Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter Read Free Page A

these schools varied. Even so, dedicated nuns and a few lay teachers broughtmore than a few programs up to the high standards of other New England public and private schools. By 1900, Catholic schools in the large urban centers, where immigrants settled nearly exclusively, were considered a “safety valve for the public system” that was groaning under the weight of immigration and grossly overcrowded classrooms.Some diocesan schools offered the latest in manual and vocational training in addition to the usual academic subjects, providing a path to jobs and a way out of poverty.
    Mayor Fitzgerald, even as a Catholic public figure, believed strongly in public education. The mayor’s brother Henry recalled that Fitzgerald sent Rose and her brothers and sisters to Concord public schools because he believed that “public schools were training grounds for success in the world.”This, although his choice conflicted with the wishes of the Archdiocese of Boston. Under the leadership of Archbishop William O’Connell, the archdiocese pressured Catholic families to send their children to Catholic schools, even if they were inferior, while influential Catholic theologians directed Catholics to invest in parochial schools.O’Connell’s colleague Archbishop Ireland of Minnesota claimed, in 1906, that “the peril of the age, the peril of America is secularism in schools and colleges.” Parents “should bend their energies to give their children a thoroughly Catholic education. There is no room for argument,” he expounded. “Nothing but the daily drill in the teachings of the faith . . . will sink so deeply into the soul of the child that it must remain there through life unaltered and unwavering.” Otherwise, he warned, the “losses to the faith will be immense.”By 1910 nearly fifteen percent of all students in Massachusetts attended parochial schools.
    The Catholic Church had taken a conservative tack at the turn of the century, and its separatist views fueled even more distrust and fear among non-Catholics. Anxiety over Catholic control ofeducation, in combination with the rising tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who did not speak English and who dressed oddly, practiced different religious customs, and ate strange foods, sparked raging nativism. Anti-Catholicism reached a fever pitch, at levels not seen since the decades prior to the Civil War.
    Nevertheless, when his family moved to Dorchester and could easily attend one of Boston’s many elementary and secondary Catholic schools, Fitzgerald enrolled his children in the public schools. He ignored the directive from the church, and as mayor he in fact supported expansion of the public-school system to accommodate the growing influx of immigrant children and their parents.
    During Rose’s postgraduate college-preparatory year at Dorchester High, she applied to Wellesley College, located on the shores of Lake Waban, twenty miles outside of Boston. One of the nation’s premier colleges, Wellesley, founded in 1870, offered a rigorous liberal arts education exclusively for women. Its world-renowned faculty taught students who as graduates numbered among the most notable female social, scientific, political, literary, and economic pioneers and leaders of the day. Rose was eager to explore new intellectual pursuits, and when she and three of her friends, Ruth Evans, Vera Legg, and Marguerite O’Callaghan, were all accepted into the fall freshman class, she was ecstatic.
    Rose and her friends would be among a very few young American women to graduate from high school and attend college at the time. Fifty-five percent of Boston’s high school graduates were young women, but only 12 percent of all students of high school age graduated.From 1900 to 1920, the percentage of all women attending college in the United States rose steadily, from 3 percent of high school graduates to 7.6 percent—similar ratesto those for men. Although women constituted nearly 40