Rose had gifts, not least her smarts, her high organizational skills, and her energy, but these had been dimmed by the men in her life. First, her father, whose insistence on a Catholic college over Wellesley was not about Rose’s best interests at all but, as she would later learn, political expediency: the great feminist mayor of Boston had sold out his daughter after he was warned by the archbishop, no less, that he would lose the Catholic vote if he allowed Rose a secular, liberal education. As for that Catholic education?
