Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America - Paperback

by John J. Fialka (Author)

In the 1800s, nuns moved west with the frontier, building hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid during the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes during the California Gold Rush, and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals on both sides of the Civil War.

In the 1900s, nuns 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, and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. Currently there are about 65,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. Their median age is sixty-nine.

Nuns 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. Sweeping in its scope and insight, Sisters reveals the spiritual wealth that these women invested in America.

Back Jacket

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

Author Biography

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