Catholic sisters (also known as “women religious”) have shaped the contours of St. Louis’ cultural, economic, and political landscapes from the city’s origins in the mid-18th century to today. Their archives are rich repositories of documents, visual resources, and artifacts that demonstrate the centrality of women religious to the histories of migration, colonialism, mission, Indigeneity, enslavement, education, segregation and desegregation, healthcare, and social reform. 

Despite St. Louis’s prominent Catholic heritage, the nuns who established the schools, hospitals, social service agencies, and asylums that formed the backbone of the city’s social infrastructure are often overlooked in public discourse and excluded from traditional histories of city “founders.” The women’s congregations who shaped these enduring civic institutions not only influenced the trajectory of St. Louis, but as they sent out sisters to set up similar foundations across the United States and around the world, they created networks of influence that spanned the barriers of geography, class, race, and gender. The archival collections that document these wide-ranging activities illuminate the history of St. Louis as a globally-connected city. However, most scholarship considers nuns primarily as the protagonists of a Catholic story, neglecting their broader significance in American and global contexts. Furthermore, traditional narratives of imperial expansion focus predominantly on male figures: explorers, merchants, soldiers, and occasionally, the lone male missionary. However, by 1850, this landscape had been reshaped by contingents of women religious who supplanted the male missionary as educators, nurses, and evangelizers. Their vital contributions, characterized by everyday acts and a self-effacing mentality, remained largely invisible to both their contemporaries and later historians. 

Shifting our focus to the work of women religious, specifically their contributions to building institutions of care in national and transnational contexts, allows us to reconceptualize the study of urban development with healthcare and educational complexes at its core. Because Catholic sisters built and managed institutions that served populations well beyond the Catholic community, a close examination of their archives uncover the experiences of a diverse cross-section of the urban population who are often not featured in standard histories of urban development. These include the ill, orphans, children, immigrants, and non-Catholic populations who relied on the institutions run by sisters.