Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America - Hardcover

Fialka, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312262299 ISBN 13: 9780312262297

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2003

Synopsis

Sisters is the first major history of the pivotal role played by nuns in the building of American society. Nuns were the first feminists, argues Fialka. They became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges.

In the 1800s nuns moved west with the frontier, often starting the first hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid and service in the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes in the California Gold Rush and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals run by both armies in the Civil War. Their work was often done in the face of intimidation from such groups as the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan.

In the 1900s they built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems and brought the Catholic Church into the civil rights movement. As their numbers began to decline in the 1970s, many sisters were forced to take professional jobs as lawyers, probation workers, managers and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. Currently there are about 75,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. Their median age is sixty-nine.

In Sisters, Fialka reveals the strength of the spiritual capital and the unprecedented reach of the caring institutions that religious women created in America.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Praise for Sisters

"Sisters's strength is Fialka's ability to put flesh and blood into the accounts of the lives and work of sisters and to show through these lives the immense contribution to American society."
---National Catholic Reporter

"Fialka tells [the nuns'] story passionately, analyzing their remarkable contributions to education, health care, social reform, and civil rights."
---San Francisco Chronicle

"Fialka is bent on recovering those thrilling days of yesteryear when flocks of sisters . . . pushed beyond the settled boundaries of nineteenth-century America to aid in the civilizing of a continent."
---Kenneth L. Woodward, The New York Times Book Review

"In a book as sweeping as its title, John J. Fialka lays out the major role of Catholic nuns in the building of our nation."
---Providence Journal

"[Sisters is a] well sourced and often sparkling narrative about legions of spirited and spiritual Catholic sisters."
---Washington Post

About the Author

John J. Fialka is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312262299
• ISBN 13: 9780312262297
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384