Educating “Sister Lucy”: The Experiential Sources of the Movement to Improve Higher Education for Catholic Teaching Sisters, 1949–1964

Abstract

In 1949 Sister Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C., addressed the National Catholic Educational Association with the argument that many bright young sisters quickly “deteriorated” into states of anxiety and discouragement because they were assigned to teach in Catholic schools without adequate academic preparation. If the Church hoped to retain the newest generation of sisters and form effective educators, she maintained, it needed to stop “squandering” sisters’ talents and educate them according to their “potencies.” By 1954 Sister Mary Emil Penet, I.H.M., following Sister Madeleva’s lead, co-launched the Sister Formation Conference (SFC), a sister-led commission that urged women’s orders to improve academic, spiritual, and professional education for sisters. As the SFC leaders travelled the nation promoting the “discovery and development of talent in the Sisterhoods,” they countered concerns about “intellectual pride” long prevalent in convent culture. While they affirmed most features of convent asceticism, the SFC sisters decisively sidestepped the notion that women’s intellectual pursuits led to corrosive pride. SFC leaders, like all sisters, considered humility a central virtue, but they argued that the frustration of sisters’ intellectual ambitions was harmful, not humble. Notably, the founders of the SFC had emerged from the minority of sisters who held advanced academic degrees and taught in Catholic women’s colleges. The practical and ideological grounding for their reform asceticism is traceable to their experiences as graduate students and college instructors. By the mid-1960s the vast majority of U.S. sisters, immersed in a postwar discourse that promoted the cultivation of individual talent as a moral good and a democratic right, had embraced the SFC leaders’ ideals and become the best-educated group of sisters in the world.