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Working within the new historiography of the body, this essay argues that convents served as a convenient metaphor for Canada in the mid-eighteenth century English and Anglo-American imagination: They were French, Catholic, feminized, and most disturbingly, closed to Protestant men. In describing French Canada and its convents, they used language that suggests their fascination with opening and penetrating this new addition to the empire, despite the fact that the Quebec Ursulines were in fact very open to visitors, even to Protestant men. Esther Wheelwright, the Ursulines' New England-born Mother Superior, played a large role in English-language fictional and historical representations of the convent in the 1750s and 1760s.

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Borderlands history has traditionally been dominated by the masculine concerns of warfare, politics, and diplomacy, but in the past two decades, women’s and gender historians have produced studies that reveal that gender and sexuality were central to all colonial North American borderlands encounters among and between Native Americans and Europeans. This new scholarship argues not just for the importance of women in borderlands societies, but for the importance of looking at gender identities, work roles, and sexual and marriage practices, and the role all of these things played in intercultural contact and conflict. Scholars interested in gender and sexuality should take a broadly comparative approach in this field, because of the striking similarities as well as important differences that emerge with a continental perspective.