ABSTRACT
The richness of the lives of nuns who, throughout two millennia, have been teachers, scholars, artists, mystics, and writers has not been well documented. Some of that mystery about nuns is because these women’s lives were subject to strictures imposed by a male church hierarchy. The author is a graduate of the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University), a Catholic women’s college in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a White, heterosexual woman who was raised Catholic, she is aware of the ways in which her identities constitute a narrative of privilege that continues to shape how she understand her own experiences as both a scholar of and practitioner in the field of higher education. Catholic women’s colleges are in the complex, and seemingly contradictory, place of being representative of both the historical context of women in higher education, and also a part of the possibility of shifting its dominant paradigms.
