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Catholic nuns and sisters in a secular age examines the changes in religious life for women religious in Britain from 1945 to 1990 identifying how community and individual lives were altered. This work is grounded in three core premises: women religious were influenced by and participated in the wider social movements of the long 1960s; women’s religious institutes were transnational entities and part of a larger global happening; and the struggles of renewal were linked to competing and contradictory ideas of collective, institutional identities. The work pivots on the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), but considers pre and post Vatican II social, cultural and religious events and social movements of the 1960s as influencers in these changes. It interrogates ‘lived experience’ by examining the day-to-day lives of women religious. Though rooted in the experiences of women religious in Britain, the book probes the relationships and interconnectivities between women religious within and across national divides as they move from institutions embedded in uniformity to the acceptance of cultural plurality. It also engages with the histories of the social movements of the long 1960s. For too long, religion has been relegated to its own silo, unlinked to the ‘radical sixties’ and depicted as ultimately obstructionist to its social movements. To contest this, female religious life is examined as a microcosm of change in the Catholic Church pointing to the ‘new thinking and freer lifestyles’ that allowed for the questioning of institutional cultures.
‘otherworldliness’ emphasised by the Archbishop of Liverpool, George Andrew Beck, in a 1950 collection of essays published to celebrate the centenary of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. 4 Others revelled in the idea that Catholicism was a ‘cultural force: a powerful critique of the modern world and all its errant ways’. 5 This credo appeared to be effective, given the demographic growth and cohesiveness of the English Catholic community during the 1950s and 1960s: it was not diminishing in the way that other religious denominations were at this time. 6 This same
modernity and to religious life through memoirs and vocation literature. Lastly, it identifies how religious congregations and orders reacted to the Modern Girl who entered religious life from the 1940s to the 1960s. In this analysis of memoirs and vocation literature, the representation and display of the Modern Girl is more relevant than her actual lived experience. This is a constructed Modern Girl, one that is less complicated than lived experience would highlight and one that is, in the sources at least, easily typecast. She is an object rather than an individual
-cycle stage varied from person to person, but in general seem to have run from the interviewees’ mid-thirties to sixties for those married in the immediate post-war years, beginning a little later for those married after the 1960s. Scholarly accounts of women and ageing tend to focus on the menopause. 3 However, the menopause did not represent a major topic of discussion in the interviews. This absence may have been
Seeing ourselves as citizens of the world helps us to relatavise [ sic ] our own situation, since it is part of a much bigger whole. 1 Sister M. Philip (née Elizabeth) Rendall’s worldview changed sometime in the late 1960s. She began transitioning from her local, teaching-centred ministry to a global ministry ignited by her passion for justice. Born in London in 1924, she attended St Angela’s Ursuline Convent School at Forest Gate. She entered the Ursulines, aged eighteen, a few years before the Second World War began. After her novitiate training, she
decline in the ‘Global North’ (and increase in the ‘Global South’), they continue to attract media attention, though almost always as ‘other’. Since the 1950s, a profusion of books has been published in Britain and Ireland and elsewhere recounting personal experiences by nuns and about nuns. The genre of ‘nuns talking’ presents a disparate range of experiences. In Britain, Karen Armstrong’s gripping and widely cited 1960s memoir explores a complex young woman’s experience of a stifling convent regime and her eventual exodus. 3 Sister Giles’ story of parting is
the heart of Margaret’s story of religious change. She identified a ‘sexual revolution’ as the key historical development which let the ‘cork out of the bottle’ on her Catholic faith. In this sense, Margaret’s personal life story chimed with a dominant narrative of collective post-war change. The idea that a process of ‘sexual liberation’ in the 1960s destroyed Britain’s Christian culture has become a
existing knowledge, how did Catholic authorities attempt to measure, interrogate and understand this experience in the 1960s? What intellectual tools and apparatus were used to construct the Church’s image of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, and what can these tools tell us about both Catholic and secular notions of the personal at this historical moment? This chapter addresses these questions
adolescence and the eventual religious belief system taken up in adulthood. Attributing a Catholic woman’s eventual ‘orthodox’ or ‘liberal’ Catholic identity, or any other aspect of their beliefs, to their sexual education is therefore misleading. The middle of the 1960s witnessed a sudden proliferation of Catholic sexual education initiatives (a little too late for most of the interviewees). Catholic schools
sexual encounter was an increasingly rare phenomenon amongst young Catholic couples in 1960s Britain. This was, in part, a consequence of wider societal shifts in sexual culture, including a ‘democratisation’ of sexual knowledge described by the likes of Lesley Hall and Roy Porter, but also a direct response to the rapid expansion of specifically Catholic marriage preparation initiatives. 2 Although the