Abstract
By examining Catholic women's colleges in New Jersey during the period 1900-1970, this paper illustrates the complexity of developing a typology of Catholic women's colleges in the United States. The first Catholic women's college in New Jersey, College of Saint Elizabeth was established in 1899 by the Sisters of Charity; followed by Mount St. Mary's, later known as Georgian Court College, in 1908; Caldwell College in 1939; and Felician, originally a junior college, in 1967. Earlier typologies of Catholic women's colleges have divided them into elite liberal arts institutions and local, vocationally-oriented colleges which served the working and lower-middle-class daughters of immigrants. Using college catalogs and yearbooks from the four New Jersey colleges, this study compiles data on curriculum, the education of faculty, college costs, and student origins, and compares it to similar data from two elite colleges, Trinity in Washington, D.C. and Manhattanville in Purchase, New York. In spite of some pressure to offer vocational courses and the challenge of giving women religious faculty members the opportunity to pursue doctoral degrees, during this period New Jersey's Catholic women's colleges provided a Catholic liberal arts education for white middle-class women not unlike that offered at better known and more prestigious colleges. Only after 1970 did social and demographic changes begin to have an impact on the curriculum and student population of this sector of Catholic higher education.