Catholic Women's Rhetoric in the United States: Ethos, the Patriarchy, and Feminist Resistance examines the rhetoric of Roman Catholic women. Focusing on women in the United States, the books recognizes that most Catholic women have felt-and been--marginalized by the Church, yet many women still seek membership in the Church because of its professed ideals. 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 scandal as they redefined what it means to be a "good Catholic mother." 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.
Elizabethada A. Wright is professor at University of Minnesota Duluth and member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities' Literacy and Rhetorical Studies Program. Christina R. Pinkston is assistant professor of English at Norfolk State University.
Table of Contents Introduction: Ethos, the Patriarchy, and Feminist Resistance Elizabethada A. Wright Part I: Ethos within Women's Religious Orders Chapter One: 'If we are always your cherished daughters': Ethos, Parrhesia, and Two Nineteenth-Century European-American Catholic Sisters Elizabethada A. Wright Chapter Two: Remembering Mother McAuley: Epideictic Rhetoric, Ethos, and Memory Amy Ferdinandt Stolley Chapter Three: The Habits and Dwelling Places of Sisters of Color: The New Orleans' Soeurs de Sainte-Famille's Reconstruction of Ethos Elizabethada A. Wright and Christiana Ares-Christian Chapter Four: Corporeal, Confrontational Resistance: The Embodied Rhetoric of the Sisters of Loretto Shana Scudder Part II: Intersections of Lay and Clergy Chapter Five: Who Owns This Church? Feminist Methods of Protest and Lay Catholic Activism Laura J. Panning Davies Chapter Six: Clergy Sex Abuse Scandals and the (Re)Making of Good Catholic Mothers Allison Niebauer and Elisa Vogel Chapter Seven: Ethos as Presence in Lay Catholic Women's Rhetorics of Accountability Jamie White-Farnham Part III: Catholic Lay Women's Ethos Chapter Eight: A Leader and a Lady: Catholic Women's Use of Business Writing to Create an Ethos of Professionalism and Catholic Lay Womanhood Jennifer Crosby Burgess Chapter Nine: Mary Daly's Radical Ethos as Epistemic Voyage Julianna Edmonds Chapter Ten: Metanoic Faith: Living Rhetorically in Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness Jimmy Hamill Chapter Eleven: Word and Deed: Dolores Huerta, Chicana Feminism and a Zurdo Ethos of Faith in Action L. Heidenreich Part IV: Women Religious Negotiations of Ethos Chapter Twelve: Sister Miriam Joseph's Rhetorical Advocacy: The Trivium and Renaissance Rhetoric at St. Mary's College, 1931-1960 Joseph Burzynski Chapter Thirteen: Holiness is Not for Wimps: The Rhetoric of Mother Angelica Jennifer L. Bay Chapter Fourteen: A Time to be Queer: Challenging the Rhetoric of Acceptance through the Works of Sister Joan Chittister Beth Buyserie Chapter Fifteen: Standing in the Eye of the Storm: The Eternal Habits of US Women Religious Jamie Downing
Landmark studies do not belie this volume's thesis that the rhetorical activities of Roman Catholic women have been largely neglected: either they are voiceless nonentities under the Church's (male) thumb; or anything interesting about their rhetoric can be isolated from their faith commitments. But here, contemporary theories of ecologically defined ethos reveal Catholic women's deployment of rich rhetorical resources in studies of women's religious orders, laywomen's activism, leadership by figures such as Mary Daly and Dolores Huerta, and the dynamic public ethos of Mother Angelica and Sister Joan Chittister, among others. When the rhetorical activities of other marginalized groups have been analyzed, important insights have emerged for the entire field, not only for members of those groups, and scholars will find the same broad significance in this volume. I know I did! -- Patricia Bizzell, College of the Holy Cross Catholic Women's Rhetoric is a groundbreaking collection exploring neglected topics in the history of rhetorical education and religious activism in the United States. These challenging essays provide significant insights into the institutional roles played by women in the public sphere, especially the accomplishments of female religious orders. As a whole, the volume demonstrates the power of feminist rhetorical scholarship to reveal the enabling conditions of historical agency for lay and religious Catholic women, the patriarchal constraints overcome, and the active resistances achieved. Scholars in all the humanistic disciplines will find this collection to be a rich resource for thinking about rhetorical practices in religious and political contexts, especially the negotiations and deployments of ethos, individual and collective. -- Steven Mailloux, President's Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University
