“Catholicism Is Getting to Be the Style”: White Women and the Making of Catholic Culture at the Catholic Summer School of America, 1892–1914

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents a new account of the Catholic Summer School of America (CSSA), founded in 1892 as the “Catholic Chautauqua.” Long relegated to the footnotes of book history and Catholic studies, the Summer School and its reading circle antecedents are here reclaimed for the study of women and American religion. As a Catholic institution, the Summer School was directed by clergy and laymen; men's names fill the published histories of the site as a religious and educational retreat. I argue, however, that it was Summer School women who nurtured a complementary vision of middle-class respectability and intimate association among a white Catholic elite that promoted theirs as the aspirational and ascendant U.S. Catholic “style” at the turn of the new century. Loosened from their parish boundaries, these summer Catholics traveled north to New York's Adirondack region and converged on the lakefront, lecture hall, and ballroom, extending their social networks, and creating an exclusive space of belonging that distinguished themselves from the diverse “immigrant church” at home. With close readings of the traces that Summer School visitors left behind in visual and textual sources—including photographs, postcards, local newspaper reports, and previously overlooked fiction and nonfiction by Catholic women writers—I draw attention to the Summer School during its first decades as a critical site for studying an upwardly mobile white Catholic leisure class concerned with its social and cultural reproduction.