“The Charity of Christ Urges Us”: Women, War, and the Four Freedoms at the College of Mount St. Joseph

Abstract

Peter M. Robinson examines the response to World War II by the College of Mount St. Joseph-on-the-Ohio (Mount St. Joseph University since 2014), then an all-female institution in Cincinnati and Ohio’s first degree-granting Catholic college for women. Though the Mount suffered no student deaths due to war, it prepared scores of nurses for military duty overseas and hundreds more for service at home. Robinson explores how the Four Freedoms articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear—aligned closely with the mission of the Mount and that of its founders, the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, at a time when American Catholics still sought full acceptance and women were gaining wider access to higher education.