Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture (review)

This book makes the case for including women religious – colloquially known as nuns – in the history of second-wave feminism. It sets names such as Sister Jacqueline Grennan and Sister Mary Joel Read alongside Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in the annals of women's activism. And it explores the plethora of nun figures in 1950s and 1960s popular culture: from Audrey Hepburn's Sister Luke in The Nun's Story (1959) to Julie Andrews's Maria in The Sound of Music (1965) to Sally Field's Sister Bertrille in the television sitcom The Flying Nun (1967–70). What was this fascination with nuns and what cultural work has been forgotten with their excision from feminist analysis?

Rebecca Sullivan answers these questions with thoughtful intelligence and rich archival detail. She links the politics of gender and religion, embedding postwar nun culture within the context of Vatican ii. From 1962 to 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued a series of edicts on aggiornamento (modernization) which, in Sullivan's analysis, feminized religion. Personalism, a socially committed spirituality, 'signaled a major shift in the role of religion from an autocratic, institutional system to a diffuse, private culture of feelings.' In popular United States culture, this shift reconciled traditional tensions between Americanism and Catholicism.

One set of chapters analyses sisters' new cultural outreach, as they joined feminist and social justice movements (including the National Organization for Women and the Planned Parenthood Federation), produced vocation books for teenage girls, and developed a new strand of folk music. Other chapters explore movie and television representations, as they changed from apparent conservatism to apparent progressivism – from Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), in which a missionary nun is confined to a cave on a remote Pacific island, to Change of Habit (1970), in which three nuns remove their habits in order to live and work with Harlem's black and Puerto Rican communities.

The compromises and conflicts accompanying these political shifts took their toll. The most tragic story concerns the Belgian Soeur Luc-Gabrielle, whose 'Dominique' held the pop music charts for twelve weeks in 1963 until displaced by the Beatles' 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.' When 'the singing nun' emerged from the cloister seeking a folk music career as Jeanine Deckers, she was spurned by a music industry which preferred the mysterious, virginal figure within the habit. Deckers struggled with debt and depression until, in 1985, she committed suicide with her female lover. The Catholic church's increasing co-operation with the mass media produced its own tensions, with male clerics supporting projects which sisters found demeaning. A chapter-long case study of The Nun's Story, based on a true account of a nun's abandonment of the convent, richly documents the different stakes in this production for entertainment executives and artists, Catholic officials, the Catholic press, and sisters on both sides of Atlantic.

Sullivan persuasively argues that the nun was a powerful and popular figure because she represented a middle way – 'between the sexually liberated single girl and the loving and lovable domestic goddess' – in the search for independent womanhood during 'the embryonic stages of second-wave feminism.' The convent offered unmatched educational and professional opportunities while containing female independence within patriarchal hierarchies and tropes of heterosexual domesticity. This was a transitional usefulness. By the early 1970s, 'new nuns' were relegated to the margins of an increasingly radicalized and sexualized women's movement while they were under attack from a Vatican having second thoughts. The Flying Nun's retreat to kitsch stereotypes and supernatural gimmicks signalled the increasing gap between nuns' politics and their popular image. Since then, films – such as Dead Man Walking (1995), in which Susan Sarandon portrays Sister Helen Prejean's campaign against capital punishment – have only intermittently revived the complex conjunction of gender, religion, and social justice.

This fascinating study answers questions which many of us didn't even think to ask. It weaves the pressures and possibilities of popular culture into the history...