Who Are the Catholic Feminists?

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 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...