Education: Plain-Clothes Women

North Dakota’s Protestants, who wanted to oust 75 Roman Catholic nuns teaching in the state’s public schools, thought they had won the battle. They got a law passed forbidding public-school teachers to wear religious garb (TIME, July 12). They hoped that this would be enough.

But the Catholic Church had faced such laws before (in Canada and Mexico) and knew just what to do. Rather than allow schools to close for lack of teachers, said Bishop Vincent J. Ryan of Bismarck last week, nuns would be told to wear ‘respectable secular dress. Some of the law’s sponsors solicited support [by claiming] that it would keep Catholic sisters from teaching . . . [but] no law can, under the protection of our Constitution, discriminate against any teacher on account of religious membership or belief.”

“Sisters,” explained an aide, “will wear ordinary dresses, modern but modest— not extreme. They will wear some kind of head covering. Some may wear no head covering at all if their hair grows out enough. They will probably make their own dresses.”