Catholic Women’s Rhetoric in the United States

Ethos, the Patriarchy, and Feminist Resistance

Christina R. Pinkston, Elizabethada A. Wright

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978790582
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Building on various feminist theories of ethos, the authors in this collection explore how North American Catholic women from various periods, races, ethnicities, sexualities, and classes have used elements of the group's positionality to make change. The women considered in the book range from the earliest Catholic sisters who arrived in the United States to women who held the Church hierarchy accountable for the sexual abuse scandals. The book analyzes women such as those in an African American order who developed an ethos that would resist racism. Chapters also consider better known Catholic women such as Dolores Huertas, Mary Daly, and Joan Chittister.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Ethos within Women’s Religious Orders: Part I
• Chapter 1: “If We Are Always Your Cherished Daughters”: Ethos, Parrhesia, and Two Nineteenth-Century European American Catholic Sisters
• Chapter 2: Remembering Mother McAuley: Epideictic Rhetoric, Ethos, and Memory
• Chapter 3: The Habits and Dwelling Places of Sisters of Color: The New Orleans’ Soeurs de Sainte-Famille’s Reconstruction of Ethos
• Chapter 4: Corporeal, Confrontational Resistance: The Embodied Rhetoric of the Sisters of Loretto
• Part II: Intersections of Lay and Clergy: Part II
• Chapter 5: Who Owns This Church?: Feminist Methods of Protest and Lay Catholic Activism
• Chapter 6: Clergy Sex Abuse Scandals and the (Re)Making of Good Catholic Mothers
• Chapter 7: Ethos as Presence in Lay Catholic Women’s Rhetorics of Accountability
• Part III: Catholic Lay Women’s Ethos: Part III
• Chapter 8: “A Leader and a Lady”: Catholic Women’s Use of Business Writing to Create an Ethos of Professionalism and Catholic Lay Womanhood
• Chapter 9: Mary Daly’s Radical Ethos as Epistemic Voyage
• Chapter 10: Metanoic Faith: Living Rhetorically in Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness
• Chapter 11: Word and Deed: Dolores Huerta, Chicana Feminism, and a Zurdo Ethos of Faith in Action
• Part IV: Women Religious’ Negotiations of Ethos: Part IV
• Chapter 12: Sister Miriam Joseph’s Rhetorical Advocacy: The Trivium and Renaissance Rhetoric at St. Mary’s College, 1931–1960
• Chapter 13: “Holiness Is Not for Wimps”: The Rhetoric of Mother Angelica
• Chapter 14: A Time to Be Queer: Challenging the Rhetoric of Acceptance through the Works of Sister Joan Chittister
• Chapter 15: Standing in the Eye of the Storm: The Eternal Habits of U.S. Women Religious
• Index
• About the Contributors