The Case for All-Girls’ Catholic Schools

All-girls Catholic schools produce great women. I was reminded of this recently when I was the guest of a book club consisting of about 10 women. They were all graduates of Catholic girls’ schools who had grown up in Washington and knew each other. I was invited by a friend who attended Georgetown Visitation, one of the area’s all-girls high schools. Smart, funny, theologically sharp, and self-aware, they were the kind of well-adjusted women that feminists always claim to champion but seldom do. 

Girls and Catholic education is the subject of the forthcoming book A Case For All-Girls’ Catholic Schools: A Feminist Theological Perspective by Cynthia L. Cameron. Cameron argues that Catholic all-girls’ schools can provide the best environment for girls to flourish. “In addition to its body of social teaching,” Cameron writes, “which emphasizes the fundamental sacredness of all humanity, the Catholic Church also has important institutional resources for guiding adolescent girls toward a healthy adulthood, resisting the toxicity of the triple bind, and attending to the flourishing of girls.” This, she explains, is imprinted as girls “negotiate growing up in a world that is characterized by consumerism, globalism, individualism, technology, and a highly sexualized vision of what it means to be a woman.”

The “triple bind” Cameron refers to is as follows: First, girls “are expected to be good at all the traditional girl stuff like friendships and relationship building, and being nice, obedient, cooperative, helpful, and nurturing.” Second, they “are expected to attract boys and be a good girlfriend while at the same time knowing how to manage not only their own sexual feelings but also those of their boyfriends.”  Third, girls “are expected to do all of this while conforming to an unrealistic standard for what is expected of women’s appearances. It is no longer enough for women to be kind and nurturing while at the same time being competitive and successful; they must also fit the ever-narrower standards for looking pretty, hot, and model-thin.” 

The above might seem like a laundry list of feminist gripes, but it does have substance. There is probably something to the phenomenon labeled “mankeeping,” whereby modern women are overburdened by men who are encouraged to overshare their emotional burdens. And while it has always been true that women are heavily judged on looks, it is even more  the case today due to the scourge of pornography.