Back in the late 1960s, when Sister Josepha Cullen, CSC, stepped
to the doorway of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, she didn't
know what kind of reception she would get. Since it had opened
in 1872, the Bohemian Club had observed one steadfast rule: no
women allowed.
Sister Josepha, wearing the veil of a woman religious, was seeking
entrance because the Notre Dame alumni clubs of San Francisco
and San Jose were co-hosting their annual Universal Notre Dame
Night there, and she had earned master's degrees from the University
in 1966 and 1968. Most men seeking membership to the Bohemian
Club will sit on the waiting list for a decade before joining,
but Sister Josepha planned to march right in. And she did -- graciously
ushered by the unsuspecting doorman and warmly received by the
Notre Dame crowd.
Now 88, Sister Josepha was the first female member of the Notre
Dame Club of San Jose. She would serve as club secretary, second
vice president, first vice president and "almost president," getting
transferred to another convent before completing her ascension.
Dismayed that San Jose would not be the first club to have a sister
as president, the men gave her a gold plaque typically given to
outgoing presidents -- to go along with her "Notre Dame Club Man
of the Year" award.
Sister Josepha, who now lives at Saint Mary's Convent after
a long career in education, had grown accustomed to opening doors
for women as an educator and college counselor long before the
University admitted female undergraduates in 1972. "Notre Dame
gave me some kind of courage in my life that I didn't have, that
I didn't know I had," she says. "I was born in an era when women
just didn't push themselves forward."
The admission of female undergraduates in 1972 may have radically
transformed the stubbornly male institution, but its longstanding
relationship with women religious helped shape the Catholic church
in America. Thousands of the nuns who taught the nation's Catholic
schoolchildren and staffed the nation's Catholic hospitals studied
at Notre Dame.
The University first conferred degrees to women on June 11,
1917. Sister Mary Frances Jerome, CSC, earned a master's of art
with her thesis, "The Position of Women in Greek Literature,"
and Sister Mary Lucretia, CSC, earned a master's of science with
her "Domestic Chemistry" thesis. From then through 1971 (the last
year Notre Dame would have an all-male undergraduate population),
some 4,600 women religious would get a Notre Dame degree -- 8
percent of all Notre Dame graduates during that period.
The vast majority of these alumnae -- and countless other women
religious -- pursued their degrees during the summer when campus
was populated by hundreds of nuns wearing all manner of sisterly
habit. In fact, the summer session, instituted in 1918, was "founded
primarily for the Sisters," according to an early brochure. "It
was a great break for them, but it was also a break for us," says
Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, Notre Dame's president from
1952 to 1987. What was first a sound business decision became
a grand opportunity for women religious and a boon for the nation's
Catholic educational system.
About 150 invitations went out to religious orders throughout
the United States to develop a summertime student body that would
otherwise have remained tiny during two World Wars and the Great
Depression. Summer tuition gave the University's budget a much-needed
boost, and the educational effort improved the quality of parochial
schools when little was being done to provide women religious
with proper education.
As late as the 1960s, teaching nuns were often assigned classrooms
without completing their own education. A 1952 study by Franciscan
Sister M. Brideen Long found that nearly 50 percent of a sample
of 1,286 teaching nuns had less than two years of post-high-school
education. Only 18 percent had finished three or more years of
college. Before education requirements were tightened, most sisters
completed just two years of college at a motherhouse, receiving
a "normal" certificate that enabled them to teach full time while
completing their work toward a degree over several summers..
By 1940, records show, 750 women were Notre Dame graduates.
Then Sister Madeleva, CSC, the president of Saint Mary's College,
established a graduate school of theology there and pioneered
the Sister Formation Movement to fully educate and certify sisters
before they were assigned their vocations. About 150 religious
institutions established degree programs for sisters, and religious
orders sent more sisters to pursue degrees in the summer at such
Catholic universities as Notre Dame, Marquette, Fordham and Loyola
in Chicago. The Sputnik era sparked a national focus on science
and math, and the National Science Foundation began offering many
teaching nuns full scholarships to pursue advanced degrees in
those subjects.
From there, the number of sisters earning degrees from Notre
Dame steadily climbed upward. During the 1960s, when Vatican II
initiatives allowed sisters to enjoy greater personal freedoms,
including the right to choose their own college and course of
study, 2,394 women earned ND degrees.
The Notre Dame summer session also granted sisters a kind of
sabbatical from demanding and somewhat cloistered lives. They
enjoyed having private rooms and leisure activities such as softball,
croquet and picnics on the pastoral campus. The sisters were welcomed
at campus events, lectures, plays and movies in Washington Hall.
Many also bought season football tickets and many, according to
folklore, had thousands of parochial school youngsters praying
for an Irish victory on Saturdays. Their affection for the place
was also instrumental in recruiting students.
On campus, summertime was known as "Penguin Days," so named
because of all the black-and-white habits skirting around campus.
But that gave way to the liberated styles of the '60s, with the
period's high-energy, post-Vatican II excitement. "Everybody was
on that campus," Sister Josepha recalls. "There were priests,
there were seminarians -- different orders. There were brothers,
there were sisters, there were lay women and lay men. It was wonderful."
"I remember being so impressed with the vitality and the spiritual
discussions I had at Notre Dame," says Anita Pampusch '70M.A.,
'72Ph.D., a former nun who became president of the College of
Saint Catherine in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and is now a Notre Dame
trustee. Although her order planned to send her to Harvard for
her doctorate after she earned her master's degree at Notre Dame,
Pampusch had other ideas. "I said, if you care about what happens
to me, I'd like to go back to Notre Dame. It was a good education
and a good environment for my values."
"It was a glorious affair," says Ralph McInerny, who has taught
at Notre Dame since 1955 and is now the Michael P. Grace Professor
of Philosophy. "Men and women who came to summer school often
put in five summers, so there were many familiar faces each summer."
By the 1970s, however, a gathering of forces -- Notre Dame's
academic evolution and its decision to go coed at the undergraduate
level, the expanded opportunities for women in society, the fallout
from Vatican II and the significant decline in vocations -- brought
irrevocable change to those summers of study and spiritual renewal.
Fewer nuns come to campus these days, and the ones who do blend
in with a habit-less population.
* * *
(October 2003)
