Sisters

“Fialka tells [the nuns'] story passionately, analyzing their remarkable contributions to education, health care, social reform, and civil rights.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Sisters is the first major history of the pivotal role played by nuns in the building of American society. Nuns were the first feminists, argues Fialka. They became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations.

In the 1800s nuns moved west with the frontier, often starting the first hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid and service in the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes in the California Gold Rush and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals run by both armies in the Civil War.

In the 1900s they built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems and brought the Catholic Church into the civil rights movement.

In Sisters, Fialka reveals the strength of the spiritual capital and the unprecedented reach of the caring institutions that religious women created in America.

“Sisters's strength is Fialka's ability to put flesh and blood into the accounts of the lives and work of sisters and to show through these lives the immense contribution to American society.” —National Catholic Reporter

“[A] well sourced and often sparkling narrative.” —Washington Post

“Fialka is bent on recovering those thrilling days of yesteryear when flocks of sisters . . . pushed beyond the settled boundaries of nineteenth-century America to aid in the civilizing of a continent.” —Kenneth L. Woodward, The New York Times Book Review