Madeleva: A Biography by Gail Porter Mandell (review)

122BOOK REVIEWS nation during the 1950-1970 years. Of interest are the IHM participation in the Sister Formation movement and the vital role played by Sister Mary Emil Penet. The outstanding feature of this book, something not found in others of this genre, are the descriptions ofpersonal relationships among and between sisters and intimate details of daily convent life—all additions to feminist history. This volume has an appropriate foreword, list of contributors, introduction, afterword, appendix, bibliography, and index. George C. Stewart,Jr. Fayetteville, North Carolina Madeleva: A Biography. By Gail Porter Mandell. (Albany: State University of NewYork Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 303. $17.95 paperback.) As the history of women in the Church is gradually pieced together, it is increasingly evident that among women who held major administrative roles in the United States and acquitted themselves well in them were several generations of nuns who founded, financed, and directed hospitals, colleges, and charitable institutions. Sister Medeleva Wolff of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, president of St. Mary's College at Notre Dame, Indiana, from 1934 to 1961, is one of those women. In addition to a 1994 study of her spirituality by Mandell, a privately published "pictorial biography" by Maria Assunta Werner, C.S.C. (1993), and articles inNotableAmerican Women and The Encyclopedia ofAmerican CatholicHistory , the reader has Madeleva's autobiography, My First Seventy Years (1959). Mandell has supplemented these sources by drawing on Madeleva's letters in archival collections in Berkeley and Notre Dame, interviews with people who knew and worked with her, and a close study of her poetry for what it might reveal about her thinking and her state of mind at various times in her life. The result is a nuanced study of Madeleva's life that supplements her autobiography, often by exploring topics that Madeleva chose to omit, such as her intimate friendship with the Reverend Cornelius Haggerty, C.S.C. Madeleva Wolff took a doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1925, one of the first two nuns to do so. She was assigned by her community in 1926 to be the foundress and first president of St. Mary of the Wasatch College in Salt Lake City, and in 1934 she was installed as president of the Holy Cross Sisters' St. Mary's College at Notre Dame. Over the next twentyseven years she transformed that institution, introducing a new liberal arts curriculum and the study of Christian culture according to a plan worked out by the British scholar, Christopher Dawson. In 1944 she established a School of Sacred Theology at St. Mary's, which became the only Catholic educational institution in the world where women could study for a doctorate in theology. In BOOK REVIEWS123 the 1950's Madeleva was one ofthe promoters ofthe Sister Formation program. A scholar in her own right, Madeleva did postdoctoral studies at Oxford, had more than fifteen volumes of her poetry published in her lifetime, traveled widely as a lecturer, and numbered among her friends and correspondents Henry and Clare Booth Luce, Thomas Merton, and C. S. Lewis. Madeleva belonged to a generation that saw a far-reaching transition in the role of women in the Church. Among the first nuns to do a number of things, she lived to see a profound change in the education of women, a change to which she contributed much. She died in 1964 at the mid-point of Vatican Council II, which would open the door to even more changes. One might wish that Mandell had situated Madeleva more clearly in the context ofher times and of Catholic higher education in America. A good index is one of the admirable features of this book. James T. Connelly, C.S.C. University ofPortland A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches & the Second World War. By Gerald L. Sittser. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 317. $39.95.) Sittser's book has taken us a fair distance across one of the largest gaps in our knowledge ofAmerican religion, the role that the churches played in WorldWar II. Sad to say, he has not led us all the way across, though his work will serve as a...