Catholic Feminist Research Articles

Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. By Mary J. Henold. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 292 pp. $32.00 cloth.

Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. By Mary J. Henold. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 292 pp. $32.00 cloth. - Volume 78 Issue 4

Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement Donna Steichen Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. By Mary J. Henold. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 291. $32.00. ISBN 978-0-807-83224-0.) The American Catholic feminist movement, which Mary J. Henold examines in this history, was primarily a phenomenon of women religious, and it almost annihilated their world. This book is thus an account of the early years of a tragedy. But the author does not seem to know it; so reading it is something like hearing "Dies Irae" sung to the tune of "Seventy-Six Trombones." Henold never knew the Catholic universe that flourished from pioneer times through the 1950s. It demanded extraordinary heroism, courage, and apostolic zeal of women religious, who were missionaries, builders, nurses, educators, and social workers to Native Americans, urban immigrants, poor Southern blacks, and frontier farmers. They operated orphan homes, nursed wounded soldiers from both armies during the Civil War, and fought city halls and chancery offices. They were college presidents and hospital CEOs when few women held such positions. Their numbers were always modest, peaking at 180,000 in 1965, but their accomplishments were stunning. But by 1974, when Henold was born, most women's communities had effectively abandoned the charism of carrying one's cross. Certainly a scholar need not live in an era to write its history. Catholic and Feministis adapted from Henold's doctoral dissertation, and it reflects thorough archival research. What she reports did happen; the names and dates are accurate. Henold sees Catholic feminism as a consequence of the Second Vatican Council. It was an expression of the nuns' Catholic faith, she says, describing their revolt and even eventual apostasy as justified. Catholic feminism was indeed a consequence of the council, but I reject her rationale. Conciliar directives for the renewal of religious life were widely misinterpreted. The turmoil of the times disrupted the sisters' lives, shook their certitude, and unsettled their identity, leaving them vulnerable to radicalization. In the guise of "renewal," agitators inundated them in neo-mod-ernist skepticism, Jungian psychology, encounter therapy, and feminist liberation theology. Their Catholic faith destroyed, many nuns seized on feminism as a substitute belief. A strong-minded remnant kept the unadulterated faith, [End Page 888]but in most communities rebels seized power. The evidence is clear in the record of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the formal liaison group between women's congregations and the hierarchy. Like children from Hamelin trooping after the Pied Piper, nuns began vanishing from parishes. Many joined a precipitate exodus from religious life, driven by disillusion, disorientation, or rebel persecution. Others changed careers; between 1965 and 1975, more than half of American teaching sisters fled their classrooms, often to enter master's programs in catechetics or theology. Dissident books appeared, written by Mary Daly, Sidney Callahan, Rosemary Radford Reuther, and other Catholic feminists. Their articles, often published in Americaor Commonwealmagazines, were discussed in secular publications such as Timeand Newsweek. In the nascent prolife movement, activists puzzled over the failure of women religious to enlist as expected. Catholic school students reported that "Sister said" they need not attend Sunday Mass, confess sins, or remain virgin until marriage. Saints and scholars of the "pre-Vatican II" past were replaced in their curricula by new writers such as Gregory Baum, Hans Küng, and Malcolm X. Catholic culture, rooted in the Creed and the sacraments, seemed to be committing suicide. Perhaps because a dissertation requires an original premise, Henold insists that hers is the first book-length study of Catholic feminism. Not even feminist partisan Mary Jo Weaver's New Catholic Women(San Francisco, 1985) meets Henold's standards. She calls Weaver's revealing report on Catholic feminism "the most influential portrait of the movement to date" (p. 246n2) but rejects it as less comprehensive than her own. One book she does commend is Defecting in Place(New York, 1994), an essay collection edited by Medical Mission Sister Miriam Therese Winter, with Protestants Adair Lummis and Allison Stokes. Henold never addresses the substance of...

Mary J Henold, . Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii+291 pp. $32.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewMary J Henold, . Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii+291 pp. $32.00 (cloth).Susan A. Ross, Susan A. RossLoyola University Chicago. Search for more articles by this author , Loyola University Chicago.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 89, Number 4October 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/606087 Views: 20Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Who Are the Catholic Feminists?

Who Are the Catholic Feminists? Leslie Woodcock Tentler (bio) Mary J. Henold . Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 291 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.00. This past summer I published an essay in Commonweal, a liberal Catholic bi-weekly. I recall with a certain embarrassment how startled I was by the title the editors gave it: "What Hillary Means: A Catholic Feminist Reflects." It was the "Catholic feminist" part that fleetingly caught me off guard, although that is in fact what I'd call myself. But "Catholic feminist" still looked, if only for a moment, like one of George Carlin's oxymorons—right up there with "military intelligence" and "jumbo shrimp." It's not just militant secularists, in other words, who harbor doubt about the compatibility of feminism and certain conservative religious traditions. My doubt might be vestigial but it hasn't died, despite my living as a self-defined Catholic feminist for a very long time—almost as long as the author of Catholic and Feminist has been on this earth. I begin on so personal a note in part to emphasize the importance of Mary Henold's subject. Most historians of women, even those who focus on near-contemporary events, don't know much about the individuals and organizations she profiles, still less their significance for Catholicism or the feminist movement generally. I'm delighted that she's taken on so foolishly undervalued a topic. But the personal note—always a temptation with books that address very recent events—is also rooted in my discontent with certain of the author's choices. Henold's protagonists were members of a handful of explicitly Catholic feminist organizations, most of which were numerically dominated by women religious ("nuns" or "sisters," in common parlance). She has almost nothing to say about the relationship between these groups and a much larger Catholic population—women like me, to risk being tediously self-referential—whose self-understanding and life choices were decisively altered by feminist ideas but who never belonged to a Catholic feminist organization. Henold begins her story in 1963, presumably in deference to the appearance that year of a vigorously feminist article in Commonweal. (Not only did philosopher Mary Lauer assail the Catholic theological tradition for its patriarchal [End Page 315] bias; she also called for the ordination of women.) Henold seeks to establish two points: first, that a "movement of Catholic feminists" (p. 2) existed in the early 1960s; and second, that Catholic feminism had immediate roots in the Second Vatican Council, which sat in four sessions between 1962 and 1965. The first assertion is almost certainly wrong. No Catholic feminist organization existed in the United States prior to 1965; nearly all such organizations date from the early 1970s. The first large-scale gathering of Catholic feminists, moreover, did not occur until 1975. Individual Catholic feminists clearly existed in the early 1960s; a "movement" in any meaningful sense did not. Nor does Henold adequately demonstrate the significance of the Second Vatican Council to Catholic feminism. Indeed, historians of American Catholicism have moved away from endowing the Council with causal significance, preferring to see it—correctly, in my view—as an accelerator of social processes already under way. Without sharply rising levels of income and education, American Catholic women could not have read the Council's reforms as relevant to their lives, much less have perceived the Council as egregiously sexist—another assertion for which the author fails to provide adequate documentation. Probably the most startling feature of Henold's generally weak chapter on the 1960s is its failure to analyze the impact, especially for women, of Catholic teaching on contraception. College-educated Catholic women in the 1950s and early 1960s had among the nation's highest birthrates, presumably because—as substantial evidence indicates—they were more scrupulous than their less-educated sisters about trying to honor a teaching that forbade all modes of birth control save abstinence or rhythm. By the early 1960s, discontent with that teaching was beginning to surface publicly; by the mid-1960s it had led to a lively debate among Catholics...

The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion. By Tina Beattie

The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion. By Tina Beattie

Catholic and feminist: the surprising history of the American Catholic feminist movement

This title presents the paradoxes of a faith-based feminism.In 1963, as Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique appeared and civil rights activists marched on Washington, a separate but related social movement emerged among American Catholics, says Mary Henold. Thousands of Catholic feminists - both lay women and women religious - marched, strategized, theologized, and prayed together, building sisterhood and confronting sexism in the Roman Catholic Church. In the first history of American Catholic feminism, Henold explores the movement from the 1960s through the early 1980s, showing that although Catholic feminists had much in common with their sisters in the larger American feminist movement, Catholic feminism was distinct and had not been simply imported from outside.Catholic feminism grew from within the church, rooted in women's own experiences of Catholicism and religious practice, Henold argues. She identifies the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), an inspiring but overtly sexist event that enraged and exhilarated Catholic women in equal measure, as a catalyst of the movement within the church. Catholic feminists regularly explained their feminism in terms of their commitment to a gospel mandate for social justice, liberation, and radical equality. They considered feminism to be a Christian principle.Yet as Catholic feminists confronted sexism in the church and the world, Henold explains, they struggled to integrate the two parts of their self-definition. Both Catholic culture and feminist culture indicated that such a conjunction was unlikely, if not impossible. Henold demonstrates that efforts to reconcile faith and feminism reveal both the complex nature of feminist consciousness and the creative potential of religious feminism.

Strategic Essentialism in Nationalist Discourses: Sketching a Feminist Agenda in the Study of Religion

In the United States, celebrations such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Columbus Day, or Veteran’s Day, to name a few, rhetorically function to shore up Christian kyriarchal, militarist, and heterosexist nationalism. In an essay on nationalism and globalization, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza states that “patriotic nationalism is the most powerful discourse of the day. . . . The rhetoric of the most recent presidential campaign [2004] has driven home the degree to which religion is implicated in such nationalist discourse.”1 The call to think of nationalism as the frame for critical studies in feminism and religion necessitates the move to study religion in the cultural-political context of nationalist rhetoric. Consequently, feminist proposals in religion will need to closely examine the cultural contexts and the rhetorical function of gender in nationalist agendas. One way to frame this analysis is to examine the issue of gender essentialism. On the one hand, the problem of essentialism has been identified as the locus of various hegemonic and ideological controls of women; on the other hand, some feminists writing in the study of theology and religion strategically retrieve modes of essentialism to combat the ideological representations of masculine superiority. An examination of the way in which the term is used in contemporary feminist theory shows that reliance on essentialism, whether strategic or otherwise, extracts a cost that remains politically perturbing. In making this assertion, I refer specifically to Schussler Fiorenza’s move to the rhetorical; what is the effect of deploying strategic essentialist positions on cultural, social, or biological femininity on the intersecting axes of oppression on wo/men such as race, class, gender, and sexuality? An example of the way in which strategic essentialism can be mobilized for theology has been presented by Nancy Dallavalle in her essay “Neither Idolatry nor Iconoclasm: A Critical Essentialism for Catholic Feminist Theology.”2 Dallavalle claims that feminist rejection of gender essentialism creates an “agnosticism” of gendered identity. According to Dallavalle, reliance on biological sexuality requires the strategic, or, to use her term, the critical use of essentialism to imagine in a more capacious way, the possibility of gender as a theological resource within the Catholic tradition. In this view, gendered identity has sacramental potential and women have a theologically legitimate way to speak of themselves as infused with the divine. Critical essentialism here functions to

The Challenges of Opening a Dialogue between Catholic and Secular Feminist Legal Theorists

Catholic Feminist Legal Theory has much to contribute to our analysis of various social, political and legal issues. However, in order for a Catholic Feminist Legal Theory to make a contribution to the dialogue about issues of law and public policy, it has to be able to speak effectively to those outside of the faith tradition. In particular, it has to get past the instinctive reaction of many people that a Catholic feminist theory cannot be reconciled with secular feminist theory. The question addressed in this Article is whether it is possible for a Catholic Feminist Legal Theory to be taken seriously by secular feminists and other legal scholars. The Article identifies and discusses some of the major challenges to the articulation of a persuasive Catholic Feminist Legal Theory to a non-Catholic feminist audience. With respect to each of the issues identified as a challenge to secular feminists, my focus in this Article is not whether the Church's position on the issue in question is correct. Rather, the focus is whether the position of the Church on the issue can be shown to be grounded in truth claims that do not sound in subordination of women or otherwise do violence to the aims of secular feminists. The Article addresses five issues: (1) the place and role of Mary within Catholicism; (2) a historical narrative of subordination in the Church; and the Church's position on (3) contraception, (4) marriage and family and (5) the ordination of women. It concludes that the first two of those issues, properly understood, do not present any problem from a secular feminist perspective. With respect to the third and fourth issues, it concludes that although the Church's positions on contraception and marriage/family are grounded in claims that do not on the surface seem inherently oppressive to women, the positions do imply a view of homosexuality that will be difficult for secular feminists to accept. Compounding the difficulty, the fifth issue, ordination presents a more directly challenging problem from a secular perspective. Thus, ultimately I am pessimistic about the ability of a Catholic Feminist Legal Theory to be able to engage in meaningful dialogue with secular feminists.

No Right to Judge: Feminism and the Judiciary in Third Republic France

Women in France were admitted to the legal profession by law in 1900, but they were prohibited from ascending to the judiciary until 1946. Once they entered the profession, feminist lawyers demanded “the right to judge” and challenged gender discrimination in employment. They found allies among juvenile justice reformers who advocated the utility of placing women on the bench of the new youth courts created by the law of July 22, 1912. This article demonstrates that the legislative efforts to secure women's judicial eligibility were thwarted by the perception of women's social and cultural inferiority and by the fact of their legal inequality. Women's protest of their unequal treatment formed an inherent claim to equal citizenship and threatened to disrupt the traditional power relations between the sexes. Les femmes françaises ont gagné le droit d'exercer le métier d'avocate en 1900, mais elles n'ont pas pu devenir juges avant 1946. Une fois entrées dans la profession, les avocates féministes ont réclamé « le droit de juger » et ont défié la discrimination contre les femmes au travail. Elles ont trouvé des alliés parmi les réformateurs du système judiciaire juvénile qui préconisaient de permettre aux femmes d'exercer le métier de juge dans les nouveaux tribunaux pour enfants et adolescents créés par la loi du 22 juillet 1912. Cet article démontre que les tentatives de réforme législative visant de permettre aux femmes de devenir juges ont été bloquées par la perception de l'inégalité sociale et culturelle de la femme, et par son incapacité politique. Les revendications professionnelles des avocates impliquaient le droit à la citoyenneté, et menaçaient de bouleverser le rapport traditionnel entre les sexes.

Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement (review)

Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement (review)

Godly Sex, a Queer Quest of Holiness

Drawing from sources as varied as the Catholic Catechism, feminist theologies and queer studies, this work offers a Creation-centered anthropological exposition of sexuality that is embedded in God's originating act of Eros in Creation. Recovering an understanding of sexuality that is both sacramental and erotic opens theological conversation into an understanding of Creation as portraits of erotic relationality, capable of wedding justice to sexuality. Within this theological portrait of human sexuality as an expression of God's own self-revelation in Creation, a new articulation of queer sexuality emerges, providing distinct insights into the holiness of sex. Working from multi-denominational Christian sources of queer narrative and theology, the author poses four distinct contributions or queer insights into sexuality. These contributions not only deepen our understanding of Eros and God but also sex and the common good.

Ecology and Mary: An Ecological Theology of Mary as the New Eve in Response to the Church’s Challenge for a Faith-Based Education in Ecological Responsibility

The Church’s interpretation of the current ecological crisis as a moral crisis is the catalyst for this essay, which proposes a newly constructed faith-based model for ecological dialogue and education. The exploration and reinterpretation of the traditional Church doctrine of the Virgin Mary as the new Eve provides a theme from which an ecological theology of Mary is constructed. Papal and Episcopal statements that call for a moral concern and response to the growing urgency of the ecological crisis are discussed in order to promote awareness of the involvement of the Church’s leadership in the issue. Analyses and interpretations by scholars in the second century Church on the doctrine of Mary as the new Eve are presented and reinterpreted to create a viable model with the potential to nurture ecological awareness and responsibility in the contemporary Church. The construction of an ecological Marian theology is approached through review and analysis of the 1974 visionary pastoral letter of Pope Paul VI, Marialis Cultus (To Honor Mary), the writings of Catholic feminist theologian and Sister of St. Joseph Elizabeth Johnson, Catholic Ecuadorian-American theologian Jeanette Rodriguez, and those of other major feminist, womanist, and liberationist theologians.

Prie katalikiškojo feminizmo ištakų Lietuvoje

The aim of this article is to present an interpretation of Catholic feminism (also known as Christian feminism) in the Lithuanian Catholic women's newspapers Lietuvaitė (Lithuanian girl), Moteris (Woman) and Naujoji Vaidilutė (New Priestess) during the first four decades of the 20th century. While in the beginning the discourse in these journals can be considered one of the most feminist among Catholic women in Europe, later, in the 1930s, it developed along the standard patterns of Catholic Action. The rather conservative International Union of Catholic Women's Leagues had a strong impact on Lithuanian Catholic women's discourse. Catholic feminism stressed women's duties to the family and society and thus also their responsibilities. This was the middle way between liberal feminism, which emphasized the rights of individual women, and socialist thought where women were formally equal to men but disadvantaged by the double burden of work. Lithuanian Catholic women maintained a balance between accepting the traditional role of the mother and embracing feminist aspirations. Even though in some respects Lithuanian women were constrained by Catholic traditions, they were not impeded by them and managed to raise questions of importance to women. They were able to extend the woman's sphere beyond the family to include the Church and society.

“Il en faut un peu”: Farm Women and Feminism in Québec and France Since 1945

Certain farm women's organizations continue to represent the social feminist tradition of Canadian suffragism and the broader social Catholic feminism still influential elsewhere. Canadian historians have often criticized such groups in contrast with a more aggressive, equal-rights feminism found among urban and rural women in both waves of feminism. We argue that, far from being conservative, groups identified as social feminist serve to integrate farm women into public debates and political action, including feminism. We outline the history of the Cercles de fermières of Québec, founded in 1915, and the French Groupements de vulgarisation-développement agricoles féminins, founded since 1959. A comparison of members with nonmembers in each country and across the group, based on survey data collected in 1989 for 389 cases, suggests that club involvement has counteracted demographic characteristics expected to produce antifeminism. In general, we find less hostility to second-wave feminism than might be expected. Relying mainly on responses to open-ended questions, we argue that, for our subjects, feminism is tempered by distaste for confrontation. Issues supported by the movement for women's liberation are favoured by farm women, but the liberationist style and tactics are eschewed. Those of our respondents identified as feminists express preference for a complementarity modelled on the idealized family.

Enfermagem e o planejamento familiar: as interfaces da contracepção

O presente trabalho trata da análise de alguns aspectos do Planejamento Familiar voltados para a contracepção de acordo com o que foi publicado na Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem no período de 1960 a 1997. A questão analisada, considera o discurso da Igreja (católica), do Estado e das Feministas, buscando perceber o posicionamento da Enfermagem . Os registros encontrados revelam que, na década de 60, predominou o discurso da Igreja, sendo que na década de 70 emerge também o discurso do Estado. Na última década analisada, não foi identificado o discurso da Igreja, o do Estado consolida-se e mantém-se o das Feministas. Estes resultados sugerem que a Enfermagem de algum modo reconhece o Planejamento Familiar como pauta de discussão. A metodologia utilizada possibilitou identificar quais os compromissos da Enfermagem em relação ao Planejamento Familiar, enquanto necessidade do ser humano nas suas relações com o Estado e a Sociedade.

"Can Women Become Priests?": A Catholic Feminist Perspective

"Can Women Become Priests?": A Catholic Feminist Perspective

“Reflection: Must We Forget?”

ABSTRACT This reflection has not yet been preached. As a Catholic laywoman, I do not have a place to preach directly to an assembly of the faithful, but as a lay member of the Order of Preachers, I answer the call to preach by writing. The texts are those for the 24h Sunday in Ordinary Time of Year A in the Catholic lectionary: Sirach 27:3–28:7; Psalm 103; Romans 14:7–9; Matthew 18:21–35. My approach is that of a Catholic feminist theology student; I combine close reading of the biblical text and commentaries, my own experience of abuse and healing and study of the literature of abuse and healing, and a critical approach to accreted meanings and underlying assumptions about key words in the faith; in this case, the critical examination is of the way forgiveness has been confused with forgetting.

A Catholic Feminist Perspective on Pacem in Terris

A Catholic Feminist Perspective on Pacem in Terris

Challenges to the Role of Theological Anthropology in Feminist Theologies

[Convictions about human personhood, rooted in an analysis of women's experience, are often foundational to Catholic feminist theologians. Drawing on the work of Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Rebecca Chopp, the author identifies challenges to Catholic feminist theological anthropology. Fulkerson and Chopp adopt a poststructuralist approach to human personhood, emphasizing the relationships that exist among human consciousness, language, and politics. Although poststructuralism's understanding of subjectivity differs significantly from that of most Euro-American Catholic feminists, it does offer ideas that Catholic feminists need to explore further.]

Lost for words?: Brazilian liberationism in the 1990s

Lost for Words? explores rise and decline of progressive Catholic grassroots activism and its drive for social justice and democratic change in four low-income neighborhoods in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Ottmann focuses on obstacles faced by poor who took seriously claim that the people were to transform Brazilian society bottom up. He follows their travails through periods of democratization, mass unemployment, and conservative backlash within Church. Goetz Frank Ottmann moves beyond purely political analysis to record how residents and progressive Catholic activists were drawn into a struggle for a juster society, and how this movement began to unravel even before it reached its peak in early 1980s. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, and drawing on theoretical insights from recent debates on social movements and sociology of religion, he examines how, by early 1990s, liberationist movement had lost its following, lost its allies, failed to achieve its core goals, and seemed to die. Ottmann then shows how in recent years activists have worked to create a new and pragmatic form of religious activism, one that draws on a range of agendas, including Catholic feminism.