Crossings and Dwellings: Mundelein College and the Legacy of Catholic Women's Higher Education in Chicago

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to head back to Chicago for a long weekend of Catholic history. The conference I attended, Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, Amercan Experience, 1814-2014, was held in conjunction with the closing weekend of the exhibition of the same name at Loyola University Chicago. In between conference panels, I ducked into the exhibition galleries, which featured room after room of breathtaking Catholic objects on loan from around the Midwest (I highly recommend the multimedia feature “5 Galleries, 5 Iconic Objects,” crafted by Loyola’s talented public history students). I was captivated by pieces chosen to illustrate the history of Catholic women’s education, including a rare 1860s “Young Ladies Sodality” banner from Holy Family Parish on Chicago’s West Side and a portrait of a young Catholic girl that hung for decades on the walls of Jane Addams’ Hull House.

I was especially excited to see one of the exhibition’s galleries devoted to the history of Mundelein College, an unmistakable Art Deco landmark on Chicago’s Sheridan Road. While conference co-organizer Kyle Roberts–who has written here about the Jesuit Libraries Project–will recap the “Crossings and Dwellings” weekend in future posts, I wanted to draw attention to an important theme of the weekend: recognizing the contributions of sister-builders. As I draft a syllabus for my Spring 2015 course on women’s higher education history at Bryn Mawr College, I’ve been thinking about how my students should understand the world of women’s education that extended beyond the so-called “Seven Sisters.” Why might we still care about Mundelein, which opened in 1930 and merged with Loyola in 1991, or other now-defunct Catholic women’s colleges whose missions have been folded into coeducational institutions?

Postwar Catholic journals sung the praises of these institutions. “In the two thousand year history of the Church,” wrote one Catholic Action commentator in 1946, “there has never been anywhere such a diffusion of the presumed advantages of higher education than that for American Catholic youth. This is especially true with regard to higher education of Catholic women.” Other Catholic writers emphasized the privilege of a college education. Their language held particular meaning for the average Mundelein College student. [3]

Recruited mainly from Chicago’s parochial school system–including the BVM’s own central high schools, St. Mary’s and The Immaculata–Mundelein students were young women whose families were committed to furthering their education in a Catholic environment.  The College allowed them to do so by making tuition affordable to working-class budgets; in addition, most students commuted from home, saving the cost of room and board. Until the late 1960s, approximately two-thirds of the student body–mostly Irish-American–were the first in their families to attend college. [4]

Despite the College’s name, these young women’s Mundelein experience was shaped by women. We often speak of Catholic sisters’ important institutional roles in growing the Church, but during the conference weekend, I appreciated the use of a term I hadn’t heard before: sister-builders. “Builder” is a particularly useful way for thinking about the Chicago BVMs, who managed a construction project in the early years of the Great Depression, getting their dream of a “skyscraper college” off the ground in 1929. Their vision for a modern, Art Deco high-rise is, perhaps, a point that deserves further reflection in conversation with Cushwa’s Catherine R. Osborne, who recently shared her work on 20th-century U.S. Catholic architecture on the blog.

In addition to the idea of sister-builders, I’d also suggest we haven’t talked much about sister students. In her opening address, historian Carol Coburn pointed to the Sister Formation Movement at mid-century, with its mission of better educating sisters for their teaching vocations.

What did it mean for laywomen and sisters to share the classroom, together, as students? I became fascinated by this phenomenon as I browsed the digital collections of Mundelein College online through Loyola’s rich Women and Leadership Archives (WLA) and the yearbooks of another “disappeared” women’s college, Newton College of the Sacred Heart, which merged with Boston College in 1974 (the subject of a conference paper by historian James O’Toole). The WLA website hosts a timeline of Mundelein College history, which begs comparative work with other Catholic (and not Catholic) women’s colleges during the immediate post-war era.

Notes:

[1] Scheir and Russett, eds., Catholic Women’s Colleges in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 27.

[2] Sister Mary Alice Joseph Moore, “Catholic College Student Retention in the United States” (Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1957), 127.

[3] Reverend Chas. A. Hart, “Catholic Action and the Catholic College,” Catholic Action 28.8 (August 1946): 7.  For similar praise, see Roy J. Deferrari, “The Challenge to Catholic Colleges and Their Graduates,” Journal of Religious Instruction 17 (October 1946): 162-71.

[4] Mundelein attracted a handful of resident students; they were housed in Mundelein’s skyscraper building and other nearby spaces until Coffey Hall, a dedicated student dormitory, opened in April 1963.  See Sister Joan Frances Crowley, “Remembering 1962-1969,” in Ann M. Harrington and Prudence Moylan, eds., Mundelein Voices: The Women’s College Experience, 1930-1991 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 2001), 154-55.