Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter Read Free Page B

percent of total college enrollments and 20 percent of graduates, the great majority attended teachers’ colleges, or “normal schools,” which were overwhelmingly female-centered, offered a relatively short period of study, and did not grant bachelor’s degrees.Rose’s decision, and financial ability, to attend a four-year women’s college put her among the most elite of American women.
    Wellesley was a secular college. In spite of the school’s strong emphasis on church attendance and Christian values and beliefs, Catholic leaders were suspicious of its Protestant foundation. They feared the independence fostered at such institutions, preferring instead a strict, sex-segregated Catholic education featuring instruction in a far less progressive curriculum than that offered by colleges like Wellesley. In the general culture, too, concerns that a college education made a woman unattractive for marriage fueled deeply held fears about spinsterhood, keeping many women from achieving educational goals and self-supporting careers.
    However, Rose’s parents allowed her to make her own decision. She had received the blessing of her father to apply to Wellesley as a day student. Her Honey Fitz was a modern man, and his bright daughter would be a new woman of the age. Smart, cultured, sure of herself, Rose would be the perfect “Wellesley girl,” or so she thought.
    On the eve of her departure for college, in September 1907, Rose’s parents sat her down and told her she would not, after all, be joining her friends and attending Wellesley. Rose was crushed. She begged her father—she knew the decision was her father’s, not her mother’s—but he was immovable. “There was screaming and yelling, absolute madness,” Rose later told Kerry McCarthy, a close relative.
    Though unaware of the details at the time, Rose came to understand that her father had chosen his politics over her future. Fitzgerald had been warned by Boston’s Archbishop O’Connell that his days as mayor could be numbered if he did not embrace O’Connell’s brand of Catholic conservatism. The mayor should, he was told, commit to shaping a new, separatist Catholic power structure within the city. Honey Fitz, well into his reelection campaign for mayor and in the throes of a crippling political-corruption and graft scandal that threatened to derail his administration and his candidacy, could not afford O’Connell’s disfavor. The archbishop could easily throw his support in the upcoming election—and the Catholic vote—behind another candidate. When O’Connell learned that Rose was going to attend Wellesley, he warned Fitzgerald that Boston’s Catholic voters would disapprove. The mayor’s daughter was one of the leading young women in the city, O’Connell argued, whose example other young Catholic women sought to follow. If she went to Wellesley, O’Connell feared, these young women and their families would be “heeding the siren call of secularism,” and the bishop would be forced publicly to condemn Rose.
    Rose’s confidence in her ability to shape her own future, along with her emotional alliance with her beloved father, was shattered. “I was furious at my parents for years. I was angry at the church. As much as I loved my father, I never really forgave him for not letting me go,” she recalled years later.
    Rose would learn to abide by her parents’ wishes, however painful this was to her. There were no options for an accredited Catholic college education for women available in 1907 in Boston. The first accredited four-year Catholic college for women, Trinity College in Washington, D.C., had opened in 1900, but it was one of only ten Catholic institutions of higher learning for women in the United States, none of which were located in NewEngland. Rose enrolled in the Convent School of the Sacred Heart on Commonwealth Avenue that fall. It would not be the Wellesley education she’d yearned for, and it would never make up for her