This volume makes a major contribution to women's history by taking seriously religion as a category of analysis for understanding Progressive Era reform impulses. Cummings focuses on four relatively unknown American Catholic women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, founder of the all-female Trinity College in Washington, D. C.; Philadelphia educator, Sister Assisium McEvoy; and Katherine Conway, Boston editor and anti-suffragist. These and many other lesser-known Catholic women simultaneously condemned and emulated the “New Woman” of the turn of the century. Catholic women cast their activities as simply the latest way that dutiful Daughters of the Church sought to better humanity. Women who changed things were not doing anything “new,” they stood firmly within Catholic traditions of female activity. Looking backwards and evoking traditional gender ideology, women expanded, rather than constricted, opportunities open to them. Catholicism, not simply the state, protected women's rights. Cummings not only unearths forgotten primary sources but she also sets the ideas she uncovers into the larger context of American women's history. Introducing gender and Catholicism into Progressive Era history is long overdue. More than a study of Catholic reformers, this book helps us understand why many religious women rejected feminism and yet acted as feminists.