ABSTRACT
In her essay “Faith, Knowledge, and Gender,” scholar Jill Ker Conway reports that although Catholic women’s colleges have received little attention from historians, 75 years ago they outnumbered other types of women’s colleges and educated “a slightly larger cohort than Protestant or nondenominational institutions” (12). Ker Conway’s essay along with others in Tracy Schier and Cynthia Russett’s recent collection Catholic Women’s Colleges in America begin to tell the “story of that relatively invisible yet significant set of institutions […] the colleges sponsored by women’s religious congregations” (6). These essays focus on such issues as the cultural and social phenomena that gave rise to such institutions, the diverse orders that founded them, and the innovative perspectives and practices that often characterized them. Schier and Russett note, however, that their collection is just a beginning and that more research is needed in a number of areas. Welcome are more histories of “individual colleges” to help “fill in blanks in our knowledge of how these institutions developed” and of the cultures that evolved at these schools (9). They also call for more comparative studies of these colleges with secular women’s colleges, asking for example, how “the women who graduated from Catholic women’s colleges differ (if they did) from those attending secular women’s colleges” (10)?
