Into Silence and Servitude joins a growing corpus of books on American Catholic sisterhoods. For the most part, these books employ historical approaches that illustrate how women religious contributed to the success of Catholicism in the United States. Into Silence and Servitude takes a different orientation and concentrates on how girls and women were recruited and trained during the post–World War II period. Titley justly argues that after the war Catholics became more committed to their parochial school system. The sons and daughters of immigrants realized that education was key to actualizing the American dream and that their parishes provided faith-promoting, effective, and inexpensive schools. The Catholic expansion of education necessitated the growth of a staff of teachers and administrators whose salaries would not overwhelm the budgets of parishes and dioceses. To satisfy that need, orders stepped up their efforts to stimulate vocations and to enlist girls into the religious life. On one level, their efforts were successful. Titley includes the oft-cited number of 180,000 sisters at the 1965 high point (7), which by 2015 had dropped to 48,546 women under vows (177). On the other hand, he also demonstrates that a major reason for the sharp decline was that adults enticed girls, far too young to fully understand precisely what they were doing, into a life that made no sense to them.

After a first chapter that summarizes the history of female religious life and clarifies certain technical terms, Titley describes the process of locating “convent material” (45). What was needed were girls and young women of “unsullied reputation” (41), who were healthy, intelligent (but not too intelligent), and malleable. Not surprisingly, Catholics schools, especially all-girls schools, provided the supply of possible recruits. One of the strengths of Into Silence and Servitude is Titley's use of small-scale sociological studies conducted by religious orders to help them understand how to bring girls into their orders. He notes, for instance, a study of 1,700 sisters conducted in the 1940s that revealed that over half of those women came from families with more than seven children (46). Titley is less successful in analyzing the appeal of recruitment materials and would have benefited from directly engaging Rebecca Sullivan's conclusions in “Adventurous Souls: Vocation Books and Postwar Girl Culture,” in Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture (Sullivan [University of Toronto Press, 2015], 124–156). As with Sullivan, Titley illustrates how savvy orders created vocational literature that engaged the fantasies of teens and then doubled their efforts via retreats, vocational clubs, and spiritual counselling.

There is no question that the “full court press” that Catholic sister-teachers and priests launched toward young women drew them into the convent. However, Titley should have spent more time delineating the limited alternatives available to Catholic girls at the time. Girls watched their mothers as well as their teachers. Having cared for brothers and sisters, girls would have been well acquainted with the toil, boredom, frustration, and thanklessness of bearing multiple children. Convent culture may have been a mystery (144), but Catholic girls knew all too well the trials of the alternatives.

While Titley does not point out the negatives of domesticity, he does spend a chapter disputing the assumption that Catholic parents gracefully gave up their daughters to the church. Just as the parochial schools needed the cheap labor of women, so parents needed their children's emotional and financial support. However, the strongest—and the most chilling—chapters are Titley's thick descriptions of the various stages that the women went through before taking their final vows. Girls as young as thirteen and fourteen entered preparatory academies, called “aspirancies,” where they began their spiritual formation. From their somber uniforms, to their censored mail, to the restrictions on family contact, the girls were taught to cultivate a collective identity and reject any impulse toward self-display or flamboyance. While the lives of the aspirants resembled that of girls in Catholic boarding schools, the stress on obedience and chastity often edged toward the creepy. As postulants and novices, women learned how to guard their eyes from distraction, dwell in silence, manage their holy habits, free themselves from the events of the world as well as the pleasures of their bodies, and envelop themselves in a strict schedule of prayer. Some orders permitted women to flagellate themselves, and all orders developed elaborate rituals of humiliation to punish violation of convent rules. Titley provides a few glimpses of the joys of religious life, but we are not surprised to find that forty percent of the novices admitted between 1950 and 1965 into the Maryknoll order did not take their first vows. Women who left were told to be silent about their experiences.

Titley finishes by describing the tumultuous 1970s that saw the steep decline of applicants to religious orders and the exiting of vowed women. He lists multiple reasons for this: the rise of independently minded girls, impatience with the rate of convent modifications, the movement of Catholics into the middle class, and the modernizing impulse of Vatican II with its resulting tensions. If we include the rising number of opportunities available to Catholic women as a result of the feminist movement, the explanations for convent defections are not surprising. It would have been more valuable if Titley had addressed how it was that these women, taught to live as if in a medieval cloister, became strong teachers, capable administrators, and cagey actors within multiple Catholic institutions. We know women left the convents in droves, but how was it that, for at least a century, spiritual formation somehow prepared some American women to act successfully in the modern world? Into Silence and Servitude sticks closely to the memoirs, interviews, and sociological studies on which it bases its descriptions, and for this it is to be commended. Answers to larger questions await other scholars.