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The University of North Carolina Press
304 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 illus., notes, bibl., index
The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement
A Nota Bene selection of The Chronicle of Higher Education
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.
"Compelling reading. . . . Provides a lively, cohesive narrative for non-Catholic feminists and readers from Generation O. . . . This concise, lively, carefully prepared volume will be useful to Catholics who want to know more about their own recent past and to students of American history, women's history, and religious history. . . . Highly recommended."
--Choice
"An example of feminist scholarship that deserves the name: professional yet personal, documenting assertions without hedging and offering a vision that balances the real and the ideal. . . . [Henold's] scholarship is careful, her writing style clean."
--America
"A splendid history of the American Catholic feminist movement. . . . Highly recommended for all seminary, academic, and public libraries."
--Library Journal
"The first substantive history of Catholic feminism."
--American Catholic
Feminists are the hope of the Catholic Church. I applaud Mary Henold for her scholarship, her insight, and her vision. Catholic and Feminist shows the way that women can take the best of our traditions to shape our church and make it the moral anchor that we need.
--Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
In her stimulating and well-researched book, Mary Henold proves decisively that there has indeed been a vibrant movement of Catholic feminism since the 1960s. It has changed with the frustration of its original reformist goals, but it still impacts Catholics who continue to pursue a vision of an inclusive church on the inside and outside edges of institutional Catholicism.
--Rosemary Radford Ruether, Claremont Graduate University and School of Theology
Cloth: $32.00
© 2009 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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