Catholic Women Research Articles

Between Feminist Solidarity and “Bible-Verse-Throwers”: Catholic Feminist Activists on Social Media and Experiences of Agency

Abstract Focusing on German-speaking progressive Catholic women, the present study aims at investigating religious women’s feminist activism on social media in relation to questions of agency. It does so by focusing on women’s own experiences of approval and empowerment on the one hand and criticism and disempowerment on the other, attending to the possible role of specific social media platforms’ affordances in this context. Taking an actor-centered approach, this article draws on in-depth interviews that are analyzed through a cgt-framework. Attention is paid to how different social media ‘bubbles’ and platform-specific affordances and vernaculars impact the responses the women receive and their possibilities of reacting thereto as their content moves between different platforms beyond their control. The results are discussed against the background of theories of agency in the context of gender, religion, and digital media, arguing for an understanding of agency as relational, situated, and dispersed.

‘They lived happily ever after’? Practices of sustaining the durability of Roman Catholic marriage in the context of transformations in intimacy in late modernity

Although in late-modern societies the idea of a ‘forever’ relationship has lost its dominant status, it is consistently upheld by the Roman Catholic Church. The aim of the article is to analyse the practices of sustaining the durability of Catholic marriage, which we treat as ways of adapting to the tensions between late-modern models of intimacy and the rule of indissolubility of marriage. We refer to data collected in qualitative research among educated Roman Catholic women in Poland. Using the lived religion approach, we demonstrate how these women sacralise actions within marriage that have been secularised in the late-modern world, while also using late modernity as a reservoir of meanings, leading to hybridisation of religious practices. We argue that sustaining conservative religious rules is often based on actions in which religious aspects are negotiated and transformed. Religion operates ‘non-autonomously’ in these processes, entering a relationship with elements that are originally not religious.

Catholic Women’s Activism for Abortion in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico and Contests over Legitimacy

Building on recent research, this paper recounts the emergence of Catholic women’s activism in favor of the right to abortion in late twentieth-century Mexico. The article argues that contests over legitimacy—specifically, disputes among Catholics about which beliefs are legitimately Catholic—are central to this history. In this case, the article follows Catholic women’s attempts to legitimize their position in favor of the right to abortion and Catholic authorities’ attempts to delegitimize the same idea. The paper concludes with a 1992 episode in Guanajuato that has not received much scholarly attention, when secular and Catholic feminists collaborated. Because these Catholic activists faced opposition from angry protestors, they set up a press conference to dispel any misconceptions and legitimize their own Catholic position in favor of the right to abortion to the Mexican public. The resistance Elvia Neri, a retired Catholic woman and mayordoma for her church, faced led her to share her testimonio, a rare archival source that publicly reconciled a commitment to both the Catholic faith and reproductive rights. Scholarship on feminist mobilization has at least included the work of Catholic activists who advocated the right to abortion. However, these contests over legitimacy have led scholarship on Catholic women’s activism to neglect Catholic perspectives that favor the right to abortion.

New Approaches to Political Catholicism and Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Authors from a transnational research group analyze Catholic women’s political mobilizations, acknowledging Catholic women’s heritage of organization to maintain their religious practice in their communities from the colonial era onward. These activities afforded women opportunities for civic experience and leadership roles that continued through Mexico’s nineteenth-century political and social debates. This special issue focuses on how twentieth-century women developed new approaches to address revolutionary policies and projects, radical mobilizations, technological changes, and transformations within the Church following the Second Vatican Council. The authors argue that Catholic women have continued to envision themselves as political actors within the framework of their religion, expanding goals to transform religious and civic practices.

Unorthodox Pleas for Contract Schools: Mother Mary Joseph Lynch and the Boarding School for Native Students in Morris, Minnesota

ABSTRACT: To better understand how Catholic women religious could participate in the "cultural genocide" of Native Americans perpetrated by boarding schools, this article considers Mother Mary Joseph Lynch, a Sister of Mercy, who founded Minnesota's Morris Industrial School for Indians in 1887. Using lenses provided by Susan Neiman and Mary Fulbrook, the article delves into the beginnings of the boarding school in Morris and considers what prompted the Sisters of Mercy to begin such an endeavor before analyzing several texts created by Lynch. The article begins with the assumption that the Sisters of Mercy wanted to be true to the values articulated by their founder, Catherine McAuley, as it also trusts the countless Native peoples who have conveyed the generational harm done to them by a process that systematically attempted to destroy their identities and their cultures.

Translating Confessions: Korean Vernacular Voicing of the Penitent Self

precis: This essay examines how early-nineteenth-century Korean Catholic women practiced confession within the Sinographic linguistic context. When Korean Catholics did not have access to confession through priests, they performed confession through both vernacular writing and brush talk, a method of communication that enabled spoken confession to be "heard" in written Sinographs. This essay draws special attention to the Korean Catholic women whose celibacy was disallowed by the ecclesial authority of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris. Introducing the stories of Korean Catholic women from a Latin letter written by one of Korea's earliest priests, Thomas Ch'oe Yangŏp, the essay demonstrates how Korean Catholic women navigated the multimodality of confessional practice.

Catholic Women as Subjects of Debate

Abstract Through the analysis of empirical material that discusses women’s positions in religion in Flanders/Belgium, this article shows how local religion/secular dynamics are co-constituted by issues of race and gender. Starting from the premise that religious women’s (self-)positioning must be understood from a critical perspective on both secularity and race, we show how a.) mainstream secular and racialising discourses aim to discipline various religious subjects by using questions of gender justice, and b.) ethnically mainstream young Catholic women partially resist this by distinguishing themselves from religio-racialised others and producing whiteness. Based on our analysis, we argue for taking women’s self-positioning towards religious others seriously as shaping a gendered religio-racialised location. Thinking through the production of a gendered religio-racialised location reveals how white Christian normativity depends on performativity and is a gendered construct. As such, we demonstrate the need for further investigations of the co-constructions of race, religion and gender focusing on the perspectives and positions of those normally excluded from these critical discussions, namely ethnic majority Christians in Europe.

Religion Lived In-Between. Time, Space, and Religious Practices of Roman Catholic Women in Poland

Abstract The article focuses on the role of time and space in the religious practices of Roman Catholic women. It aims to demonstrate not only how the spatial-temporal conditions of everyday life shape religious practices, but also how the space and time for practicing religion are produced as a result of practices. The article also shows how religious and other practices compete for limited spatial-temporal resources, contributing to the transformation of religious practices by incorporating new materials, technologies, and meanings. Based on the results of qualitative research among Roman Catholic women in Poland and using the praxeological lived religion approach, the analysis shows that religion is lived by women in-between—interwoven in temporal and spatial terms between other practices, either dominated by them or sometimes gaining a monopoly. The shape of religion in everyday life, therefore, does not only depend solely on the dynamics of religious practices, but also results from tensions between various social practices.

„Našlaičiams vaikams reikalinga pagalba“: pamestinukų žindyvės Vilniuje XVIII amžiaus antrojoje pusėje

The article focuses on the wet-nurses for foundlings in Vilnius in the second half of the eighteenth century when the number of children abandoned by their parents grew significantly. Wet-nurses who nursed foundlings have already received some attention in previous historiography, however, there have been no attempts to more thoroughly explore who were the women employed by hospitals and other charitable institutions as wet-nurses, what were the conditions of their employment, and how important could the income earned from this work have been in supporting their households. The research, based primarily on two distinct lists of foundlings and wet-nurses from 1789 and 1790 (see apendices), reveals that the wet-nurses were married Catholic women who had given birth several months earlier. The sources show that, throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, their monthly payment of 8 złotys remained unchanged despite inflation or other economic processes as well as the the increase in demand of women able and willing to work as wet-nurses for foundlings when the numbers of abandoned children grew significantly. Nevertheless, such employment provided women with, albeit low, but permanent and–if the nursling did not perish early–lasting income. The research demonstrates that at least some of the wet-nurses were married to artisans and merchants, and resided in Vilnius and its suburbs, not, as was usual in other European regions, the countryside, although there are indications in later sources that foundlings were actually placed with nurses of the surrounding countryside. The registers of baptisms and marriages reveal that at least some of these women were married, baptized their own children at the parish church of St John, and acted as godmothers to the children of other parishioners. However, the data on the social status of women employed as wet-nurses for foundlings is insufficient to confirm that–just like in other European cities–they were destitute and came from the lowest strata of society.

“Dear Lord, If It Were Up to Me, It Wouldn’t Happen”: Marital Duty, Consent, and Catholic Women’s Sexual Agency in 1950s French-Speaking Belgium

“Dear Lord, If It Were Up to Me, It Wouldn’t Happen”: Marital Duty, Consent, and Catholic Women’s Sexual Agency in 1950s French-Speaking Belgium

The relationship between religious affiliation and menopause symptoms and attitudes in United States women

ObjectivesThis study's aim is to examine patterns of menopause symptoms and attitudes among United States women from different religious affiliations. Study designWe used data from a national sample of midlife and older adults. For this analysis, we included only women who were postmenopausal or had undergone hysterectomy. We constructed univariate and multivariate logistic regression models to examine the relationship between religious affiliation and menopause symptoms and attitudes while adjusting for potential confounders. Main outcome measuresMenopause symptoms (hot flashes, pain in sexual interactions, pleasure in sexual interactions, trouble falling asleep) and attitudes (relief on periods stopping, regret on periods stopping, worry about becoming less attractive) measured by self-report on Likert scales. ResultsAcross denominations, 47 % of women experienced hot flashes, 48 % experienced pain in sexual interactions, 95 % experienced pleasure, and 88 % had trouble falling asleep. Regarding attitudes towards menopause and aging, 62 % felt relief in their periods stopping, while 56 % expressed worry about becoming less attractive with aging. Baptist women were more likely to experience hot flashes and trouble falling asleep compared to Catholic women. However, when adjusted for smoking status, this relationship did not persist. Unaffiliated and Spiritual women were less likely to experience trouble falling asleep and more likely to report pleasure in sexual interactions compared to Catholic women. Spiritual women were significantly more likely to feel regret on periods stopping compared to Catholics. ConclusionsThere is a relationship between religious affiliation and the menopause experience. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering social influences on women's health.

“Whether my Body Breaks or the Plum Tree Withers”: Iwanaga Maki, Social Welfare Pioneer, and the jūjikai Women's Religious Order

Maria Iwanaga Maki (1849–1920) was 23 years old in 1873 when she returned home after a community exile and persecutions of more than 3000 people carried out by the Meiji government. Historians in the public record refer to Iwanaga as otoko‐masari (man‐nish) when she stood up to a representative of the Shogun, while in her public work she became known as the sister of the intersection. She was a social‐work pioneer, believed to have cared for upwards of 900 children. During her family's imprisonment in Bizen (Okayama), Iwanaga's younger sister, Fui, and her father died. Iwanaga and her compatriots started the jūjikai Cross Society, that was the first Japanese Catholic women's order post‐persecution in 1879, working to assist those affected by epidemics and beginning one of, if not the first orphanage in the Meiji era in Japan. In this article by including a family tree, I consider how memory and emotion is transmitted across generations, drawing on Marianne Hirsch's “postmemory,” in the light of the narratives about Iwanaga. I examine three primary sources, including two spoken records and a photograph, to better understand the emotional person of Iwanaga, and her institution of onnabeya, or women's rooms.

Saintly Protest: Women Religious, Religious Women, and the Early United Farm Worker Movement

Abstract: While the image of César Chávez graces the face of U.S. postal stamps, less recognized are the women of the United Farm Worker Movement. Yet Catholic women, from the better-known Dolores Huerta to regional organizers like Lupe Anguiano, were critical to the union’s early victories. This article begins the work of excavating the lives and labor of the women religious and religious women of the union, with an emphasis on the activism of Catholic Latinas. When structural changes within the Catholic Church of the mid-to-late twentieth century prompted women to reexamine their faith, they responded by supporting movements, such as the grape strike of 1965–1970, on picket lines, with fasts, and for some, with full-time labor. “Saintly Protest” turns to the grape strike and explores how Catholic women, including women religious, came to support the union, and the dynamic relationship between la cotidiana , their activism, and their faith.

“San Juan is Catholic”: The Hijas de María in Puerto Rico’s Parishes and Streets, 1872–1918

Abstract: The Hijas de María, a global Catholic laywomen’s organization, were active in Puerto Rico from the end of Spanish rule through North American rule. Their organizational structure and their pieties buttressed the Church’s few pastors and, after the North American invasion, its new hierarchy. In the space that the institutional Church could not fill, the Hijas’ devotions provided the laity with new, feminized paths for holiness. The devotional life of the Hijas de María developed within new global currents in the Church, including increasing Roman influence and a greater focus on children and their potential sanctity. This is also a story of how Puerto Rican Catholic women met modernity and its secular influences and claimed the island for their own and the interests of religion and the Church.

Factors associated with postpartum family planning use in Rwanda.

Resumption and initiation of contraceptive methods after delivery are of critical importance in ensuring the well-being of the mother and the newborn. However, evidence related with postpartum family planning in Rwanda is scanty. This study employed survival analysis techniques to study the time to resumption or initiation of contraceptive methods after childbirth in Rwandan women and the associated factors. Data were collected from the 2020 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey (RDHS). Descriptive statistics were obtained after adjusting for study design. Initial analysis was conducted using the Kaplan-Meier method, followed by univariate and multivariable Cox Hazard proportional models to study factors associated with the initiation of contraceptive use after delivery. Cox Model assumptions were tested using scaled Schoenfeld Residuals. 5682 women who delivered in the five years preceding the survey were included in this research. The percentage of women who used modern contraceptives was 32%, 55%, 67%, and 79% at one month, six months, one year and two years respectively. Delivery by cesarean section, access to health insurance, and an increase in the number of children under five years of age were associated with increased chances of utilizing modern contraceptives after delivery. An increase in women's age and in the ideal number of children and women with a history of terminated pregnancy were associated with reduced chances of using postpartum family planning. The influence of religion was highlighted, with Catholic women associated with high contraceptive use. There is a need to strengthen postpartum family planning in Rwanda. Policy makers and clinicians should provide additional customized interventions for women with factors associated with low use.

Chrześcijański feminizm w Afryce – kontynentalne dyskursy i lokalne praktyki

<p>This paper discusses selected research topics developed by feminist theologians connected with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. The Circle was established in 1989 and was led for many years by Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a Ghanaian Methodist theologian. Today the Circle attracts women theologians from three generations and various African countries. The paper refers to feminist and postcolonial theories as well as some more African-oriented topics developed in the Circle’s writings. Complex and ambiguous reinterpretations of the so-called African Traditional Religion are framed by references to inculturation and liberation theology. The final part of the paper refers to the concept of “oral theology” and theology in practice. The author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana among Catholic women is mentioned to draw parallels between the theological practical approach and the anthropological concept of lived religion.</p>

Margaret Chowning, Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940

Margaret Chowning, Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940

Fostering the sacred in a secular society: Catholic women practicing religion through intimate relationships

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the body of scholarship on lived religion by using intimate relationships as a lens in order to examine religiosity. Based on ethnographic research carried out among practicing Catholic women in Belgium, I unpack Catholic women’s understanding of the entanglement between religiosity and relationships by showing the ways in which these women perceive intimate relationships to enable—and at times hinder—their performance of religiosity. I draw on the study of lived religion in a twofold manner. Firstly, I mobilize it as an ethnographic tool to capture the experiences and practices of the women with respect to intimate relationships. Secondly, I contribute to the further theorization of the field by investigating religiosity and how religion is practiced in a non-religious setting, i.e. coupledom in a secular society. Hence, in this article I propose a novel road of inquiry that utilizes intimate relationships as a lens to understand how religion is enacted on an everyday basis. In doing so, we may come to see intimate relationships as a site where religiosity is constructed and performed, in particular against the background of a secularizing society in which Catholicism is no longer the default option as it once was.

Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940: How Women Preserved the Power of the Catholic Church in Mexican Political Life, written by Margaret Chowning

Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940: How Women Preserved the Power of the Catholic Church in Mexican Political Life, written by Margaret Chowning

Immaculate Conception of Gender: The Marian Phenomenon Among Catholic Women Pilgrims

This research concerns the phenomenological pragmatics of the Marian imaginaries in the study of gender and religion as intersecting and coconstituting themes. The contemporary constructions of antiquity occur in two ways: phantasmatic conceptions of the sacred as indoctrinated gendered catechisms, and embodied forms manifest on the body, thus serving as dogmatic disruptions for human sexuality. Reminiscent of Irigaray, what are the ways in which seemingly sexed bodies shelter the deterritorialized Queen? In what manner do bodies on pilgrimage facilitate the mediation of the mediatrix? This study examines how the queen of virgins, the Regina Virginum, demarcates the visions of womanhood and femininity through fieldwork among the Latina Catholic women pilgrims to the House of the Virgin Mary in Selçuk Province, Turkey. In this context, it further provides an analysis of discourse within the context of Pope Francis’ address at the General Audience held in the Paul VI Audience Hall on Wednesday, 23 August 2023. The research results are set to highlight how women can cultivate empowerment by embracing their inner selves, paralleling Mary’s spiritual influence on women’s agency. Findings demonstrate how women utilize pilgrimage experiences, inspired by Mary’s multifaceted symbolism, to challenge gender norms, reconstruct identities, and assert agency, emphasizing the transformative potential of religious practices in empowering women.