Rebel, Reformer, Religious Extraordinaire: The Life of Sister Irene Farmer

Sara Stratton holds a PhD in American history from York University.

Irene Farmer lived in interesting times. She entered the order of the
Sisters of Charity in 1937, when nuns’ lives were far more cloistered
and circumscribed than they are today. In their elaborate habits, they
stood apart from society. By the 1960s, however, Farmer was the Superior
General of her order, shepherding its 1600 congregates through the
radical changes in religious life that emerged from Vatican II (e.g.,
nuns were no longer required to wear habits, and the work that they
performed was widely expanded). In the 1970s, she worked for social
justice with the Canadian Religious Conference.

Geraldine Anthony describes Farmer’s leadership as remarkable and the
religious order’s transformation as a struggle. But therein lies the
problem: Anthony’s account is more a description than an analysis.
Each of the chronologically arranged chapters is prefaced by an awkward
summary of events in the secular world. The story that follows is often
stiffly constructed, and great chunks seem left out. In 1951, for
example, Farmer was sent to Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax to
serve as Superior. As Anthony relates it, this was a terrifying prospect
for Farmer, since she had no university education and would be working
with nuns who held PhDs. Indeed, the five years she spent at “the
Mount” were among the most stressful of her life. Yet Anthony
allocates only six pages to it. (Perhaps a peril of being too close to a
living subject is that one is unwilling or unable to get too close to
difficult material.) Moreover, attempts to soften Farmer’s portrait
with gentle stories fail, because she is such a strong person.

Anthony spends more than 200 pages applauding Farmer’s good works,
and then concludes with the plea that “women religious” should
emerge from their “miasma of activities” and make their spiritual
life “their chief contribution to a pagan world.” That’s a curious
contradiction of Vatican II.