Episode 198: From Convent to Corporate

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time…how an early career in the Catholic church paved the way for everything that came after. 

“The truth is that as a nun, I had the freedom to do a lot of things within a certain context that I wouldn't have had otherwise. You know, we were not as oppressed and cloistered as you would think.”

From the convent to the corporation. Coming up on The Broad Experience.

---

For the past 30 years Ellen Snee has been working in the realm of women’s leadership. She’s run her own consulting firm, working with senior women at big corporations, she herself has been an executive at a technology company, and she’s also worked as a coach to individual women.

But before all that, she spent almost two decades as nun. Ellen grew up in a big Irish Catholic family just outside New York City. She was the eldest of five kids.

“...and both my mother and my father had siblings who were nuns and priests. So our household was filled with nuns and priests, relatives, friends, and from the parish.”

Still, Ellen didn’t aspire to be a nun growing up. Her aunt was a nun and Ellen says at that point, in the 1950s and early 60s, nuns still wore the full habit and they seemed pretty strict. She didn’t see herself that way. She didn’t have any particular plans for a career until her tween years.

“But when I turned 12, one of the priests had come over and he was like a big brother and he always, he brought comfort to my mother. He was probably 29 at the time, but he made her laugh and that was an uncommon experience. She had a lot to deal with. And when he was leaving, my father said, will you give us your blessing, Father? Which is what happened in very Catholic settings. And so we all knelt down and he gave us his blessing. And while I was praying, I thought, that's what I wanna be when I grow up, I'm gonna be a priest.”

She says she felt an overwhelming sense of calling at that moment. So once the prayer was over, she got up and announced her intention to the room.

“...and all the adults looked at each other like, All right, who's gonna tell her, who's gonna break the news? And so Father Tom was the designated person and he said, ‘Well, Ellen, you mean a nun?’ And I said, ‘No, I don't mean a nun, I mean a priest.’ And he said, ‘Well, girls can't be priests.’ And with that, my mother went in the kitchen to clean up and my father walked Father Tom to the car. And I was left, you know, with this really major calling and recognition. And no one was taking it seriously.”

Over time, and with a lack of support, the feeling ebbed away. A few years later Ellen thought she might be an air stewardess and travel the world. Then she became a student at Fordham University in the Bronx. It’s a Catholic Jesuit university. 

“And while I was there, I met all these young Jesuits. It was the late sixties, early seventies when there was unrest and riots on campus. But there was this little enclave of young men who were studying to be priests and young college students, men and women, who would gather to pray and go to church and go on vacation and or a day to the beach or a trip. And I felt really at home, you know, today we say ‘I found my tribe,’ but it was my group. I also had a group that went drinking every Thursday night. So, you know, I was kind of a multifaceted person.”

But she knew for sure that she was drawn to the work of the Jesuit priests - work which has always been about education as well as spirituality and helping the poor…

“So I went to talk to one of my Jesuit friends, and in the course of the conversation, I blurted it out that I think I wanna be a nun. And he laughed because at it was 1972 and all the women were leaving the convent, the priests were leaving the priesthood, not joining.”

But that desire to serve, to be part of a movement bigger than herself, persisted. When Ellen graduated she went off for a year to Missouri to serve in a program the Church ran to help people in need. And while she was on this program the director introduced her to a woman who was a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, an international order of nuns. 

“I quickly found out that she did a lot of work at the Jesuit University in St. Louis. And so we shared the love of the Jesuits, and by the end of the day, we agreed that I would come up in a month to visit her and her community. And I did. And I ended up joining the community in Missouri where I worked, I worked in the dorms, with the students and in campus ministry, and I lived in the community with the nuns…and I knew this was the group I wanted to be part of.”

Ellen began her life as a nun by working at a girls’ school for a year, then she spent two years formally training for her vocation…some of that in France, where her order had its roots. Unlike the nuns she grew up with, Ellen and the other nuns in her order didn’t wear habits, just everyday clothes. By the seventies nuns had much more choice over their dress. 

She particularly loved living in community with all the other women. 

“Most of us would pray in the morning or go to mass in the morning, and then we would be about our work all day until we came home. We took turns cooking dinner, and then we'd have evening prayer together, and then we'd watch TV or read or do homework or whatever. Like most normal people.”

For years, her work was teaching girls and young women. 

“So for three years I worked in one of our high schools in the DC area, and I taught, I taught math, I taught religion, I ran programs, I did everything that was needed to be done. And then I went on to get a degree in theology because I wanted to teach at a seminary. I had decided that I would change the church by teaching future seminarians, which was ambitious and totally naive.”

AM-T: “And when you say change the church, what do you mean? Tell me more about that.”

“Well, the church is one of the great patriarchies and the role of women and its attitude toward women was very oppressive. Now, we were fortunate because we were our own order and we experienced that more at the, the Rome level, unlike the orders of nuns who were controlled by a bishop. But it was still really oppressive and very hard for me to deal with. So I've always been systemic in my thinking and I thought, well, if I could teach at a seminary, I could change the minds and hearts of the future priests.”

AM-T: “All these guys!”

“All these guys. So <laughs>, I went into a seminary to do my theology and I was convinced this was gonna work. So I got accepted in the doctorate and I went off to Rome for this final training.”

But while she was there, she received a letter asking her to return to the US and run a new initiative the order was launching. Ellen was always drawn to new ideas so she said yes. But she says during the years she was doing that work, the Catholic church became more conservative…and she realized changing the men in the church wasn’t something she was likely to pull off. 

“So I changed the focus of my study. I read a book about women's psychological development and thought that's, I'm not gonna try to change men. I'm gonna try to develop and advance women. And so that was fundamental pivot. And I came up to Cambridge to do a doctorate at Harvard and lived in a community with five other women who were also doing advanced degrees. And two years later I realized  that the church had continued to get more conservative. The community was, we were living in smaller and smaller groups, so the sense of community for me had really changed, and I had changed. And so it was no longer a place I could live in integrity.”

AM-T: “Just to confirm then, your decades with the order, that spanned your twenties and your thirties, into your very early forties.”

“I left when I was 40.”

AM-T: “Gosh. Talk about a, I dunno what, call it a midlife crisis, but, you know, whatever hits you when you turn one of these big decades…that's huge.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

AM-T: “You've referred to this already, but I do think that when a lot of listeners hear about, you know, somebody being a nun, either they're Catholic, so they know a lot about it, or they've seen the films and they think, well, that sounds like obeying a lot of orders and being oppressed in a male run system, which you've basically indicated it kind of was. But I would've thought that from the get go, that would've been really difficult for you. I mean, I guess what was good and bad about it? What was bearable and what made you really nuts?”

“Yeah, so let me say something about what you said a moment ago, which is people who are Catholic, in my experience, have the greatest stereotypes, not necessarily good experience, but stereotypes of nuns. So I learned very early on that, you know, if I was gonna introduce myself as a nun and the person was Catholic, I was going to hear about, ‘oh, I had a great aunt who was a nun’ and ‘the nun slapped my hand in grade school’ and all these horror stories. Whereas the further you got from Catholicism, you know, someone who was Jewish or Muslim or atheist, they just found the whole thing fascinating. They may have seen the movies, but they didn't project the movies onto you the way the people who were closer to nuns did. So that's one comment. What was hard and what drove me crazy…you know, I think people always want, want to know what was it like to not marry and have children and have sex. I think that's always the question behind the question.”

AM-T: “I was gonna come to that…”

<Ellen laughs> “You know, and I think that differs for from person to person. And even after I left, when I was younger, I never wanted to have children. I think I was influenced by having a sister who had a very serious physical deformity, and I was afraid that I carried the gene. So the not having children was not an issue, you know, psychologically I was in a different place. Not having grandchildren is the hardest thing in my life ever. So there are consequences to choices. I have stories about how I handle that. Um, not having a partner, what worked for me and will be maybe hard to understand, but because I was in higher education and then involved in a seminary and knew a lot of Jesuits, I had a lot of wonderful male friends. You know, it wasn't a sexual relationship, but it was wonderful, wonderful genuine friendships. And you know, in our thirties when my girlfriends were trying to find someone to marry, they'd often say, ‘You have more friends who are guys than we do.’ And at times that was true. So I had the gift of exchange with men.  I think I was mostly happy for most of those years. So I always felt like I was encouraged to take initiative and  grow, right? A lot of emphasis on personal development. A lot, a lot, a lot. You know, things that people have been discovering in the last 10 years. I mean, that's old hat.”

AM-T: “You were there in the seventies and eighties.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah.”

AM-T: “Well, and, and you know, just going back, ‘cause I wasn't expecting to talk about the sort of celibacy life thing this quickly, but what I was thinking, what interested me so much in thinking about your timeline wasn't so much about  not having sex or whatever, it was more about the time…because you became a nun at this crazy time in history when the pill had come in, women were much freer to do what they wanted than they ever had been before. And so while all that was going on, you were going the other way as it were, which is that was what interested me so much is how you felt about that, looking at what was going on in society from where you were.”

“Yeah, so I would say two things. One is that  I grew up in a pretty conservative, traditional family, so I wasn't…”

AM-T: “You weren't thinking about burning your bra or…you know…”

“No, no I wasn't, I wasn't in that even before I became a nun. And the truth is that as a nun, I had the freedom to do a lot of things within a certain context that I wouldn't have had otherwise. And that were really in a parallel track. You know, we were not as oppressed and cloistered as you would think. So I didn't feel like - I actually felt often like I had more freedom than some of my married or coupled friends at that time.

AM-T: “That’s so interesting…you mean, because you were free to develop yourself and your interests and no man was expecting to have his dinner on the table at six o'clock?”

“No, no. I mean, we were completely collaborative and in community. I mean, this is the story that I think really illustrates it: in community. My room was across the hall from the principal of the school where I taught, so she was my boss's boss, and we sat and watched TV together and took turns cooking dinner. So it was egalitarian and communal, really, not just trying to make it that way. It really - we made decisions together, so you know, in a lot of ways we were living the principles of that decade.”

---

Ellen’s years living and working with other women laid the foundation for the work she went into after graduating from Harvard in 1994 with a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology. As part of that degree she studied the psychological dimensions of holding power for women. 

She went on to found a consulting company to use the wisdom she’d gained in her first career - and the knowledge she’d acquired during her degree - to help women in leadership and women who aspired to leadership. 

Ellen had seen women of all different types hold authority within her order of nuns. Some were outgoing, some shy. And nobody was perfect.

“Nuns are first and foremost human beings and human beings are really different. And they don't always get along well. You know, they see things differently. There are squabbles, there are unkindness, all of that. And what I benefited from having been a nun for 18 years is I saw such a range of women, old women, young women, different nationalities, different personalities, different ways of holding authority, different ways of interacting. So it wasn't, nothing I saw led me to say, Oh, she's doing that because she's a woman, or because she's a woman, I would expect her to do something different. I would say, Oh my God, there goes Claire again. I wouldn't say Claire should know better because she's a woman.” 

But when she transferred into the corporate world she encountered plenty of stereotypes…

“Whereas when you get into the world of work, what happens is there are two few women at the top. And when you're the only woman, you are assumed to be the expert on everything 'Woman'. You know, you could be a, a nuclear scientist, but they're going to expect you to understand everything about women. If there are two, the system pits them against each other. So the system, the men around them start to say, Oh, she's this, loves nothing better than to see something happen to make them squabble. You know, it's just the system. The individuals may be very kind, but their system not so much.”

She also found that many senior women she met in corporations couldn’t answer the question ‘what do you want?’ with clarity. But Ellen believes knowing what you want for you life and career is where authority begins. 

Remember when Ellen was 12 and felt that calling to become a priest? At the time she says and in her years as a nun, she thought of that calling, that inner voice, as the voice of God. Now, she thinks of it as an interior voice of authority - a sort of innate knowing exactly what she should do. It’s a voice she says many women have trouble recognizing or accessing in part because of all the messaging we get about what we *should* be and do.. This forms a lot of her work with women in corporations: helping them discern what it is they truly want so they can get there.

A couple of years after 9/11, Ellen left the east coast and moved to California. She’d been craving some sun. But it turned out to be a tough move, and a low point in her life. 

“The thing that no one tells you is that even if you have friends in an area you’re moving into, those friends have lives and those lives are busy. So when you move to a new city you may as well be in another country.”

Finding a community, making new friends…finding new clients…it was all far harder than she’d anticipated. But after selling her condo and moving into an apartment building she met the man who would become her husband. She also landed a job at a tech company she’d been consulting for.

“And so I became a global executive around talent and leadership. And I loved it. I loved the community. I loved being part of something bigger than myself, and that's what had drawn me to religious life. And though, although a tech company is not a religious organizations, it was a company that had real mission and had very strong values. And again, I was able to do amazing things because I had the support of leadership, and it was fabulous.”

Ellen married in her fifties. She says her husband, who was quite a bit older, was very supportive of her work. He died early in 2020. Recently she moved back to her old neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began studying on another Harvard program - this one designed for leaders with lots of life experience. The class is split equally between men and women.

“I have never in my life had that experience. I mean to be at this stage in life and this is the first time it’s 50/50?”

Ellen is 72 now. She says she no longer identifies as the Catholic she once was, but she still feels a calling in her work. Which nowadays is focused on women and climate change. 

“So I feel like I still have the sense of mission. I'm still looking for new communities, and I'm still as dedicated to serving others and to serving others as a coach, where I bring all I know about discernment to women who haven't had that opportunity to learn how to know what they know, how to recognize their desire and how to pursue it.”

Ellen Snee. She’s the author of the book LEAD: How Women in Charge Claim Their Authority. I’ll link you to more information about Ellen and her book and some photos under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

And on a personal note, I wanted to let you all know that I will be wrapping up The Broad Experience at the end of this year. It has had a good ten-year run, I’ve loved doing it, but things have changed quite a bit for independent podcasters in the last few years, and it’s time for me to move on to other things. I’ll go into all this in more detail in the final show, and I do have a couple more shows to bring you in the meantime. 

And I know I’ve said this before but listeners have always been a big part of this podcast and when I do stop it’s the community that I’ll miss most. 

That’s the Broad Experience for this time.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.