Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (review)

86 Biography 21.1 (Winter 1998) that was how one of the meetings had gone: the mother had come in and they could not exclude her, so they recorded the exchange between aU four of them. The reader has the sense of overhearing an actual conversation, as the ethnographers question the couple about their attitudes toward this Palestinian-Israeli collaboration. Both mother and daughter disapprove of the collaboration for sexual and poütical reasons. The book gives the impression of utter spontaneity, while being tightly structured. The authors are clear from the start that this book is for a Western, English-speaking readership, although Othman hopes "that someday these stories will be available in Arabic" (228). Miriam Cooke Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. 751 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-80984-X. A friend of mine who is a Benedictine nun told me some interesting things about her community in northeastern Kansas. She said that the community includes both old-style sisters who live and dine in common, and newfangled members who live in twos and threes in surrounding areas. The nuns are attached to a community of monks (she herself teaches the History of Monasticism to both male and female novices) and attract many Catholic lay people to their classes and prayers, as weU as ascetic practitioners from other cultures. She mentioned that her community puts prospective newcomers through a battery of psychological tests to be sure of their vocations, eventuaUy sending many of them—feckless adolescents, people in temporary crisis, the unhinged—away to find more appropriate sanctuaries. She discussed stoically the community's uncertain finances and the fact that none of them have health insurance; those without income are supported by the professionals and other wage-earners. Her community has preserved its autonomy: although it has a daughter house in Mexico, it owes allegiance to no one but the pope. And, she reminded me proudly, the Benedictines have been doing all this for 1500 years. That's a pretty successful business. Jo Ann Kay McNamara tells a similar story for aU Christian female reUgious professionals throughout the last two miUennia. In six hundred plus pages of text, she recounts the experiences of Christian nuns from the days when Jesus himself attracted women foUowers, to the present, when John Paul II repeatedly reminds women that they never numbered among the apostles. The book is more a narrative history than an analysis, although McNamara traces several themes in the history of nuns. She describes women who adjusted their vocations to whatever restrictions or opportunities were allowed them by the male celibate hierarchy. She writes of their routine poverty and their Reviews 87 struggles to retain some sort of control over their own destinies. She foUows the elusive ideal and varied practices of syneisactism—the partnership of male and female religious—through the centuries. She argues for the "distinct historical identity" of Christian nuns (xi), claiming an essentiaUst difference as the basis for women's spirituaUty. Finally, she links the history of nuns, and their struggle for autonomy within a Christian patriarchy, to the emergence of feminism itself. Each chapter opens with a short discussion of social, political, economic, and/or ecclesiastical contexts of the period from a womaninclusive point of view. The first chapter on women in the early Roman empire, for instance, tells how family poUtics narrowed social and economic roles for women among both Romans and Jews, and how Christianity provided women with a brand new possibility of professional chastity. In the next several chapters, McNamara buUds the church organization of Late Antiquity, while at the same time sketching a definition of women's celibate vocation in a Romanized context. These heady, expansionist days of Christianity saw the brief flourishing of genuine syneisactism, according to McNamara, when deacons and deaconesses, male and female anchorites, bishops and widows all worked together to create a major religion. But once bishops figured out how to turn Christianity into a mainstream doctrine, the partnership of the sexes threatened the male bonding essential for a coherent leadership. For citizens of the Empire, imbued with the age-old misogyny of the ancient...