Veiled Leadership: Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Race Relations

"Veiled Leadership examines the lives of Mother Katharine and her congregation within the context of larger constructs of gender, race, religion, reform, and national identity. It explores what happens when a non-dominant culture tries to impose its views and morals on other non-dominant cultures. In other words, as outliers themselves-they were semi-cloistered Catholic women from primarily immigrant backgrounds in a culture that regarded their lifestyles as alien and unnatural-their attempts to Americanize and assimilate Black and Indigenous people, whose families had been in the country for generations longer than the nuns' own, adds complexity to our understanding of cultural hegemony"--