New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era. By Kathleen Sprows Cummings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvii + 296 pp. $45.00 cloth.

摘要

This volume makes a major contribution to women’s history by taking seriouslynreligion as a category of analysis for understanding Progressive Era reformnimpulses. Cummings focuses on four relatively unknown American Catholicnwomen: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty,nfounder of the all-female Trinity College in Washington, D. C.; Philadelphianeducator, Sister Assisium McEvoy; and Katherine Conway, Boston editor andnanti-suffragist. These and many other lesser-known Catholic womennsimultaneously condemned and emulated the “New Woman” of the turn of thencentury. Catholic women cast their activities as simply the latest way that dutifulnDaughters of the Church sought to better humanity. Women who changed thingsnwere not doing anything “new,” they stood firmly within Catholic traditions ofnfemale activity. Looking backwards and evoking traditional gender ideology,nwomen expanded, rather than constricted, opportunities open to them.nCatholicism, not simply the state, protected women’s rights. Cummings not onlynunearths forgotten primary sources but she also sets the ideas she uncovers intonthe larger context of American women’s history. Introducing gender andnCatholicism into Progressive Era history is long overdue. More than a study ofnCatholic reformers, this book helps us understand why many religious womennrejected feminism and yet acted as feminists.