and renewal, paved the way for Catholic activists to advocate replacement of such outdated routinized forms of religious expression with a new habitus of conveying piety that would answer the requirements and challenges of the period. The new templates for expressing pious women’s convictions and religious belonging favoured an intellectual instead of an emotional approach to faith and, moreover, included among the legitimate and up to date forms of articulating personal devotion a new habitus of modernized household work, professionalized and rationally designed collective participation of laywomen in the public sphere as well as their proficient participation in the paid labour force. The project’s results have been made available to academic and non-academic audience in multiple forms: articles, conference presentations, lectures, public talks, on-line entries.
