Catholic Women’s Rhetoric in the United States

Elizabethada A. Wright is professor of writing studies at University of Minnesota Duluth.Christina R. Pinkston is assistant professor of English at Norfolk State University.

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!

• Table of ContentsIntroduction: Ethos, the Patriarchy, and Feminist ResistanceElizabethada A. WrightPart I: Ethos within Women’s Religious OrdersChapter One: ‘If we are always your cherished daughters’: Ethos, Parrhesia, and Two Nineteenth-Century European-American Catholic SistersElizabethada A. WrightChapter Two: Remembering Mother McAuley: Epideictic Rhetoric, Ethos, and MemoryAmy Ferdinandt StolleyChapter Three: The Habits and Dwelling Places of Sisters of Color: The New Orleans’ Soeurs de Sainte-Famille’s Reconstruction of EthosElizabethada A. Wright and Christiana Ares-ChristianChapter Four: Corporeal, Confrontational Resistance: The Embodied Rhetoric of the Sisters of LorettoShana ScudderPart II: Intersections of Lay and ClergyChapter Five: Who Owns This Church? Feminist Methods of Protest and Lay Catholic ActivismLaura J. Panning DaviesChapter Six: Clergy Sex Abuse Scandals and the (Re)Making of Good Catholic MothersAllison Niebauer and Elisa Vogel