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WHO ARE THE CATHOLIC FEMINISTS? Leslie Woodcock Tentler Mary J. Henold. Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 291 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.00.
This past summer I published an essay in Commonweal, a liberal Catholic biweekly. 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 nearcontemporary 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...