There Were Also Many Women There: Lay Women in the Liturgical Movement in the United States, 1926-59 by Katharine E. Harmon (review)
- There Were Also Many Women There: Lay Women in the Liturgical Movement in the United States, 1926-59 by Katharine E. Harmon
In There Were Also Many Women There Katharine Harmon provides a comprehensive, detailed, carefully documented history of a much-neglected topic: the role of lay women in the liturgical movement in the United States during the critical decades preceding the Second Vatican Council. In the preface Harmon clarifies her perspective on the liturgical movement, whose aim extended far beyond the revision of texts to the renewal of the social order led by members of the lay apostolate whose lives were centered in the liturgy. After a brief, skillfully prepared review of European "Preparations for America (c. 1870-1926)," Harmon explores the ideas and life experience of eleven laywomen whose contributions were crucial to the American liturgical movement: Justine Bayard Ward, Ellen Gates Starr, Maisie Ward, Sara B. O'Neill, Nina Polcyn Moore, Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Ade Bethune, Therese Mueller, Mary Perkins Ryan, and Florence Berger. These women were involved in the liturgical movement in multifarious ways, from writings and lectures on the reform of liturgical music and art (Justine Ward and Bethune) to the promotion of the proliferating literature on liturgical reform (Starr, Maisie Ward, O'Neill, and Polcyn Moore) to experiments in community centered upon the liturgy (Day and de Hueck Doherty) to the creation of rituals for the Catholic home (Mueller, Ryan, and Berger). Harmon's historical narrative explains the connections among these women and their links to Catholic women's movements such as the National Council of Catholic Women and the Grail.
Harmon's history is carefully contextualized; she pays close attention to her Catholic laywomen's experience of American culture from the 1920s [End Page 585] through the 1950s. We see how these laywomen were both fully acclimated to American life and genuinely countercultural in their vision. Especially effective are the sections where Harmon helps us to hear the voices and see into the life experience of the "semi-anonymous" laywomen who wrote to the editors of Orate Fratres or dared to speak up after lectures delivered during National Liturgical Weeks. These sections enrich our understanding of the grassroots nature of the laity's involvement in liturgical reform, as well as the tensions and conflicts within the movement. One common refrain that comes across in the sections on Harmon's eleven liturgical activists and her examples drawn from the semi-anonymous: a call to the clergy and some members of the elite within the liturgical movement to provide practical answers to the questions and concerns of the laity. Laywomen wanted to know how to implement what they heard at National Liturgical Weeks or read in Orate Fratres back home in the parish or neighborhood setting (p. 330). They wanted opportunities to attend Dialogue Masses, which were much more likely to elicit a positive reaction from their non-Catholic spouses than traditional Masses. They wondered "why family communion has never been preached, or why isn't a day set aside for it every month?" (p. 329).They hoped to find ways to incorporate devotions dear to them from the "old country" into American immigrant communities (p. 329). They sought to find room for familiar traditional devotions to the Sacred Heart, the Sorrowful Mother, and the Little Flower into the new, emerging liturgical scene (pp. 337-38).
Harmon's history of laywomen in the American liturgical movement fills crucial gaps in our knowledge of American Catholic history and the experience of women in American religion. It also provides scholars and students with a fuller, deeper understanding of the lived experience of the laity in a crucial period in American and Catholic history. It is a model for future historians of the American laity.
