Organized Voluntarism

and educational institutions of the Catholic Church in the United States has come from religious communities of women. Yet the sisters' role has rarely been studied. Literature dealing with them has ranged from antiCatholic tracts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to community histories and biographies of foundresses. Both have tended to reinforce the view of sisters as socially peripheral women, aloof from society, its needs and concerns.1 Official Catholic publications, while recording the activities and accomplishments of churchmen, have neglected full-time female church workers. For example, priests were enumerated by name, location, and work in every issue of the Official Catholic Directory over 1870-1940. In the case of sisters, the directory provided the name of the superior of the local convent and usually the number of sisters. Church histories remain

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