This book offers a new perspective on the often-overlooked lives of lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. It explores how over a century ago in England some exceptional Catholic lay women – Margaret Fletcher, Maude Petre, Radclyffe Hall, and Mabel Batten - negotiated non-traditional family lives and were actively practicing their faith, while not adhering to perceived structures of femininity, power, and sexuality. Focusing on c. 1880-1930, a time of dynamism and change in both England and the Church, these remarkable women represent a rethinking of what it meant to be a lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. Their pious transgressions demonstrate the multiplicity of ways lay women powerfully asserted aspects of their faith while contravening boundaries traditionally assumed for them in an ostensibly patriarchal religion. In fact, the Church could be a place for expressions of unconventional religiosity and reinterpretations of womanhood and domesticity. Connecting together the lives of these women for the first time, this work fills a lacuna in the scholarship of modern Catholic and gender history. Drawing from private collections and numerous archives, it illustrates the surprising range of modes of Lived Catholicism and devotion to faith. Students and scholars of Catholicism, gender, and LGBTQIA+ studies will find significant merit in a book that assigns lay women a more prominent role in the English Catholic Church and offers examples of the flexibility of Roman Catholicism.

Summoning everyday Catholic laywomen to the forefront of twentieth-century Catholic history, Mary J. Henold considers how these committed parishioners experienced their religion in the wake of Vatican II (1962–1965). This era saw major changes within the heavily patriarchal religious faith—at the same time as an American feminist revolution caught fire. Who was the Catholic woman for a new era? Henold uncovers a vast archive of writing, both intimate and public facing, by hundreds of rank-and-file American laywomen active in national laywomen's groups, including the National Council of Catholic Women, the Catholic Daughters of America, and the Daughters of Isabella. These records evoke a formative period when laywomen played publicly with a surprising variety of ideas about their own position in the Catholic Church. While marginalized near the bottom of the church hierarchy, laywomen quietly but purposefully engaged both their religious and gender roles as changing circumstances called them into question. Some eventually chose feminism while others rejected it, but most, Henold says, crafted a middle position: even conservative, nonfeminist laywomen came to reject the idea that the church could adapt to the modern world while keeping women's status frozen in amber.

Where are the women in liturgical history? In considering the influential liturgical movement in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, Katharine E. Harmon reveals that the reality is analogous to Matthew's account of the crucifixion of Jesus: "there were also many women there" (Matt. 27:55). In this groundbreaking study, Harmon considers women's involvement in the movement. Here, readers explore the contributions of Maisie Ward, Dorothy Day, Catherine deHueck Doherty, Ade Bethune, Therese Mueller, and many others. Harmon shows how movements and institutions such as progressivism, Catholic women's organizations, Catholic Action, the American Grail Movement, and daily Catholic family life played a prominent role in the liturgical renewal. The historical record is clear that women were there, they ministered to the Mystical Body, and their important work must be recognized.

Celebrating the diverse contributions of Catholic lay women in 20th century America Recovering Their Stories focuses on the many contributions made by Catholic lay women in the 20th century in their faith communities across different regions of the United States. Each essay explores the lives and contributions of Catholic lay women across diverse racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds, addressing themes related to these women’s creative agency in their spirituality and devotional practices, their commitment to racial and economic justice, and their leadership and authority in sacred and public spaces Taken together, this volume brings together scholars working in what otherwise may be discreet areas of academic study to look for patterns, areas of convergence and areas of divergence, in order to present in one place the depth and breadth of Catholic lay women’s experience and contributions to church, culture, and society in the United States. Telling these stories together provides a valuable resource for scholars in a number of disciplines, including American Catholic Studies, American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Feminist Studies, and US History. Additionally, scholars in the areas of Latinx studies, Black Studies, Liturgical Studies, and application of Catholic social teaching will find the book to be a valuable resource with respect to articles on specific topics.

Tells the stories of hundreds of Catholic women who as individuals and groups represent almost every point on the religious spectrum ; lay and religious, traditionalists and reformers. Includes the topics: Ideals of American Catholic womanhood, women in the convent, Reformers and activists, and Catholic feminism.

"Weaver fills an important gap in women's studies through her investigation of the intersection of the women's movement with the lives of contemporary Roman Catholic women." -- Iris "Mary Jo Weaver has charted the course of this new consciousness among Roman Catholic women." -- Rosemary Radford Ruether "This is the first full-scale study of how the U.S. women's movement has intersected with the lives and aspirations of American Roman Catholic women."Â -- Elizabeth Johnson, Religious Studies Review

"Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women's colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman's story to explore how debates over Catholic identity were intertwined with the renegotiation of American gender roles. By examining female power within Catholic religious communities and organizations, she challenges the widespread assumption that women who were faithful members of a patriarchal church were incapable of pathbreaking work on behalf of women.".