New Women of the Old Faith

Kelly Baker

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, one of our contributing editors, just had her first book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, published by the University of North Carolina press. New Women of Old Faith places Catholic women at the center of the narrative to highlight how Catholic women were active defining Catholicism as well as their place as "New Women." This book has topped my reading list, and it will prove useful by complicating the portrait of women's participation in the Catholic Church and in American culture.

Here the description from the University of North Carolina press:

American Catholic women rarely surface as protagonists in histories of the United States. Offering a new perspective, Kathleen Sprows Cummings places Catholic women at the forefront of two defining developments of the Progressive Era: the emergence of the "New Woman" and Catholics' struggle to define their place in American culture.

Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women's colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman's story to explore how debates over Catholic identity were intertwined with the renegotiation of American gender roles. By examining female power within Catholic religious communities and organizations, she challenges the widespread assumption that women who were faithful members of a patriarchal church were incapable of pathbreaking work on behalf of women.

Cummings emphasizes, though, that her subjects understood themselves to be far more marginalized as Catholics than they were as women. Whatever opportunities arose for American women in the early twentieth century, these Catholics pursued them not as "New Women" but as daughters of the "Old Faith." Cummings's analysis makes a strong argument for the need to devote more attention to religious identity as a factor in interpreting women's lives.