A threatened resource:
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy A THREATENED RESOURCE LEADERSHIP & CATHOLIC WOMEN'S COLLEGES ALMOST HALF the women in the House of Representatives, one of the two women Cabinet members and...
...They must be widows who "inherited" their husband's seats...
...They have come from the small Catholic women's colleges...
...These women belong to the current generation of women office-holders - those who overcome the obstacles women face in the difficult world of nitty-gritty politics to reach some of the highest offices a-vailable to either men or women...
...No other Catholic women are in a position where they can do so much good except, of course, the Catholic women educators who helped to form them...
...We tended to follow our fathers into the grass-roots organizations...
...They learned what they could do...
...The nuns who taught me at Ursuline were committed to the education of women...
...So do two of the three women who have been elected mayors of America's largest cities...
...There was no question of a man as the student body president and the woman as vice president," said one...
...Elizabeth Tidball, makes it clear that, until the present time at least, most women of high achievement have come from the women's colleges in general...
...The colleges which produced these women and inspired them are now at risk for several reasons...
...It may be that the Catholic colleges educate a different economic group...
...There was a common core of study, and we tended, all of us, to be studying and discussing the same things - Aquinas's theory of politics, for example...
...It would be a shame if the educational resource which has been so fruitful in giving us caring and concerned women leaders should disappear...
...We had almost individual attention at all times and great encouragement to do whatever we hoped to do...
...And yet they have had this surprising result...
...The prestigious Seven Sisters of the ivy league...
...We had no knowledge of, or experience with, the clubwoman and volunteer life...
...Mary Rose Oakar, congress woman from Ohio, thinks there was another dimension...
...Barat in my time attracted women from rather well-to-do, conventional Catholic families...
...There was the effect of the nuns themselves - a group of highly dedicated women," she says...
...They have reached pinnacles of influence in an arena which affects all of our lives...
...Research bears her out - women legislators over the years have tended to pay more attention to the needs of families, of children, of the poor, as well as to the cause of peace...
...What is true of all women's colleges is true of the Catholic women's colleges...
...There are 132 Neylan colleges in the United States, of which, at last count, 55 were women's colleges...
...Recent research, especially the research done by Dr...
...They were the editors, the athletes, the fund-raisers...
...In addition Catholic women's colleges suffer from a weakening of commitment to education on the part of religious in some cases, and from the competition of tuition-hungry men's colleges which have become coeducational...
...I stumbled across this surprising fact while doing research on a paper for the Neylan Conference, the association of colleges sponsored by women religious...
...Women from other colleges find this supportiveness, friendship, and sisterhood enviable...
...Our educations called us to service, and politics is one of the best ways of serving and helping others, of making their lives better...
...Our colleges were small, but the attitude was that no area of study was closed to us...
...Jeanne Simon (wife if Representative Paul Simon of Illinois), a lawyer and former state legislator, has other explanations...
...In the world of higher education these women's colleges constitute a tiny minority...
...Or they must be the appointees of politicians paying off old debts...
...Which group of colleges has produced these women leaders...
...In the past few weeks, when I have called people's attention to this interesting and rather puzzling phenomenon, the tendency has been to explain it away...
...What did their colleges do for these women...
...Think again...
...We were the leaders and we had the responsibility...
...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy A THREATENED RESOURCE LEADERSHIP & CATHOLIC WOMEN'S COLLEGES ALMOST HALF the women in the House of Representatives, one of the two women Cabinet members and many state and local office-holders come from a small identifiable group of colleges...
...When I first ran for office, I was reluctant to ask for help from other alumnae...
...The congresswomen themselves can only hazard guesses...
...She also feels that these small colleges fostered a sense of friendship and sisterhood among the women who attended them...
...They themselves had the opportunity to develop and exercise leadership...
...And the emphasis was on Christian humanism - a total development of the whole person...
...Five women's colleges have closed in the last few years...
...The congresswomen I talked to mentioned the same things other women's college graduates do...
...But why politics...
...Until recently Catholics looked on themselves as a minority, and the traditional paths into the mainstream for minorities have been politics, sports, and the arts...
...Quite the contrary...
...Did the Catholic women's colleges do something more...
...Concern, compassion, caring for others - we absorbed those things almost unconsciously...
...Patricia Roberts Harris, noting this when she was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, spoke feelingly," . . . what a luminous minority these institutions have been - what achievements they have piled up...
...The only female role models we had were the Catholic nuns...
...They were part of being a woman...
...That applies to some of the women we are talking about but not to all of them by any means...
...The best explanation of all for the number of Catholic women graduates in politics is one of those cited by Con-gresswoman Oakar...
...Small women's colleges are even more vulnerable than others because they have little or no endowment and are highly tuition-dependent in an era of soaring costs...
...All colleges are vulnerable today because of the dwindling of the college-age population and the drying up of funds...
...Throughout their college lives they saw women as role models - as professors, department heads, administrators...
...The sense seemed to be 'you're one of ours and we believe in you...
...We came out of college unafraid of responsibility and willing to take it...
...But they came, and they offered to do what they could, whether they were Republican or Democrat...
...They were wonderful women, and the lay teachers who taught with them were wonderful people, too...
...Support from other women is invaluable to them...
...Women in the political world face fierce competition and merciless examination by the press and public...
...Most of the office-holders we are talking about, however, have come into prominence during recent years when, researchers agree, Catholics had already become part of the mainstream...
...A few years ago, Barbara Mikulski, congress woman from Maryland, trying to explain the numbers of ethnic women successful in politics, had this to say, "Our mothers were housewives or working women...
...Women from these colleges, she continued "have a higher than average level of intellectual self-esteem, a great deal of involvement in academic and student life, a greater likelihood of completing college, enrolling in graduate and professional schools and attaining doctoral degrees...
Vol. 110 • June 1983 • No. 12
