The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s

The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s. By Amy L. Koehlinger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. x + 304 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Everyone in my generation remembers the sisters at Selma. Out of the blue, or so it seemed, women religious emerged from their convents-still in full habit-to march in support of African American voting rights. The impact on witnesses was enormous and not confined to those of us who already saw the movement as a holy crusade. The impact on women religious was enormous too, as Amy Koehlinger's fine study explains. But as Koehlinger also explains, the sisters at Selma did not emerge from nowhere. They were products in part of quiet reform in vowed religious life in the 1950s, which involved a new emphasis on extended education for sisters and unprecedented inter-congregational cooperation. Many were veterans, in their school-girl pasts, of various Catholic Action initiatives. And all were already cornmitted, if only by anticipation, to racial-justice activism. The demonstrations at Selma, which took place in the spring of 1965, marked the start for American nuns of intense involvement in what used to be called the "racial apostolate." In the second half of the 1960s, thousands of women religious tutored inner-city children in summer enrichment schools, taught in historically black colleges, presented race-relations workshops to other women religious as well as white suburban laity, and engaged in home visiting in poor urban neighborhoods.

The New Nuns...