Gender Identities in American Catholicism

Gender Identities in American Catholicism contains over one hundred original documents that range temporally from the earliest days of American Catholicism to the present. These documents illustrate how gender is a prime determiner of social position in the church and in American society as a whole, and how changing attitudes to gender identities affect a community’s self-understanding. These carefully selected texts show ways in which gender issues were constructed in the past and how they are reconstructed in the midst of historical developments. What may surprise many readers are the ways in which male domination was subtly challenged long before such epochal events as women’s suffrage and the feminist revolution occurred. Taken together, these texts show the plurality of American Catholic ideas about gender and the tension between competing attitudes.