| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Catholic Women's Colleges in America. Ed. by Tracy Schier and Cynthia Russett. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. x, 439 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6805-X.)

The decade of the 1990s produced a growing body of research and publications describing the historical contributions of Catholic sisterhoods in the United States. Published in 2002, Catholic Women's Colleges in America is an outstanding product of this "historical renewal," analyzing the creation and development of Catholic women's colleges. Funded by the Lilly Endowment, the editors, Tracy Schier, associate director of the Boston College Institute for Administrators in Catholic Higher Education, and Cynthia Russett, Larned Professor of History at Yale University, joined twelve other scholars from a variety of disciplines to produce this scholarly treatment of this significant topic. The editors state that "half of all colleges for women in the United States were founded by religious sisterhoods" (p. 1), and by the 1950s "Catholic women's colleges educated a slightly larger cohort of American women than did Protestant or non-denominational institutions" (p. 12). Consistently ignored by historians of higher education, American Catholicism, and women, Catholic women's colleges provided a singular experience for generations of Catholic women and nuns, who served as faculty and administrators for most of these institutions until the last decades of the twentieth century.

This voluminous anthology includes ten chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, as well as two appendices that document the names, places, and (in some cases) closing dates of these institutions. The editors' introduction sets the tone for the book by providing a brief overview of the purpose and scope of the anthology. In chapter 1, Jill Ker Conway examines the interaction of "faith, knowledge and gender" and explores the often contradictory goals of women's education and the important role of sisters as a counter-model to "conservative views of women and the family" (p. 16).

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