Bookhouse recently delivered a comprehensive history chronicling University of San Francisco’s Lone Mountain College, a former women’s college high on a hill overlooking the Bay City.
On January 22, 1933, Edward Hanna, the Archbishop of San Francisco, presided over the of the official dedication of the San Francisco College for Women, founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. At the time, Archbishop Hanna may have envisioned that this college, administered by a dedicated order of nuns, would soon become one of the nest Catholic Colleges for women in the world. He never could have predicted, however, that 45 years later, the San Francisco College for Women would have its destiny completely linked to the University of San Francisco, another Catholic institution of higher education, established in 1855, in the city named for Saint Francis of Assisi.
Joanna Budenz Gallegos has done a masterful job in tracing the story of the San Francisco College for Women, from its origins found in the history of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, to the college’s first charter in 1921, to its establishment on Lone Mountain in the first years of the Great Depression, through the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, to its transformation into Lone Mountain College in 1970, and finally to its acquisition by the University of San Francisco in 1978.
Joanna Gallegos has ensured through her superb book the transcendence of the students, faculty, and staff of the San Francisco College for Women and the Lone Mountain College. Her book also guarantees the immortality of the institution itself in the minds of all those who are fortunate enough to read it.