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.

Cameron cites the usual evidence for single-sex education—especially for girls: studies showing that girls in all-girls’ schools take more Advanced Placement tests, score significantly higher on them than girls in coeducational schools do, and achieve higher scores in math and science courses. She also explores the remarkable history of women who founded and ran Catholic schools:

The story of the Ursuline sisters is typical. In August of 1727, twelve Ursuline sisters arrived in the French colonial city of New Orleans. Within three months of their arrival, they had established a boarding school for girls that enrolled “twenty boarders of European descent, seven enslaved boarders, and ‘large numbers of day students and Negresses and Indian girls.’” The sisters saw themselves as preparing girls of all social classes for their roles as mothers of a Catholic population. The curriculum included reading, writing, spelling, math, needlework, and the catechism. 

Religious women and the all-girls’ schools that they founded were a part of the settling of the American West. The Sisters of Providence, a French community, supplied sisters for a school for girls in Indiana in 1839. The sisters found a thick forest with no roads, a shed that served as a cathedral, and a sparse population. The sisters opened a school for girls within a year and, by 1856, had founded “twelve schools in Indiana and Illinois, two orphanages, one for girls and one for boys, and pharmacies where those in need could receive medicine.”

Then there’s Georgetown Visitation in D.C., where Cameron taught for many years. In the mid-1800s, the Georgetown Visitation Academy was offering its students the following courses: 

Religion, Orthography, Reading, writing, Arithmetic, Grammar, English, Composition, Sacred and Profane History, Ancient and Modern Chronology, Mythology; most important and interesting experiments in [natural] Philosophy and Chemistry, Rhetoric, Versification, and Poetic Composition, Geography, Astronomy, the Use of Maps and Globes, French and Spanish Languages, Music on the Harp and Piano Forte, Vocal Music, Painting in Water Colours, Painting on Velvet, plain and ornamental Needlework, Tapestry, Lace Work or Embroidery on Bobbinet, Bead Work, and Domestic Economy. 

“At their peak in the mid-twentieth century,” Cameron concludes,

all-girls’ Catholic schools offered students a variety of curricular programs. Girls could choose from college preparatory classes, vocational training for careers in business or nursing, and domestic arts classes. While this was described in traditional language that tended to restrict the options available to women, all-girls’ schools took seriously the need to produce well-educated young women prepared to succeed in whatever path they chose.

Cameron also advocates treating children as wonderful creations, not just as creatures who will only reach their full glory in adulthood. She quotes theologian Karl Rahner:

This morning does not derive its life simply from the afternoon which follows. This playtime with its beauty is not important simply as a prelude to life as lived in full earnest. It is unique. It has a value in itself. . . . It is precious not merely because it seeks the riches of life in its maturity. The strange and wonderful flowers of childhood are already fruits in themselves, and do not merely rely for their justification on the fruit that is to come afterwards. The grace of childhood is not merely the pledge of the grace of adulthood.

The lived experiences of girls are the necessary data that must be put into conversation alongside the received truths of the Christian tradition; only in this way will our theological exploration produce fruit. 

Despite its merits A Case for All-Girls’ Catholic Schools becomes less interesting when Cameron insists on flying the feminist flag. Terms like “patriarchy,” “intersectionality,” and “white privilege” pop up. She cites leftist academics. Even when this is done in the service of making a good point, she invariably misses other important points because of it.

Consider, for example, Cameron’s discussion of vulnerability.

In Christianity, God makes himself vulnerable. Jesus Christ made himself vulnerable to the point of torture and death. Cameron argues that because women are more vulnerable than men, they powerfully represent imago Dei—the image of God. Citing Catholic theologian Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo and her book The Power and Vulnerability of Love, Cameron urges us to “think theologically about the twinned experiences of vulnerability and love, particularly in women’s experiences of maternity and natality.”

Vulnerability, she explains, is:

an anthropological constant, as something constitutive of the human person. As an anthropological constant, vulnerability then can be understood not just as that which can lead to fear, anxiety, and violence. It is, for Gandolfo, also that which makes possible the foundational human experiences of love and caregiving. This balanced approach to understanding how vulnerability functions in our lives is particularly helpful for naming aspects of the imago Dei in adolescent girls. 

Summing up, “as created in the image of God, girls participate in God’s love in the midst of their vulnerabilities, not despite them.” Seeing that girls are special even before marriage and childbirth and expressions of Christlike vulnerability and love “is a call to stand in solidarity with girls in all of their gifts and vulnerabilities, affirming that they matter to God and to us in the face of a culture that says otherwise.” 

Amen. Yet why does Cameron draw so narrow a lesson from this and seem to insist that only girls show vulnerability? Every day, men put themselves at risk for the care and safety of women. Cameron says she wants us to appreciate girls and then expand from there:

to a wider society that marginalizes many who do not fit our societal expectations. In other words, it is my conviction that all-girls’ schools are one place—among many—where the work of the Reign of God happens, and adolescent girls, because of their passions, gifts, and vulnerabilities, can show us what it means to live into our human vocation as disciples of Christ.

Yet many of those who today “do not fit our societal expectations” are men who have become anathema to the so-called enlightened culture. In his recent book, The Moral Life, the priest James Keenan, SJ. makes a case similar to Cameron’s about the centrality of vulnerability to a Christian life. We are not meant to ever fully recover from grief, Keenan writes, because grief is a sign of deep and abiding love. It keeps alive our love for the person we have lost: “Entrance into grief is not solely an encounter with absence but with presence as well.”

Unlike Cameron, Fr. Keenan doesn’t exclude men from this life-affirming grace. When Mark and the disciples were grieving in the Upper Room over the death of Jesus, it was their moment of vulnerability that the Lord chose as the right time to return to them and reveal His full promise. Jesus came to them when they were at their most defenseless and open. Grief, Fr. Keenan observes, also “opens the door” for us to minister to others and share the love of Jesus with them. Keenan puts it this way: “Their grief was not an obstacle to their capacity to see Jesus but rather the passageway itself.” 

The Catholic men I grew up with knew that we could show signs of this kind of vulnerability without degenerating into the kind of weak men feminists say they want—those who cry at everything, are too intimidated to take rejection or ask a girl out, and who decline to show raw courage or exercise power.

We also knew that women can be powerful. The nuns of the Sisters of Mercy who taught me in grade school didn’t take any nonsense. And decades before Caitlin Clark and the WNBA, I saw great female athletes competing in the gyms throughout the archdiocese.

Indeed, the lessons we learned as kids also inform Caitlin Clark’s worldview and explain much of her integrity: She is also a Catholic. A native of Des Moines, Clark is a parishioner at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in West Des Moines. She attended St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Elementary School and then Dowling Catholic High. Clark told the Des Moines Register in 2018: “We get to live our faith every day. Dowling starts every day with prayer and ends every day with prayer. This is a big reason why Dowling has such a special culture and is such a special place to go to school.” 

A Case For All-Girls’ Catholic Schools: A Feminist Theological Perspective has a lot going for it, reminding us that there are special theological virtues that are frequently associated with women that are often not recognized as virtues in our culture today. It would have been even stronger if Cameron had realized that in 2026, the group most “marginalized,” mistreated, misunderstood, and in need of special “intersectional” care are the guys.