Catholic Women's Colleges Research Articles

Discourses of Whiteness: White Students at Catholic Women's Colleges (Dis)engaging Race

Discourses of Whiteness: White Students at Catholic Women's Colleges (Dis)engaging Race

How Have Epiphanies Affected Your Life?

How Have Epiphanies Affected Your Life?

Adding ‘Women's Voices’ Across the Curriculum

Adding ‘Women's Voices’ Across the Curriculum

Counseling a Student Presenting Borderline Personality Disorder in the Small College Context: Case Study and Implications

This case study examines the dynamics and challenges associated with counseling a client experiencing borderline personality disorder in the small college institutional context. The work of counseling centers at small private institutions has been relatively unexplored in the extant college counseling literature. To help fill this gap, the current case study explores a counselor's work with a student at a private, Catholic women's college.

The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (review)

Reviewed by: The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past Rosemary Radford Ruether The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past. Edited by Catherine A. Brekus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2007. Pp. x, 340. $59.95 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.) Forty years ago there was little writing on the history of women in religion. But in recent decades there has been an enormous outpouring of research that has demonstrated how central women are in the actual practice of religions, especially in Christian congregations. In spite of the ample availability of excellent studies on women and religion, Catherine Brekus, professor of the history of Christianity at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, finds that women still continue to be ignored in mainstream histories of America. History is seen as primarily about elite men in public life. Women, non-elites, and people other than white Protestants are still marginalized. Religion also is marginalized. Women historians share this bias, often ignoring religion and women of color. Catherine Brekus has edited this collection of twelve essays on women in American religion in an effort to demonstrate the importance of greater inclusiveness. She argues that one cannot understand American history without seeing the importance of religion, or American religion without seeing the importance of women. These twelve essays by leading women historians cover four centuries from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. They include four that focus on white Protestants, one on Black Protestants, four on Catholics, which include blacks, whites, and Mexican Americans, one on Mormons, and one on Jewish women. A twelfth essay challenges the presumed split between religion and the development of feminism in the late 1960s, showing how religiously committed women predominated in its development. [End Page 173] The four essays on American Catholic women are striking for their diversity. One, by Emily Clark of Tulane University, focuses on the centrality of white and black religious women in the evangelization of blacks in the city. Another essay, by Kathleen Cummings of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, details the struggles of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur to found Trinity College in 1897–1900. This was the first Catholic women's college to be founded as a college rather than evolving from an academy. The Sisters' proposal to found such a college raised fears of Catholic conservatives in the United States and in the Vatican that this was a capitulation to Americanism, feminism, and co-education, all anathema in some circles. Cummings shows how Sister Julia McGroarty steered a difficult course between conflicting forces to found the college. A third essay, by Amy Koehlinger of Florida State University, lifts up the racial apostolate of American nuns in the 1960s that not only pioneered new work with African Americans in the rural South and the inner cities, but was able to use the gender and racial ambiguity of habited nuns to cross racial and gender boundaries. A concluding essay, by Kristy Nabhan-Warren of Augustana College, focuses on a Mexican American lay woman of South Phoenix who successfully translated her personal experiences of apparitions of the Virgin Mary into an international movement of Mary's Ministries that founded a K–12 charter school and created a powerful practice of empowerment of women that combines feminist and conservative values, Catholic and evangelical styles of piety. These twelve essays make fascinating reading. Together they make clear how much we miss of American religious history if we ignore the role of women of many ethnic and religious backgrounds. Rosemary Radford Ruether Claremont Graduate University Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Catholic Women's Colleges in America. Edited by Schier Tracy and Russett Cynthia. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. x + 439 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Catholic Women's Colleges in America. Edited by Schier Tracy and Russett Cynthia. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. x + 439 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Catholic Women's Colleges in America (review)

The stated aim of this collection of essays is to open up what has been "a closed book"—the history of Catholic colleges founded by women religious. The editors make no claim that it is definitive, but it is a significant landmark which should serve to stimulate scholarly interest in a topic that has been grievously neglected. The scope of the activity alone warrants investigation. Leaving aside junior colleges and those founded strictly for sister-students (over a hundred of which existed at one time or another), the number of four-year colleges founded by Catholic women religious increased from ten in 1918 to 142 in 1968. Today only about twenty still restrict their enrollment to women, but some ninety others have become coeducational institutions, not a few of which are now universities.

“To Save Them from the Dangers to Their Faith”

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.

The Intentional Secularization of a Denominational College The Case of Webster College

This study1 examines the circumstances that led to the transition of Webster College from a Catholic women's college to a secular, co-educational university. The issue of identity was re-addressed at a critical juncture in the history of Webster, as the college dealt with its financial and enrollment difficulties. The study shows the influential role of leadership in defining and re-defining the institution's identity.

Springboards to Mortarboards: Women's College Foundings in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania

I investigate the effects of environmental forces drawn from two organizational theories, institutional and ecological theories, on the founding rate of four-year women's colleges in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania from 1855 to 1968. Results show that institutional forces measured by the presence of elite women's colleges, the development of Catholic women's colleges, and the enactment of the suffrage amendment increase the women's college founding rate and their inclusion leads to organization density decreasing the founding rate monotonically. In the population of four-year women's colleges studied, I argue that institutional forces are suitable measures of legitimacy, while ecological forces are appropriate measures of competition. Further, the presence of delegiHmation forces, separate from competition forces, suggests the need to consider their effects in future analyses.

A thrust from within: Reconceptualizing teacher education at Alverno college

The year is 1981. Enrollments in teacher education, which in the 1940s and 1950s had accounted for as much as 85% of the student body of this Catholic women's college in Milwaukee, are dropping as the nation faces an oversupply in its teaching force and women begin to choose other careers. What are the college's options? Discontinue the program? Cut back resources and weather the period of decline? The minutes of the college's Reconceptualization Group for October, 1981, may seem surprising. In describing the discussion that evaluated progress in a major rethinking of the teacher education program, the minutes reported, are participating in a time of dramatic changes in education in our society and in our own institution. We are in a rare position to respond to those changes ... (Minutes, 1981). The Education Department faculty, joined by faculty from other disciplines similarly interested in teaching adults in college and other professional settings, began the major revision of the teacher education program at Alverno College in 1979. The process of the work has spanned the decade of the 1980s, influenced first by an internal stimulus but further encouraged, reinforced, and critiqued by the national debate in the mid-1980s. The articulation of the resulting Model of the Develop-

A Slice of My Life

The first woman I had a lesbian relationship with called herself Tiny Hero, or TH for short. She called me many things, including Kitty Kitzmueller, which she sometimes shortened to Kit. She gave my breasts good Polish names, Sophie and Stella. A pious college friend of hers, Regina Kelly, she nicknamed Regina Coeli, and an obnoxious male in our English department she called Birdlegs. Because she felt burdened by a long Italian name, TH wanted to get a WASP name by marriage. For a time she dated an ex-seminarian with a WASP name and not much else to recommend him. When he broke off their engagement, she was very hurt. I comforted her. Out of that experience, a lesbian relationship developed. But long before we caught on to what was happening between us, we invited a third woman to move into TH's apartment at the same time I did. Like us, she was the product of a small Catholic women's college. TH called her by her full name, Maren Ann Agatha Norgaard, Agatha having been added when Maren converted to Catholicism. During the baptismal ceremony, a candle carried by one of her friends set fire to her veil-a small incident which delighted the pagan heart of TH and foreshadowed Maren Ann's later involvements with Rome. Beginning a lesbian alliance with a roommate in a very small apartment, occupied by a third woman, had its special intricacies and awkwardnesses, among them the bedroom arrangement: the three single beds had no room between them and no room between walls and beds except in front. It would have been an ideal bedroom to display to a suspicious parent. Before Tiny Hero and I knew we wanted to sleep together (not one of the possibilities mentioned by the nuns who taught us), we had chosen the outer beds. I can still see us, two rather slight, dark-haired women separated by a very large blond Norwegian. One night at three a.m. we awoke to the sounds of choking. M.A.A. Norgaard was clutching at the rosary she wore around her neck, which had become tangled up in the scapular she also wore around her neck. TH and I cut them loose, perhaps saving her life. Cradle Catholics who had by then lapsed, TH and I judged Maren Ann's religious zeal with the bored detachment of regular Sunday zoo visitors who know the chimp will be scratching his crotch. We protested angrily, though, when Maren Ann's spiritual adviser, one Father Brendan, announced that he would thenceforth interpret the will of God for her. Sometime later she decided to go to Vietnam to see for herself if the United States ought to be involved. (I was never sure if Father Brendan and Mother Church could be blamed for this third threat to her life, but my opinion of the priest was not improved when I ran into him several years later in Minnesota. The woman I loved was with me. Brendan looked at her and asked, Is this your son?) Many of the women who were with us in a Catholic graduate school had passed through parochial schools. We each had our little collections of bizarre tales, of pagan babies ransomed, for example, and spectacular apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. TH herself had a fine sense of humor and imagination-playful, fanciful, irreverent. I was irreverent myself, but the quali-

Morphological Sexual Dimorphism in Species with a Tapered Thallus of the Hepatic Genus Metzgeria

Morphological Sexual Dimorphism in Species with a Tapered Thallus of the Hepatic Genus Metzgeria

Catholic Women's Colleges and the War

T OTAL war has brought about varying degrees of modification in all types and on all academic levels of education. Because of the chronological age of their students, institutions of higher learning have felt the impact of the war more than elementary and secondary schools. Colleges, universities, and professional schools have been affected by military service, acceleration, the government's utilization of institutions, and the psychological appeal of attractive salaries enticing students to leave school. The change which the war has made in the four-year Catholic women's colleges is revealed by a study of questionnaire replies received from fifty, or 56 per cent, of the eighty-nine four-year Catholic women's colleges in the United States. Data was submitted regarding enrollment, faculty, finance, length of term, adjustments in administration, departments and services, and curricular and extracurricular activities for September, I94i and I943, and for the summer schools of I94i and I943. These dates were chosen as indicative of pre-war and recent conditions in schools. In addition to this information, administrators were asked to comment on their institutions' current problems and their anticipated postwar problems. The colleges included in this study had enrollments ranging from 40 to 746 in I94I, and from 46 to 780 in I943. For comparative purposes, the institutions were classified in four groups as based on the September, I94I, enrollments. In numerical order, the grouping included schools whose enrollment ranged from 20 to I70 (Group I), I7I to 320 (Group II), 32I to 470 (Group III), and 47I to 770 students (Group IV). The groups included I3, 22, I1, and 5 colleges, respectively. In the matter of enrollment, Catholic women's colleges as a group presented a situation in contrast to that reported by the Office of Education for 622 institutions of higher learning. The enrollment of these 622 institutions for the period from October I5, I94I, to October is., I942, showed a total decrease of i3.7 per cent. Excluding teachers' colleges, normal schools, and junior colleges, enrollments in the universities, colleges, and professional schools alone decreased I0.7 per

Catholic Women's Colleges and the War

Catholic Women's Colleges and the War

Survey of Modern Language Teaching in Catholic Women's Colleges of the Middle West

opinion in our Catholic Women's Colleges in the Middle Western area, a questionnaire was sent to the colleges in this region asking them to state the aim desired, the texts used, and the student enrollment in French, German and Spanish-the Modern Languages usually taught. The results secured from the thirty-four colleges which contributed are shown below. Twenty institutions seek to impart a reading and speaking knowledge, while thirteen wish reading ability alone. The methods used in securing these objectives are listed in Table I. The facility with which the language students of these colleges express themselves at the end of the first and second year is shown in Table II. Table III shows the most popular texts in use. Because of their great variety, it is impossible to include in this report more than the three most generally used in each language. The enrollment in the different languages is given in Table IV. It will be noted that the freshman groups are divided because many students beginning a language in college are placed in the elementary group, while others who have completed two years in high school are assigned to the intermediate group. The sophomore group contains those students who began the language in college and those who had it in high school. In this year, most colleges give a Literature course, however, to the latter. From an examination of the tables, it will be readily seen that our Catholic Women's Colleges in this area are rapidly abandoning the old objective of a reading knowledge alone as the ideal.

Survey of Modern Language Teaching in Catholic Women's Colleges of the Middle West

The Modern Language JournalVolume 25, Issue 4 p. 314-316 Survey of Modern Language Teaching in Catholic Women's Colleges of the Middle West Sister M. Roberta Hardesty S.L., Sister M. Roberta Hardesty S.L. Webster College, Webster Groves, MissouriSearch for more papers by this author Sister M. Roberta Hardesty S.L., Sister M. Roberta Hardesty S.L. Webster College, Webster Groves, MissouriSearch for more papers by this author First published: January 1941 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1941.tb03012.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume25, Issue4January 1941Pages 314-316 RelatedInformation