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This chapter focuses on the fundraising for the Mary Memorial Altar, moving from the first efforts to raise funds for the altar in 1913 to the culmination of those efforts in 1938. It argues that in this period before the full clericalization and centralization of Catholic philanthropy, some middle- and upper-class International Federation of Catholic Alumnae (IFCA) members living in cities, especially on the East Coast, managed to exert some power and play significant roles, just as Hoffman and the women of the National Organization of Catholic Women had done before 1919. Assertively submissive—or submissively assertive—in their relations with the clergy, between 1919 and 1938 the IFCA's leaders rarely challenged priests or bishops, though they certainly prodded them occasionally. At the same time, though they admired Mary's virtuous submission, they were much more than passive subordinates. They led the efforts to raise the money for the Mary Memorial Altar, and focusing on the altar as artifact and metaphor shows how women—both lay elites and ordinary devotees—were absent and present at the Shrine.

This chapter focuses on Katherine E. Conway, a journalist and author based in Boston, who frequently commented on the constellation of issues that constituted “the woman question” in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Like most other Catholics, Conway had little patience for the New Woman's wholesale renunciation of ties to tradition, family, and community, and criticized her for “clamor[ing] for new spheres of influence, or the reform of the universe.” Most significant, however, Conway despised the New Woman for introducing a scourge into American society, a disease to which she believed she and other Catholic women were immune: “the modern malaria of the morbid consciousness of womanhood.”

This chapter focuses on the women's benevolent institutions. They were in place in 1880 dispensing aid on a regular basis. By ministering the poor, benevolent ladies understood the degree of dependency that was created through increased industrialization and growth. Catholic women's religious orders were the first to build benevolent institutions in Galveston. Ursuline nuns accompanied Bishop John Mary Odin to Galveston and formed the Ursuline Academy and convent. They acted as nurses. They converted their convent to a military hospital during the Civil War. Galveston's middle- and upper-class women sought to capitalize on the wave of pride and donation to build institutions of their own — for children and old women. Lasker Home for Homeless Children and the Johanna Runge Free Kindergarten pulled women toward a greater sense of civic and community responsibility. These institutions were temporary shelters for children whose family was unable to offer an education.

This chapter focuses on the time when Sister Julia McGroarty presided over the opening of Trinity College for Catholic women in Washington, D.C. McGroarty, the American provincial superior of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (SND), had by that point dedicated more than fifty years of her life to educating Catholic young women and girls. The success of her final and most ambitious venture had depended in large part on her ability to underscore the essential differences between the future Trinity student and the threatening New Woman. Early publicity for the college had emphasized that “while the New Woman, with her head full of vagaries, is reconstructing the Universe, Trinity College will offer to her Catholic sisters an opportunity to accrue knowledge which, though adapting itself to all rightful demands of the period, is firmly wedded to that unchanging faith which has lifted women of all ages to her true position.”

This chapter examines the Americanist controversy and the relationship between Catholicism and Progressivism in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and drawing on both social history and gender history, it shows how Progressive ideals have shaped Catholicism and links Americanism, a late nineteenth-century ideological conflict in the Catholic Church, to anxieties over the “new woman.” The chapter also considers the founding of Trinity College for Catholic women in Washington, D.C. in the context of women's history, as well as the college's connection to Americanism. By doing so, it shows that the construction of gender was related to the articulation of religious identity in America during the Progressive Era.

Katharine Harmon explores the intersection of the interwar Liturgical Movement with three forms of female lay initiative, the National Council for Catholic Women, the Catholic intellectual revival promoted by Maisie Ward and the Grail. The development of the theology of the Mystical Body of Christ served as a means by which Catholic laywomen, hitherto confined to a restricted sphere of religious activities at the parish level and in the family home, were able to enter upon a much wider sphere of action. The Liturgical Movement thus helped promote greater freedom of action for Catholic women and paved the way for their greater participation in later initiatives such as the Christian Family Movement.

Many scholars have defined feminism narrowly as the desire for autonomy, thus failing to take into account the central role of women in their families, communities, and churches. In particular, Catholic women, who venerate the Virgin Mary as the model of ideal womanhood, have been commonly accused of being reactionary or antifeminist. This chapter urges historians to reframe the narratives of Catholic history and feminism so that the more complex accounts of religion's relationship with the modern feminist movement can be revealed. Focusing on Estela Ruiz, an elderly Mexican American woman who claims to both see and hear the Virgin Mary, it shows how faith and activism have empowered lay Catholic women to reform their families and society while also transforming the culture and identity of Catholicism.

Mary Henold explores the changing character of the National Conference of Catholic Women during the 1960s and 1970s, with particular reference to its executive director Margaret Mealey. By contrasting the new attitudes among Catholic women that arose in the aftermath of Vatican II with those of the nascent feminist movement, Henold demonstrates that Catholic feminism continued to accept a modified notion of male/female complementarity even as it asserted the right of Catholic laywomen to be active in the Church and develop a theology that was their own.

This chapter explores the origins and aims of the five voluntary women's organisations included in this research: the Mothers’ Union, Catholic Women's League, National Council of Women, National Federation of Women's Institutes and the National Union of Townswomen's Guilds. Each group is situated within the context of the inter-war women's movement and their contribution to both the movement and to the lives of their members is evaluated. The chapter also considers the membership of each organisation, at both local and national level and explores why each of the five organisations sought to ensure that they remained non-party and non-feminist throughout these years.

Chapter two examines how the Sisters of Mercy lived their religion and sought to incorporate their founding charism in their works of mercy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sisters of Mercy, as defined by Catherine McAuley, were not constrained by the religious rule of cloister or enclosure, and consequently went out into the world in ways that other women religious, both Catholic and Protestant, could not. As the Mercys spread throughout Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, performing similar but not identical ministries, they built a network of parish schools, academies, hospitals, homes for women, orphanages, and other ministries that sprung from a common foundress, spirit, and purpose. By the early twentieth century, Mercys from Chicago South, Chicago West, Aurora, Ottawa, Milwaukee, Janesville, Davenport, and Iowa City, faced with changes to religious life directed by the Vatican and conscious of the needs of their local foundations and communities, discussed consolidating the disparate locations into one Province.

In hearing the phrase “passing on the faith,” images of more than a list of beliefs pass before the eyes of the hearers' imaginations. This chapter reconstructs debates over the nature of authentically Catholic “formation,” both intellectual and spiritual, as conducted by elite figures in Catholic higher education in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Then, as now, a desire for integration and wholeness was widely shared; the most contentious issue pitted advocates of a rigidly neoscholastic formalism against others intent on producing young Catholic apostles infused with a radical zeal for social justice and openness to engagement with the non-Catholic world. These debates, which engaged leaders from Catholic women's colleges in addition to male clerics, belie the image of “Catholic unity” often ascribed to that era, a view promoted by some intent on making Catholic Studies a vehicle for retrieving the lost world of “integral” Catholicism.

This book concludes with a brief epilogue on the origins of the imaginary Catholic woman of the French Third Republic. The fall of Rome and the installation of the Third Republic transformed French Catholicism and disappointed the postrevolutionary generation of romantic Catholics who had hoped to reconcile their faith with the modern political and social order. The development of a monolithic image of the Catholic woman was a process in which both Catholics and anticlericals participated. Both sides were willing to embrace the notion that Catholicism was a religion of women. This epilogue explores how the feminization of religion affected romantic Catholicism in general and Catholic fraternity in particular by focusing on the Empress Eugénie and Sister Marie Elisabeth, heroine of Victorine Monniot's 1861 novel Marguerite á vingt ans.

Chapter one examines the spiritual and community life of the Sisters of Mercy from 1846 to 1929. It explores how the founding charism of Catharine McAuley was transported to the United States and found resonance among Irish and a growing American Catholic female population in the Midwest. In addition, this chapter discusses the expectations for Catholic women in this period and what motivated women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to enter a religious congregation like the Sisters of Mercy.

This chapter examines the development of some of Liverpool’s most significant moral welfare organisations between the late-Victorian period and the end of the First World War. It unpacks the early historical trajectories of the House of Help, the Liverpool Vigilance Association, the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, and it argues that these organisations continued to view women’s relationship to the city through the lens of Victorian gender ideals. Moreover, the chapter examines how the pioneering and well-intended efforts of these organisations to craft a ‘respectable’ form of public womanhood during the first two decades of the twentieth century were still steeped in presumptions about the immorality of the working class, and working-class women in particular.

This chapter looks at the attitudes toward religion and ethnicity among South Asian Muslim women and Latino Catholic women. On the one hand, Muslim women separate religion from culture and identify more strongly and affirmatively with Islam than with their ethnic culture. Latino Catholic Women, on the other hand, see their Catholicism as inextricably connected to their Latino heritage and express a great deal of ambivalence toward Catholicism. However, ethnicity does not naturally fade away for Muslim women. Islam is in fact a way for them to assert their independence from the inherited culture of their parents and from the racialization of the dominant society, whereas Latino Catholic women view religion and ethnicity as inseparable. Nothing goes against Herberg's theory of religious primacy more directly than the persistence of Latino Catholicism.

Chapter four examines the growing demand for sisters to staff various institutions and the need to educate and prepare its members for ministerial work as teachers or health professionals. This chapter examines the emergence of the Sister Formation Conference, how the Mercys engaged in this movement, and how they attempted to meet the expanding needs of its members while faithfully serving the needs of the Catholic Church. Throughout this period, the American Catholic laity grew in number and maturity and embraced new lay movements like Catholic Action. The Chicago Mercys while separated by monastic-like religious structures were also a part of these developments. These developments in conjunction with the movement to fully educate sisters for ministries prepared the Chicago Mercys for the more dramatic changes of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Chapter six examines the legacy of the Sister Formation Conference and Renewal on how sisters saw their ministry, their local community living, and their identity as women religious in the late 1960s through 1980s. This chapter contains sections concentrating on ministry, community living, and efforts to redefine or rearticulate Mercy religious identity. Case studies and examples illustrate how sisters investigated new ministry choices or reinterpreted existing ministries as well as how they experimented with small group living and the reactions to these experiences. Finally, the chapter explores how the changes to ministry and living opened discussion about how Mercys saw themselves and their spirituality in relation to one another and their place within the Catholic Church (among both hierarchy and laity).

Chapter seven examines the nature of religious life following the tumultuous decades of renewal. This chapter explores how the community lived and worked as the meaning of religious life shifted. In a post-Vatican II world and Church, women religious have reinvented or reimagined their places in society and in the Catholic Church (among hierarchy and laity). This chapter looks at how Sisters of Mercy lived from the 1980s to 2008, what diverse ministries drew their focus, and how they came together as one. This chapter also deals with the consequences of a shrinking Mercy community population due to low entrance levels and aging. Lastly, it examines the motivations and process of the merger into West Midwest in 2008.

Chapter three examines the nature of religious life following amalgamation and throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as that life became increasingly structuralized but remained faithful to the spirit of their foundress. It begins with a discussion of how these separate but united foundations merged into one. It then takes a closer look at the formation process and how women went from novice to professed Sister of Mercy within the context of a new and more monastic and highly structured religious life of the twentieth century. Chapter three examines how the Mercys strove remain loyal to their founding spirit and faithful members of the institutional Catholic Church.