Why did the FBI recruit Catholic high school girls in Chicago?

One day in 1947, FBI officials showed up at Notre Dame High School for Girls on Chicago’s Northwest Side. They were looking for a few good Catholic girls — to work at the FBI. One of the students at the school that day, Patricia DePasquale, talked years later about these FBI recruiters.

“Working for the FBI, getting this job after high school, it gave her the independence and freedom that I think she wanted,” said DePasquale’s daughter Carmie Callobre.

Callobre, who lives in Skokie, said that back in the 1940s, her mother jumped at the opportunity to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For the next several years, DePasquale was a switchboard operator for the FBI’s Chicago office.

She even dated some FBI agents. “Mom was gorgeous when she was young, and she dated a lot of people,” Callobre said. “And she definitely did date FBI agents. They would just take her anywhere downtown. She would go to, probably, the Berghoff. Definitely Italian Village.”

DePasquale eventually left the FBI and started working at a law firm. The man she eventually fell in love with and married — Callobre’s father, Edmund Daugird — was the manager of a bar in Rosemont. DePasquale, who died in 2024, later worked at restaurants, catering businesses and a corporate cafeteria. Years later, Callobre wondered how common it was for the FBI to recruit girls from Catholic schools in Chicago.

“I was flabbergasted the first time … she told us about that,” Callobre said. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s odd.’”

In more recent decades, the FBI has become known for its competitive hiring process. But there is an extensive history of the agency recruiting high school girls to work office jobs in an earlier era. How much of that initiative focused on Chicago and Catholic schools? The FBI did not answer requests for information for this story, but historians and former high school recruits cast light on those hiring practices, which eventually set the stage for women to become FBI special agents.

‘Catholic girls would fit in’ at the FBI

Even as Pat DePasquale’s life diverged from the FBI, she kept in touch with her former co-workers at the bureau, maintaining those ties by joining the Society of FBI Alumni.

“It started as a group of ladies who went to lunch and just wanted to keep their FBI connection and their friendships together,” said Western Springs resident Jane McCarty, who was the Society of FBI Alumni’s president until November.

Formally organized in 1973, the alumni group began inviting men to join in 1979, but most of the members are still women. “We have agents in our group, but predominantly we’re support staff — intelligence analysts, IT people, typists, the clerical staff,” McCarty said. The national organization has a chapter in Chicago with 120 members.

McCarty said the FBI regularly sent recruiters to high schools all over the country, and not just Catholic schools. Even now, the FBI has Teen Academy and Youth Academy programs, which “allow high school and middle school students an opportunity to get a comprehensive look into today’s FBI.”

When McCarty was a student at a public high school in California in 1968, FBI recruiters showed up there. A month after McCarty graduated, she started working for the FBI as a stenographer.

“Today, I probably could not get my job, because you need a college degree,” she said.

This recruiting tactic was not targeted at Catholic school girls exclusively. But when McCarty transferred to the FBI’s Chicago office in 1979, she did notice a number of the local employees were from Notre Dame High School for Girls. (Located at 3000 N. Mango Ave. in the Belmont Central neighborhood, the school closed in 2016.)

“Those Catholic girls would fit in because, you know, you had to have a certain-length skirt,” McCarty said. “The rules were the rules. I mean, we couldn’t wear pants until ’72. There were so many rules like that, it would be like a Catholic school.”

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, author of the 2007 book The FBI: A History, said a strategy of hiring Catholic girls would line up perfectly with longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s attitude in the post-World War II years, when the United States was in the grip of fears over communism.

“He placed a huge emphasis on recruiting Catholics because he thought that Catholics would be reliably anti-communist,” said Jeffreys-Jones, a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “They had the moral code and backbone. He went out of his way to praise the Catholic schools in America. He explicitly said that these schools have amongst their teaching staff not a single example of an atheist. And of course, communism, amongst other things, stands for atheism. That was his outlook.”

Hoover did send FBI agents to recruit young women from Catholic schools on the East Coast; Jeffreys-Jones said he’d be surprised if Hoover didn’t do the same thing in Chicago, a city still heavily influenced by its Catholic culture.

During World War II, the FBI had vastly expanded the number of women on its payroll. In addition to working as secretaries, stenographers and switchboard operators, women began to take on more skilled activities, such as statistical analysis and code-breaking. “However, they still weren’t permitted to become the elite special agents,” Jeffreys-Jones said.

Hoover’s sexism was a major obstacle to that sort of reform, although as Jeffreys-Jones noted, women faced similar prejudice throughout the world of law enforcement. “I think it is frustrating for women to serve only in the lower ranks of an agency like the FBI, and we do have proof definitive that women can make very good detectives,” he said. (As evidence, Jeffreys-Jones pointed to 19th-century Chicago sleuth Kate Warne, whom he wrote about in his 2025 book Allan Pinkerton: America’s Legendary Detective and the Birth of Private Security.)

Moving up the ranks

In 1971, 16-year-old Nancy McRae wrote a letter to Hoover saying she hoped to become a special agent. Hoover wrote back: “Because of the nature of the duties our Special Agents are called upon to perform, we do not employ women in that position. We must have Agents who are qualified to cope with any situation they may face.”

Hoover died in 1972, ending his 48-year reign as the director of the FBI and its precursor agency, the Bureau of Investigation. Just two months after his death, the FBI finally allowed women to become special agents.

“What I know, what all of you know, and what Hoover either did not know or did not acknowledge, is that women are absolutely essential to effective law enforcement,” then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a 2024 speech to the group Women in Federal Law Enforcement. At the time he spoke, 24% of FBI special agents — and 37% of agent trainees — were women.

Wray resigned in January 2025 as Donald Trump returned to the presidency, setting the stage for Trump to appoint Kash Patel as FBI director. Since then, the word “Diversity” was painted over on a wall at the FBI Academy, and critics said proposed changes to the FBI’s physical fitness standards would be unfair to women.

Christina Riebandt, an FBI special agent in Chicago, wrote a 2021 article for the FBI’s internal magazine, The Investigator, about Nancy McRae, who’d received that rejection letter from Hoover back in 1971. “Many women in the Bureau, myself included, have this letter pinned up or framed at our desks as a reminder that we once were unable to hold the position we have now,” Riebandt wrote.

McRae, who was born in Chicago and raised in Connecticut, did end up working in law enforcement after all, but at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration rather than the FBI. McRae said she felt “honored” that Hoover’s letter to her became a touchstone for women in the FBI. “To think that a letter that made me so angry 50 years ago could bring such joy and happiness today is truly amazing,” McRae told Riebandt.

Notable women in the FBI have included Kathleen McChesney. She’d also been rebuffed by the FBI back in 1971, when she was a student at Washington State University. An FBI recruiter on campus refused to give her a job application, saying, “The FBI doesn’t have women as agents.” Hired after Hoover’s death, McChesney eventually became the special agent in charge of the Chicago division in the early 2000s, overseeing investigations of Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese and Gov. George Ryan.

Although Jane McCarty began working for the FBI during Hoover’s reign, she said she didn’t experience much discrimination. She eventually worked her way up through the ranks to become an asset forfeiture investigator. “Somebody took a chance on me,” she said. “Somebody said, ‘I think she could do the job.’”

Callobre said her mom spoke nostalgically of her time as an FBI employee — and McCarty said that attitude is common among the Society of FBI Alumni’s members.

“We still have the FBI in our heart,” McCarty said. “We all have very fond memories of our work there, and are very proud.”

Robert Loerzel is a journalist based in Chicago.