Gidget Goes to the Convent
Taking the Veil as a Girl’s Adventure in The Flying Nun
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895656 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rebecca Sullivan (0000-0002-0877-4997, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 15-30 |
| Publication date | 2001-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-s031-02-02 |
| OpenAlex | W1995757002 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Although many remember Sally Field as the all-American girl in the ABC sitcom Gidget, her more successful television series was her second vehicle, The Flying Nun. With only one year between the two sitcoms, it is easy to see Gidget—whom everyone must have thought was destined to become a suburban housewife—in the new character of Sister Bertrille. This relationship was directly alluded to by Variety Magazine in a review of the pilot episode. Dismissing it as “Gidget Takes the Veil,” the reviewer complained, “the effect is that she’s playing an old role in a new guise. They might aptly have called the opus, ‘I Was A Teenage Nun’” (qtd. in Prouty n. pag.). As acerbic as this review may be, it begs the question, What’s wrong with a teenage nun? Certainly in the 1950s and 1960s the majority of new religious vocations were made by teenage girls, usually right after high school (Wakin and Sheuer, De-Romanization 38). For Catholic girls, the convent could be perceived as an exciting option for an adventurous life as far away from middle-American suburbs as they could go without actually crossing any boundaries of proper femininity. The association of a vocation with adventure and romance was reinforced by many religious sisters, and with good reason. American women religious were experiencing unprecedented liberty and, along with that, confusion as they underwent an intense period of reflection and renewal during these two decades. This period began in 1951 with the Call for Renewal initiated by Pius XII and continued beyond the Second Vatican Council from 1962–1965. Denied any decision-making authority and banished from voting privileges in the Vatican hierarchy, women religious were nonetheless crucial to the implementation of the new attitudes of matching spiritual fortitude with social justice. They were the ones who implemented many of the experiments and tested the limits of reform. Furthermore, they were teaching the next generation of Catholics, inspiring girls to consider joining a convent themselves
Adventure · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Femininity · Girl · Housewife · Literature · Period (music · Political science · Romance · Sister · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |