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 groups 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
Introduction: Ethos, the Patriarchy, and Feminist Resistance
Elizabethada A. Wright
Part I: Ethos within Womens 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-Familles 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 Womens Rhetorics of Accountability
Jamie White-Farnham
Part III: Catholic Lay Womens Ethos
Chapter Eight: A Leader and a Lady: Catholic Womens Use of Business Writing to Create an Ethos of Professionalism and Catholic Lay Womanhood
Jennifer Crosby Burgess
Chapter Nine: Mary Dalys Radical Ethos as Epistemic Voyage
Julianna Edmonds
Chapter Ten: Metanoic Faith: Living Rhetorically in Dorothy Days 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 Josephs Rhetorical Advocacy: The Trivium and Renaissance Rhetoric at St. Marys 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
