Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-261) and index.

Introduction -- Chiefly among women : the old faith, the new woman, and the creation of a usable past -- Enlarging our lives : higher education, Americanism, and Trinity College for Catholic women -- The wageless work of paradise : Catholic sisters, professionalization, and the school question -- The morbid consciousness of womanhood : Catholicism, antisuffrage, and the limits of sisterhood.

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.

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