“To Save Them from the Dangers to Their Faith”

Abstract

This article explores the history of Catholic women's colleges and former women's colleges in the United States, with specific focus on student life in the mid-twentieth century. In the peak year 1956-1957, 42,900 young Catholic (and sometimes non-Catholic) women attended about 116 colleges, a significant proportion of the higher educational sector. These colleges helped acculturate many children of Irish, German, Eastern European and Italian families to middle-class American society, at the same time creating a specifically female and Catholic culture on the college campuses. This culture, which was characterized by the ideals of femininity, religion, and service, can be reconstructed through materials in the college archives: for example, through minutes of faculty committees and student organizations, records of college events, photographs, audio-visual material, scrapbooks, catalogs, and student publications. The archives of Catholic women's colleges are important in that they document a little-studied area of American life- Catholic women's culture-and furthermore show how it has changed and evolved up to the contemporary period.