When our Cardinal comes home and starts to put into practice the decrees of the Council, he will need a strong group of laymen just like yourselves and the Council of Catholic Women. The Cardinal feels you are prepared, you are knowledgeable, you are educated, you are well grounded in your faith and you are able to do the work. . . . Old ways of doing things have to be changed and that is not always easy to do and we do want to present to the Cardinal a group of women who are zealous but not overzealous; a group of women who are faithful and trustful and obedient.
Father James Murtaugh, address to the Chicago
Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women (1964)
I write as a woman whose consciousness has been raised enough to notice that Marriage has fallen into the pit of sex-role stereotyping—where “men are men and women are women.” This philosophy ignores the fact that we are, first of all, persons. . . . I see no humor in this myth perpetuation.
Mrs. Lucille W. Martin, letter to the editor (1972)
Perhaps Father James Murtaugh was thinking that Cardinal Albert Meyer had all the luck. While his boss was in Rome at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), a worldwide meeting of the bishops of the Catholic Church then in its third year, Murtaugh was charged with delivering an address to the 1964 annual fall assembly of the Chicago Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women (CACCW) in the cardinal’s stead. On that occasion, Murtaugh gave what was a very typical Vatican II–era speech from a clergyman to a group of active Catholic laywomen. He first made clear the hierarchy under which he and they both lived. “Our Cardinal” would be coming home, he said, and he is the one who would put the Council’s decrees into practice. Following the familiar model of Catholic Action, however, where laypeople were encouraged to give their service in a program outlined by their bishop, the priest told the women they would be needed to implement Meyer’s plan. Or, more precisely, that “a group of strong laymen just like yourselves” would be needed.
Now for the buttering up: You are smart, educated, and able! Priest speakers rarely failed to compliment the ladies, particularly when they were about to take something quite valuable away, and this speech was no different. Do not be too zealous, laywomen of Chicago; the Cardinal can’t have you too excited. Trust that what we teach you is correct, be faithful, and—please—do what you are told. Murtaugh managed to convey that change was the dominant theme of Vatican II, yet the lingering tone was one of warning. This group in particular, these ladies in hats eating dry chicken and laughing politely at the priest’s jokes: these women, he feared, could be trouble. And he was right.
This book studies communities of highly active, largely nonfeminist laywomen at a particularly unsettled moment in the history of the American Catholic Church, the roughly ten years following the start of Vatican II. Laywomen like those of the CACCW were meant to anchor the church in these volatile years, and if we think of them at all, this might be how we remember such women: ever-present, deferential, quick to serve and slow to question. But if this is all they were, why would a man like Father Murtaugh go out of his way to warn them to behave? He did so because Catholic laywomen were already signaling they were unsatisfied with how they as women fit into the discourse surrounding the Council. In the decade or so following Vatican II, these laywomen often went further than the hierarchy was prepared to go, fostering far-reaching and significant conversations that questioned basic cultural and theological precepts of Catholic gender identity. In this moment they claimed the authority to define for themselves what it meant to be a Catholic woman.
Active laywomen, especially those who channeled their energies through Catholic women’s organizations like the National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW) or the Catholic Daughters of America (CDA), faced a challenging and at times frustrating set of circumstances in the 1960s and 1970s, circumstances that men like James Murtaugh merely exacerbated. Murtaugh and his confreres presented themselves as gatekeepers, authorized to interpret and implement the changes brought by Vatican II. The women of the CACCW did not challenge his right to authority; they had invited him to speak, after all. But the priest’s thoughts on hierarchy and gender only highlighted what was, for laywomen, a conundrum at the center of the Council.
One of the most electrifying changes emerging from the Council was a newly emphasized, expansive interpretation of vocation for laypeople. Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, outlined their role clearly: “Upon all the laity, therefore, rests the noble duty of working to extend the divine plan of salvation to all men of each epoch and in every land. Consequently, may every opportunity be given them so that, according to their abilities and the needs of the times, they may zealously participate in the saving work of the Church.”1 Father Murtaugh casually revealed where laypeople ranked in his estimation when he attempted to convey this idea to the CACCW at the same event the previous year: “The laity can no longer be a negative element, nor can he be passive or neutral.” But Murtaugh’s confusing pronouns do beg the question, Were laywomen to be included in this reinterpretation? Clergy did seem to believe that the conciliar Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity applied to women, but they also consistently maintained, in both overt and subtle ways, that laywomen were different by nature than their husbands, brothers, and sons, and therefore retained a distinct role within the lay sphere. Because the Council made significant changes in the church’s understanding of the role of the laity without questioning its core beliefs about gender, its leaders were sending Catholic women contradictory messages. How could laywomen’s role as laypeople be expanded if the church still taught that woman’s nature was basically fixed and subordinate?2
This book addresses how a particular set of Catholic laywomen puzzled out this contradiction for themselves in the years during and following the Second Vatican Council, which also happened to be, not coincidentally, the years of feminism’s resurgence in the United States. In the wake of so much change, within the church and without, laywomen asked over and over again: What does it mean to be a Catholic woman? In asking and answering this question with such frequency they came to challenge the very notion that the Catholic Church’s interpretations of gender, and that gender itself, were immutable. The Laywoman Project investigates this significant, creative work of laywomen undertaken at their own urging, and on their own behalf.3
It may take a readjustment to consider moderate, nonfeminist Catholic laywomen as vibrant and significant originators of discussions about gender, let alone as change agents in this area. Catholic feminists typically dominate any narratives about challenges to women’s gender identity in the church during this period. They tended to distrust organizational laywomen, particularly the leaders of the National Council of Catholic Women, because they refused to support cherished feminist goals such as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Feminists also believed such laywomen colluded with the hierarchy to keep Catholic women in the roles the church expected.
But such narratives cannot adequately explain the contents of the NCCW archives, for example, which are bursting with examples of their members reconsidering Catholic gender identity as early as the mid-1960s. Far from policing the boundaries of Catholic womanhood at the hierarchy’s behest, NCCW leaders were questioning what they had been taught and trying to find a balance for themselves that would fit their identities to the changing times. They were among the first to openly question female essentialism, complementarity, and women’s traditional roles in church service in their publications. Moreover, the NCCW leadership viewed the organization not only as a place to foster new ideas about gender but also as a means of teaching Catholic laywomen around the country to test and possibly reject the limits Catholic notions of womanhood placed on them. A narrative that attributes all discourse on gender to the Catholic feminist movement is far too simple to explain transitions in Catholic gender identity in these critical midcentury decades.
The NCCW was not alone in its project to remake American Catholic womanhood. For roughly fifteen years, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, Catholic laywomen wrote countless articles, memos, papers, conference addresses, and letters to the editor, guiding themselves and other women to new understandings of who they were. It was a vast preoccupation, a project in which large numbers of Catholic laywomen participated. I have come to call this phenomenon “the laywoman project.” In studying it I am foregrounding laywomen as historical actors, keeping in mind historian Thomas Sugrue’s lament that too frequently the study of Catholics in this era “emphasizes Catholics as the objects of change, not the agents of change.” Nowhere has this been truer than in the study of laywomen, whose process of self-discovery and self-determination has been largely ignored.4
Before I elaborate on what the laywoman project produced, and what conclusions we might draw from the conversations in which these writers engaged, I need to situate the laywomen historically. I have elected to study in depth the leadership of four different organizations (the National Council of Catholic Women, the Theresians, the Catholic Daughters of America, and the Daughters of Isabella), one organization in brief (the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations [WUCWO]), and the contributors to one Catholic periodical (Marriage). While these women represent a variety of paths, they were certainly not the only individuals involved in the work of puzzling out Catholic gender identity in the Vatican II era. Catholic feminists were also clearly part of this larger project, as were some women religious, priests, and laymen. In selecting these particular communities for in-depth analysis, I am not arguing that they are the only people worthy of study. The number of Catholic laywomen’s organizations is large and includes many devotional societies and sodalities, among other groups that could help us understand gender identity. I have chosen to dive deeply into a few organizations rather than provide an overview of the many.
Furthermore, while the organizations the women in this book represented had enormous reach, they were not particularly internally diverse. While some leaned more “progressive” and some more “conservative,” they can best be described as occupying moderate positions both within American politics and within the Catholic Church. Further, the majority of the laywomen in this study were white, middle-class, and middle-aged. While Catholic laywomen enjoy little tangible power in the Catholic Church, these women were able to capitalize on the privileges of their race, class status, and education level to assume leadership in prominent national organizations and achieve an audience for their ideas during a period of intense discussions about the laity’s role in the Catholic Church and in the wider world. Most of the communities in this study had women of color in their memberships, so we know that diverse Catholic women participated in these conversations. However, those with the power to direct the laywoman project on the national level were predominantly white, and when they did address questions of race and racism—which was infrequently—they did so from a white perspective. The exception to this in the study is WUCWO, whose Latina leadership in the 1970s reflected the group’s determination to forward marginalized voices, particularly from the global South.5
We must first place these women within larger conversations about the history of Vatican II. For many years historians of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century were preoccupied with asking whether Vatican II is best classified as a rupture in the church’s history that radically changed Catholic culture and practice or as an event that manifested on a large scale trends already in evidence among the faithful. In the last fifteen years, scholars have largely dismissed the narrative of “rupture” in favor of that of “continuity,” finding that many strands of thought and practice that came to the world’s attention with the Council can be traced back decades. For the purposes of this book, I want to focus specifically on changing perceptions of lay authority and autonomy.6
We have abundant evidence that American laypeople, in concert with many laity globally, had begun to question the accepted perception of laypeople as passive and obedient. Under this dominant model, laypeople learned the correct paths to follow from clergy and women religious, absorbing and accepting in the process that as laity they had inferior spiritual status. To keep laypeople on the straight and narrow, religious professionals heavily emphasized sin and encouraged frequent confession. Laypeople were directed to keep their marriages open to all the children God might send their way, regardless of their ability to support them, under the threat of dire spiritual consequences. Laypeople who suffered under such teachings—or simply under the weight of the world in which they lived—were trained to seek solace and relief not only in the Eucharist but in a variety of prayerful devotions, particularly to the Blessed Mother.
But significant changes in the American church in the middle decades of the twentieth century destabilized this model. For example, this mode of structuring the lay-clerical relationship worked best with a large educational gap between clerical leadership and the people in the pew. It was also reinforced by the Catholic community’s insularity; a culture that strongly discouraged “mixed marriage” (that is, unions between Catholics and non-Catholics) and sought to maintain homogenous Catholic educational and social networks was thought by many to have a greater ability to perpetuate its beliefs in changing times. But after World War II, the influx of large numbers of GIs into both Catholic and secular colleges began to narrow the education gap; clergy who in the past had typically been the most highly educated Catholics in the building could no longer rely on their credentials to sway the faithful. Moreover, the transition of large numbers of white Catholics from concentrated, homogenous urban neighborhoods to the religiously and ethnically (though not racially) diverse suburbs (and the prosperity that attended these developments) enlarged laypeople’s experience and opened them to new ways of being in the world.7 Furthermore, external developments such as the civil rights movement encouraged African American Catholics and their allies to work for justice in and outside the church, with or without clerical leadership.
Consequently, we see laypeople exploring new forms of Catholic practice and lay leadership that challenged, both implicitly and explicitly, lay passivity and the beliefs that reinforced it. Some of these developments involved direct verbal challenges to clerical authority, while others demonstrated through behavior that laypeople had come to see themselves and their faith differently. Explicit challenges usually came from a highly engaged, highly educated class of laypeople who were exploring leadership as Catholic intellectuals and/or in various forms of Catholic Action in the 1940s and 1950s. (Catholic Action is shorthand for lay involvement in many different types of projects that engaged with “the world,” and originated with or were sanctioned by the hierarchy.) The laypeople who from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s began to reject, with increasing openness, the church’s prohibition of artificial contraception are an example of such a challenge.8 A second example is the work of the interracial justice movement, centered in the Catholic Interracial Council (CIC), among other groups. According to historian Karen J. Johnson, images of marching priests and sisters often dominate our knowledge of this movement, but its leadership is best characterized as self-consciously lay. “They made racial justice a central component of Catholicism,” she writes, and “challenged the hierarchy that placed priests above the laity.”9
Several other examples of emerging lay authority can be found in the most prominent and innovative Catholic Action movements at midcentury. The Christian Family Movement (CFM) focused on progressive Catholic couples who hoped to strengthen their families in the faith as they applied that faith to solving problems of the modern world. Jeremy Bonner notes that these couples “experimented with forms of religious life in which the clergy’s leadership role was either muted or absent.” Similarly, the Cana movement, with its dual focus on preparing couples for marriage and strengthening existing marriages, had the unintended consequence of “decenter[ing] the moral authority of the Church. In teaching couples about the nature of marriage, Cana helped to create a generation of experts, experts who would increasingly come to value their own decision-making abilities.”10
Historians have also provided abundant evidence in recent years for how American Catholic laity, particularly laywomen, began to transform their faith practice well before Vatican II. At times their choices indicate changed spiritual preferences or outlooks, but at other times their decisions represent true rebellion against clerical authority. We know, for example, that the way laypeople prayed changed markedly in these years as participation in traditional devotions began to decline starting in the 1950s. The laity seemed to find them less and less necessary to enacting Catholicism.11 Likewise, declines in the number of Catholics going to confession over this period suggest that laypeople’s conception of sin was changing to reflect less of an emphasis on guilt and punishment, a mindset that had tended to keep Catholics in awe of their clergy’s ability to judge and forgive sin. James M. O’Toole argues that women especially seemed to be growing uncomfortable with confession, citing priests’ dismissiveness and intrusiveness, along with unhappiness at always having to bare their souls to a man. Overall, the ways laypeople were approaching prayer at midcentury reflected “a good deal more than the mere repetition of words prescribed by others.” They were actively making decisions about their own faith practice.12
Finally, we know from statistics that well before Vatican II or the turmoil of “the sixties,” lay Catholics were making decisions that contradicted church teachings (or at least accepted tradition). The most important of these statistics concerns the use of birth control; Catholic women increasingly used artificial contraception over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, defying the church’s authority. Already as of 1955, 30 percent of American Catholic women between eighteen and thirty-nine were using artificial contraception; by 1965, that number reached 51 percent, from which it would only increase. Rates of “mixed marriage” to non-Catholic partners were also on the rise.13
So what are we to conclude about mid-twentieth-century laywomen from this information? Is it safe to argue that in the case of laywomen’s identity, as with so many other trends in the American church, the real transition occurred before Vatican II? Several historians ask us to consider this idea. For example, in his study of women and devotions, Timothy Kelly argues that “the changes in participation levels in the Our Lady of Perpetual Help devotion indicate that American women’s ideology of gender may have changed before the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s.” He further argues that “Catholic women who once embraced a ritual that affirmed their roles as passive nurturers increasingly rejected that feminine ideal. That they did so in the years before the rebirth of the feminist movement suggests that they had begun to redefine their lives earlier than we previously believed.” Similarly, Paula Kane asserts that Marian devotion declined in part due to women entering the workforce and becoming more independent. This shift, she argues, is evidence for a “Catholic women’s consciousness” that originated in the 1950s, not the postconciliar period, as many have assumed.14
This argument fits well into the narrative of continuity. If every other change seemingly had its roots in the postwar period, why not the shift in laywomen’s gender identity? I have no wish to deny that Catholic laywomen were changing in the 1950s; the evidence that laywomen had already initiated some of the shifts that would help them rethink their identities as Catholic women is incontrovertible, as Kane and Kelly have proved. But I would argue against the idea that Catholic women had a collective consciousness this early, since this implies both a desire and an ability to articulate the transition they were undergoing. That articulation would take place—it is, in fact, “the laywoman project” itself—but not until the conciliar and immediate postconciliar period, as the evidence in this book will demonstrate.
On this point it is helpful to remember the climate in which Catholic laywomen lived in the 1950s, and the dominant messages laywomen in leadership were both receiving and perpetuating. Colleen McDannell and Kathryn Johnson remind us of the preoccupation with a particular kind of Catholic domesticity that flooded Catholic culture in this era. Fears of secularization and materialism in a time of prosperity prompted Catholic commentators to place added emphasis on patriarchal authority, not only within the hierarchy but within the family. Complementarity, the teaching that each sex was assigned distinct traits and roles by God and nature, was proclaimed far and wide as a bulwark against selfishness, secularization, and communism. A woman could not pick up a Catholic magazine at midcentury without reading about her proper role and how she put her and her family’s salvation—nay, the salvation of the entire world!—at risk if she abandoned it.15
We know, too, that the movements in this era which encouraged lay authority and autonomy explicitly (and enthusiastically) also preached complementarity, discouraging women’s leadership or sublimating it into domestic concerns. As we will see, both CFM and Cana taught laywomen to embrace and pass on Catholic teachings on gender. Furthermore, women leaders in the “progressive” liturgical movement instructed women to incorporate liturgical changes into their lives by making their homes centers for sacramental activity. Historian Katharine Harmon views this as fundamentally empowering for women, as it allowed them to “unite their role as wife and mother with that of the liturgical apostolate.” Yet it did not challenge complementarity, the heart of accepted understandings of gender identity and vocation for laywomen.16
It is the women to whom these complementarian discourses were directed—and those who, to a great extent, had found them meaningful and influential in their life arrangements—who became the protagonists of the “laywoman project” of the 1960s and 1970s. How do these women fit into a larger history of feminism and, in a more focused way, into the history of Catholic feminism? First, should all of the women who engaged in the laywoman project be considered feminists because of the nature of this endeavor, and if so, are they Catholic feminists? It is also fair to ask, if the answers to these questions are affirmative, why write a book about what is basically watered-down feminism? If these women were doing the work of Catholic feminists—just more politely and on a larger scale—what is the point?
In fact, the majority of the women in this study were not self-identified feminists, and for the most part their project did not have the explicitly stated purpose of advancing feminist goals. Although they were working through similar questions about gender identity at the same time as early Catholic feminists, their approaches were distinct. The rhetoric of laywomen in this study was often much more circumspect, for example, and they were more careful not to offend. This can be partially explained by the fact that, unlike the majority of Catholic feminists who pursued their activism mainly through organizations and support networks outside Catholic patriarchal systems, the laywomen in this study were active in organizations and communities that were run by women but ultimately controlled by men; run by women but supervised by men; or directly run by men.
A second difference is that the laywomen in this book often discussed issues of identity centering in the home and family that contemporary Catholic feminists either found of little interest or had already moved beyond. Since Catholic feminism was dominated by women religious, the problems arising from the gendered nature of Catholic married life did not receive much attention in the movement.
Finally, since these conversations about Catholic womanhood did not typically have feminist goals and were not always informed by feminist theory or theology, the women who fostered them could end their projects with ideas that would have truly alarmed feminists. The women of the Catholic Daughters of America and the Daughters of Isabella (D of I) demonstrate that exploring questions of gender identity is not the exclusive province of feminists, nor do processes of empowerment always conform to feminist ideals. It must be pointed out, too, that the women in this study are much more representative of American laywomen as a whole than were the Catholic feminists, then as now a tiny minority of Catholic women in the United States. Almost certainly the activity of the women in this book reached far more women in the pew than Catholic feminists did in the same time period.
Recent work in the history of feminism is helpful for situating these Catholic women, who flirted with feminist concepts and may have been influenced by them, but did not choose the feminist label for themselves. This new work has encouraged us to rethink the very definitions of feminist activity. In the past, historians who were often activists themselves privileged more radical forms of feminism, particularly those centered in overwhelmingly white organizations on the East Coast. Historians, no less than the activists they chronicled, policed the term feminist to ensure that activists met certain benchmarks of orthodoxy before they could be recognized as such. As a result, more moderate manifestations of feminism outside the accepted centers of activity have been missed. In fact, the boundaries privileging the “second wave” caused historians to obscure much meaningful activity taking place at midcentury. This scholarship asks us to broaden our understanding of feminism so we can know the full scope of women’s activism.17
Another set of emerging scholarship, particularly pertinent to the laywoman project, turns its focus to nonfeminist women’s organizations that engaged feminist questions in thoughtful, serious ways. Feminist history has typically focused almost exclusively on those who called themselves feminist, but recently scholars have turned instead to explore how feminist ideas may have been adapted by women in diverse contexts. Melissa Estes Blair explores this narrative through such groups as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the League of Women Voters, and the National Council of Negro Women. Faith Rogow argues that the women of the National Council of Jewish Women also pursued some liberal feminist goals without claiming the label of feminist. Dorothy Sue Cobble writes of the “social justice feminism” of women in the midcentury labor movement. Likewise, historian Janet Weaver alerts us to the empowered Catholic Mexicana “barrio women” who led groups for women’s economic justice in the Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s without self-identifying. Finally, what Lanethea Mathews-Gardner argues about Methodist organizational women in this era could just as easily be said about the Catholic laywomen in this study: “More important than debating the extent to which the WDCS [Women’s Division of Christian Service] was or is ‘feminist,’ is recognizing their part in multiple struggles over the appropriate roles, responsibilities and opportunities available to women and their organizations in the mid-20th century.”18
The larger purpose of this book, then, is not to claim there were even more Catholic feminists than we once believed. Instead, I join these other historians in arguing that one did not need to be a feminist to rethink and even challenge the limitations placed on women through restrictive notions of gender hierarchy and essentialism. Thousands of Catholic laywomen were doing just that, quite vocally, and under the very noses of the self-identified Catholic feminists who at times disdained them, not to mention the clerical and laymen who had long benefited from these restrictive notions. The 1960s provided the perfect opportunity for this rethinking to occur, not primarily because the Catholic community had become more liberal, or because the women’s movement created an atmosphere more conducive to raising such questions, but because the church was squeezing laywomen into an impossible situation they themselves took action to resolve.
By the mid-1960s an active laity was showing its strength and coming to think of itself as able to exercise autonomy and contribute in meaningful ways, not only to the church’s mission, but to its theology and even its governance. Some clergy were supportive of the laity’s assumption of new forms of leadership, but as James Murtaugh’s speech reminds us, most in the church’s hierarchy were almost completely unprepared for laywomen—as women—to do any of those things. The church’s teachings that had formed clergy and laywomen alike demanded sanctity of laywomen while simultaneously assuming they were inherently selfish and immature. Laywomen’s primary role was in the home, nurturing Christian families, and their leadership was encouraged only if they fostered and tacitly agreed to those restrictions.
Laywomen received this message directly from the Council fathers. On the feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1965, the Council released a statement directed to the women of the world. “The hour is coming,” they promised, “in fact, has now come—when the vocation of woman is being achieved in its fullness, the hour in which woman acquires in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved.” The average woman in the pew might have been pleased to have her power celebrated (the buttering up . . .), but the singular “woman” hinted at what was coming next. “Wives, mothers of families, the best educators of the human race, in the intimacy of the family circle, pass on to your sons and daughters the traditions of your fathers. . . . always remember that by her children a mother belongs to that future which perhaps she will not seek. . . . Women, you who know how to make truth sweet, tender, and accessible, make it your task to bring the spirit of this Council into institutions, schools, homes, and daily life.”19 If the fathers were offering laywomen the world, it was a limited one indeed. It is hard to escape the sense that the Council, like Father Murtaugh, was trying to cut these women off before they even got started. If Catholic laywomen became too enthusiastic about what they heard from the Council about the laity’s role, they might exceed their boundaries as women and therefore destabilize the church’s teaching on gender. The remarkable thing was that for the majority of the faithful, committed Catholic laywomen in these pages, this did not stop them.
My focus in the following chapters is not just on laywomen and their ideas, but specifically on how those ideas changed over time. Each chapter focuses on a different community of women so as to trace in detail, year by year, the transitions each group made as it processed new information over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. These four chapters show the range of positions American Catholic laywomen could adopt and how drastically they could change in a short period of time. Despite the internal divergence, some conclusions immediately present themselves.
First and foremost, across the board we see Catholic laywomen claiming the authority to define for themselves what a Catholic woman was. Vatican II made it seem to some that just about everything was open for discussion, including by laity, and laywomen leaders took advantage of these unusual circumstances to effectively hijack the conversation about gender from the hierarchy. The very fact that the laywoman project took place is proof that one of the church’s modern claims about men and women is false: gender is not immutable. Women revisiting what they had been told and changing their self-conception and behavior proved that gender roles were not fixed as innumerable Catholic commentators claimed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Moreover, laywomen had more power to spread this idea than we might have believed.
Laywomen’s organizations chose to educate their memberships about the Council, exposing potentially millions of Catholic women to the laywoman project through their publications and programming. They did not serve merely as a clearinghouse for the bishops’ information; on the contrary, leaders in these groups came up with their own programs and crafted their own interpretations for dissemination. In significant ways, these early reflections on women and Vatican II served to refocus laywomen’s vocation away from expected roles and responsibilities. The laywoman project is truly an example of the “lived history” of Vatican II in which laypeople interpreted and implemented the Council’s teachings as an active process in concert with the hierarchy.20
Overall, the laywoman project helped Catholic women transition to a new understanding of their own vocations that depended far less on essentialism, that is, the belief that each sex can be defined by a certain set of traits and accompanying expectations for their behavior. Each of the communities came to challenge the idea that good Catholic laywomen only live for others, to the point of effacing their own calls. Moreover, they largely rejected the idea that it was shameful for Catholic wives to choose employment outside the home. These communities encouraged laywomen to think more expansively about their role as persons in the world, instead of as women first.
The second epigraph for this chapter is a revealing illustration of the laywoman project’s capacity to challenge gender essentialism. Mrs. Lucille Martin wrote in to Marriage magazine in 1972 to complain about a lighthearted article that would have caused little fuss just a few years earlier. Titled “Power Struggle in the Supermarket,” the piece joked about the different nature of men and women as revealed through their shopping habits. The author—not incidentally another laywoman—revealed that this piece was not quite so fluffy as it might appear on the surface. “The sexes are different,” the author insisted. “Androgyny (with its claim that the sexes soon will merge and everybody will be as mixed-up as milkshakes) just won’t work. The sexes are not going to merge as long as there is shopping to do.”21
Martin considered this work an example of “the pit of sex-role stereotyping—where ‘men are men and women are women.’” She would no longer tolerate such an outlook in the magazine, where once it would have been second nature, and she was not fooled by the failed attempt to mask it with humor. But Lucille Martin does not appear to be an ardent feminist. Note how she opens her critique: “I write as a woman whose consciousness has been raised enough to notice . . .” Raised just enough to use her first name and not her husband’s, but no more perhaps, as she takes pains to make clear. Still, she took a stand in the pages of a respected Catholic periodical for the right of laywomen to cast off ideas that no longer fit (or perhaps had never fit) their idea of themselves.22
The wide-ranging discussion of essentialism, and its rejection by many participants in the laywoman project, also led them to question complementarity. This is the teaching that God created men and women to complement each other with distinct natures, functions, and roles; it is the church’s core modern teaching on gender roles. Writers in Marriage challenged the teaching on many fronts, including deeply ingrained perceptions of women’s sexuality and other aspects of laywomen’s roles in married life. The women of the NCCW also undermined complementarity by teaching that laywomen must rethink the roles they had been assigned as women in the gendered world of parish life; they heard over and over that they now had more to contribute to the Catholic community than spiritual bouquets and checks for the missions. These were worthy pursuits to be sure but ones rooted in an essentialist vision of what a woman was and, perhaps more important, what she should not be. The laywoman project did not reach universal conclusions on this subject, however, as we shall see.
In the prologue, I return to the discourse of essentialism and complementarity that permeated the Catholic community shortly before the laywoman project began. Through a set of popular articles responding to a “vocation crisis” starting in 1958, I examine how Catholics perceived laywomen at the end of the 1950s. Together, these articles illustrate laywomen’s place in the Catholic hierarchy of vocation, and therefore their status in the Catholic community, on the eve of Vatican II. Essentialism dominated, as laywomen were blamed for suppressing vocations to the sisterhoods.
Chapter 1, on the Theresians, emerges directly from the themes of the prologue. The Theresians, a group for laywomen, was founded in the early 1960s for the sole purpose of fostering vocations to the sisterhoods. By design, the group encouraged laywomen to view their own lives and work as secondary to the superior calls of women religious. Over time, however, the Theresians show how laywomen and their allies took concrete steps to develop a vocation for laywomen that placed them on an equal spiritual footing with others in the Catholic community. Eventually, the Theresians became an explicitly feminist organization, but not before they spent over a decade wrestling with foundational questions of gender identity in the context of Catholic teaching.
Chapter 2 shifts focus from the tiny Theresians to the massive National Council of Catholic Women, which claimed to serve every Catholic laywoman in the United States. I specifically focus on the NCCW’s relationship to feminism as it attempted to rethink Catholic womanhood (and challenge the hierarchy) without the radical step of self-identifying. This chapter also examines the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations (WUCWO), an organization closely associated with the NCCW that took a more self-consciously feminist path, to explain the curious nature of the NCCW’s nonfeminist feminism.
In chapter 3 I move away from women’s organizations to explore a community of Catholic women in print. Marriage magazine, a periodical for Catholic couples, took changing gender roles as its particular focus during the postconciliar era, and encouraged laymen as well as women to debate controversial ideas in its pages. Unlike the organizational women in this book, the laywomen writers in Marriage were most preoccupied by questions that centered on gender, sexuality, and other intimate matters, especially the evolving power dynamics between Catholic husbands and wives. Here we see laywomen’s challenges to essentialism and complementarity most strongly articulated (and most strongly opposed) in articles on working wives, sex, and male headship in the family.
Chapter 4 considers two more self-consciously conservative groups of Catholic laywomen who nevertheless participated in the laywoman project in fascinating ways. Leaders of the Catholic Daughters of America and the Daughters of Isabella took a defensive posture, proudly positioning themselves as shoring up a faith under threat in the 1960s and 1970s. However, they too considered new ideas about their own identities as women in the church as they tried in good faith to adapt to the realities of a changing world. After a decade of careful thought as well as input from the hierarchy, they determined their best course was to hold on to what they knew. They found more power in an older version of Catholic womanhood than newer interpretations of gender could offer them, even as they saw the strength of their organizations diminish as a result.
I offer The Laywoman Project first and foremost as a work of scholarship to add to our understanding of this time in the history of the American Catholic Church. But I also offer it as a reminder of the collective power of Catholic laywomen, who too often—even among themselves—are perceived to be powerless in the Catholic Church. At a time when the scandals caused by systematic sexual abuse by clergy and the cover-up of that abuse by the hierarchy demand an emboldened laity, the work of these women reminds us that Catholic laywomen can train themselves for self-advocacy. Laywomen do indeed have a history of challenging clerical authority, if primarily in this case by questioning and perhaps rejecting teachings central to the construction of their own identities.
The laywoman project proves that faithful, committed, nonradical Catholic leaders at the very heart of American Catholicism fostered vitally necessary conversations in the postconciliar era that the clerical leadership of the church was extremely reluctant to have. They undertook their larger project because the church wanted change in one area (“the laity”), while leaving the church’s understanding of gender, and therefore the underpinnings of its power structure in institution and family, sacrosanct. Laywomen determined they had the authority to address the situation through word and action. In doing so they threw off their passivity as, in fact, they had been instructed to do as “laymen.” Theirs is a legacy of laywomen thinking, speaking out, and acting on their own behalf. If their actions could not change the hierarchy, the hierarchy nevertheless could not stop them from transforming themselves and their communities—that is, the church—through new understandings of who they were and what they were called to do.