The Laywoman Project

In The Laywoman Project Mary J. Henold “studies communities of highly active, largely nonfeminist laywomen at a particularly unsettled moment in the history of the American Catholic Church” (p. 2). She focuses on the ten years after the end of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962–1965), a worldwide, media-covered event that ultimately produced sixteen documents that did much to modernize the centuries-old, global church. Working for centuries as perceived “inferiors” to Catholic nuns and limited to purely domestic duties, laywomen, post–Vatican II, charted their own trajectory as agents of change (although they rarely self-defined as feminists). Historically, the Church had given Catholic women the role of keepers of the traditions in a conservative, patriarchal institution that counted on these wives and mothers to anchor the core beliefs of gendered essentialism that demanded women practice submission, fidelity, self-sacrifice, and obedience to male authority in the church and in the home

Canon Law · Holy See · Institution · Obedience · Political science · Sacrifice · Sociology · Theology · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies