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It’s highly appropriate that in the week before Easter, and in Women’s History Month, we focus not just on religious history, but on the history of a group of Roman Catholic women–those women that everyone else refers to (almost always incorrectly) as “nuns”. In this instance, we’re talking with Mary Beth Fraser Connolly about her book Women of Faith: The Chicago Sisters of Mercy and the Evolution of Religious Community.
It might not seem that such communities have much to do with women’s history, or any other sort of history. In fact, it’s interesting how peripheral we might think women’s religious communities are to this or any other society. And this instinctive reaction is true for many historians as well. Fraser Connolly writes that previously subdisciplines of history has “considered” sisters or nuns “women of little consequence to the advancement of women in society and in churches.” In Women of Faith Fraser Connolly makes a comprehensive assault on this position. Among other things, she argues that “asking new questions about the choices women made based upon their faith…enriches our understanding of the past, whether speaking of all women, Roman Catholic women, or all of society.” She also explains how the Sisters were the foundation of the American Catholic world; and how while the 1960’s were a watershed in the history of American Catholic culture, they can only be understood by what was happening in the preceding four decades.
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