New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (review)

Summary Review

Kathleen Sprows Cummings’ New Women of the Old Faith demonstrates that one can write about Catholic women as individuals, while situating them within the history of the Catholic Church in the United States during the Progressive era and societal debates about the “new woman” that were taking place at the same time. Although Catholic women chose to remain communicants in a church often described as patriarchal, they were willing and able to respond to the idea of the “new woman,” symbolized by women’s entrance into higher education in significant numbers, their ability to find employment, and the rise of the suffrage movement. Most of them did not support this concept, however, but instead promoted the “true woman,” who aspired to the highest calling of all: motherhood.

Cummings selected four women, two lay and two religious and examined the ways in which they mediated “between the tradition of the Old Faith and the exigencies of a new, industrialized nation” (12). Margaret Buchanan Sullivan, Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ, and Katherine Conway are not necessarily representative of American Catholic women of their era, but their lives and work show that Catholic women not only understood the difficulty a “new woman” might encounter in a male-dominated church, they were also well aware that most Americans viewed members of their faith as outsiders.

Margaret Buchanan Sullivan, the subject of chapter one, “was determined to find evidence from the past that would underscore U.S. Catholics’ patriotism and eligibility for responsible citizenship” (24). Along with others who shared her views, Sullivan developed an interpretation of American history written from a Catholic perspective, focusing on women such as Queen Isabella of Spain, without whom Columbus would have never set sail for the New World, and Elizabeth Ann Seton, touted as the founder of the parochial school system in the United States. Sullivan’s work did more than highlight the contributions of Catholic women throughout history, however; it helped “defend and define the church in the United States” (20).

Chapters two and three focus on two remarkable sister teachers and their place in Catholic education. Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder and first president of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., realized that if Catholic women were not allowed to matriculate at Catholic colleges and universities, they would enroll in secular institutions. Some ecclesiastical leaders opposed the proposed college because they were convinced that Trinity students would not receive enough exposure to traditional teachings concerning the role of women in church and society advocated by the hierarchy. The controversies surrounding Trinity’s founding illustrate the tensions experienced by American Catholic women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: was the college, Cummings asks, “intended to facilitate Catholic girls’ assimilation to American culture, or was it designed to insulate them from its evils?” (91)

Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ, was involved in Catholic education in a very different way than Sister Julia McGroarty. As a Sister of St. Joseph, who taught in Philadelphia parochial schools for many years, Sister Assisium helped train novices preparing to teach in the burgeoning parochial school system. Because she knew her own vocation had been nurtured by sisters she had encountered during the course of her education, Sister Assisium understood that parochial school teachers often served as role models for young women considering religious life. Her concern for vocations was fueled by the desperate need for sister teachers throughout the United States. In the Philadelphia archdiocese, for instance, the number of parish schools doubled between 1884 and 1903; without teachers, these schools would have been unable to open. Cummings then contextualizes this case study within a larger question dividing Catholic leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: How necessary were parochial schools to the growth and strengthening of the Church in the United States?

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