A Colloquium on Kathleen Sprows Cummings’s New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era
Kathleen Neils ConzenUniversity of Chicago
Catherine BrekusHarvard Divinity School
Kathleen Sprows CummingsUniversity of Notre Dame
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.
Kathleen Neils Conzen is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor Emerita of American History and the College at the University of Chicago. Conzen’s research and teaching focus on the social and political history of the United States in the 19th century, with a special interest in issues of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western settlement, and urban development.
Catherine Brekus is Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School and in the Department of American Studies. She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in the history and literature of England and America, and she holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. Before coming to Harvard she taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where she was Professor of the History of Christianity and Religions in America. She was also an Associate Member of the University of Chicago's Department of History and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings is the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also professor of American studies and history at Notre Dame. She is an accomplished scholar, having also written New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and published two edited volumes: Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History (Cornell University Press in 2012) and Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is a public scholar, appearing on NBC’s live coverage of the conclave in March 2013, the canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII in April 2014, and the papal visit to the United States in September 2015. She is frequently quoted in the New York Times and other media outlets on Catholic subjects.
