Because of its title, a reader might worry lest Suellen Hoy's book reinforce the American tendency to portray Catholic sisters as naive innocents (or, alternately, as whores). Such worry proves unfounded; Good Hearts undercuts this binarized stereotype by filling in the historical void that underpins it.

Good Hearts comprises seven meticulously researched chapters on Catholic sisters in Chicago between the second decade of the nineteenth century and the 1960s. Six of these chapters were published previously in scholarly journals or anthologies, but the volume is not marred by the gaps that sometimes weaken collections. Another of the book's assets is the balance it offers between depth, in four chapters focused on specific congregations of Catholic sisters in Chicago, and synthesis, in three chapters addressing experiences that congregations of sisters shared and issues that they addressed.

Good Hearts begins with an introduction highlighting the agency of American Catholic sisters (3) and the reasons for this work having gone “unacknowledged and unexplored” (7). In the first chapter, these themes inform the author's reading of the migration to the United States of thousands of Irish women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve as Catholic sisters. The chapter helpfully delineates two distinct waves of sisters, a smaller antebellum group that established congregations and pioneering ministries and a second wave recruited by those pioneers especially to staff the growing Catholic school system. The discussion of the ways in which these women made great sacrifices and yet also “enlarged the scope of their lives” (33) is especially insightful.

Chapter 2 details the tireless service of the Sisters of Mercy to Chicago's “shanty Irish” in the antebellum period as well as the enhancement of the church's image effected by the nursing the Mercys did during the 1849 cholera epidemic and the Civil War. Subsequent chapters shed valuable light on the gradual shift in the Chicago mission focus of a number of women's congregations from serving white ethnic Catholic immigrant communities to serving the African American community. We see a microcosm of that shift in the 1911 transformation of the former Chicago Technical School for Girls, part of the ministry of the Good Shepherd Sisters to abandoned (white) women and girls since 1866, into the Illinois Technical School for Colored Girls. A similar microcosm may be discerned in the effects of the post–World War II refusal of the Sisters of Loretto to limit admission to their elite academy in Woodlawn by race. This decision led to the abandonment of the school by the white Catholic community and its eventual closing, a development ably documented in chapter 6. Indeed, by the time we reach the final chapter of Good Hearts, in which Chicago Catholic sisters are seen participating actively in the civil rights movement, we realize that the astonishment of the white community in Chicago and elsewhere over this participation emerged from almost total obliviousness to much of what Catholic sisters had been doing for decades. This is the very problem that Good Hearts seeks to address.

Despite its many strengths, Good Hearts does raise certain methodological questions. Throughout the volume the author runs quotations directly into the narrative, never once, in my reading, explicitly identifying the source of a quote. This could be dismissed as an annoying tic, one that forces readers to turn repeatedly to the endnotes.

But the decision to omit the names of quoted speakers and writers suggests a modern historiographical simulation of an objectivity that is, in the twenty-first century, problematic. To be fair, the tendency toward such narrative smoothness is characteristic of much of the recent scholarship on the history of women religious. This inclination may be an expression of the very longing for innocence that historiography about Catholic sisters also serves to undercut.

Nonetheless, the methodology to which these elisions point has substantive implications. In Good Hearts, for example, the author highlights the agency and activism of Catholic sisters as an “unwritten chapter in the history of American women” (3; 159 n. 7). But the feminist anthropologist Saba Mahmood had already complicated the question of women's agency in her 2001 article “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival” (Cultural Anthropology 16:2 [May 2001]: 202–36) and in her 2005 book The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press). In point of fact, four years before the publication of Good Hearts, Diane Batts Morrow, in her groundbreaking study of the first American congregation of black Catholic sisters, Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence 1828–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), had already specifically discussed the complex—active as well as “docile”—agency of American Catholic sisters (Batts Morrow, 71). To expect Good Hearts to engage the arguments in Persons of Color seems not unreasonable. The latter is one of the best books written on Catholic sisters in recent years, as well as the current premier work on American Catholic sisters and race, a topic central to Good Hearts. Not coincidentally, Persons of Color is informed by black feminist theory as well as by historical scholarship on American Catholic sisters.

The engagement of Batts Morrow's more theoretically sophisticated work could have leavened other parts of Good Hearts as well. For example, the author's observation that the great need for parochial-school teachers led (white) religious congregations serving in Chicago to abolish the dowry requirement is helpfully nuanced by Batts Morrow's description of a black congregation rendered so poor by white racism that the dowry was a necessity, though not an absolute one. Similarly, the argument that the agency of Chicago Catholic sisters “quietly challenged the cult of true womanhood” (45) takes on added texture in light of Batts Morrow's assertion that black sisters, by presenting themselves as “women of virtue who embodied standards of morality previously ascribed to white middle-class women exclusively,” confronted the stereotype of black women as sluts or black Jezebels (Batts Morrow, 1).

By engaging scholarship like this in her work, the author would have risked fracturing the narrative smoothness of Good Hearts. She would also have enriched considerably an already solid contribution to the history of American Catholic sisters.