Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest Inside the Church and Military (Princeton Studies in American Politics)

"This is the best work on where feminism really is in the United States in the 1990s. It is also the best work I know on the power of words. I recommend it to any feminist and democratic theorist."--Jane Mansbridge, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Riots and demonstrations, the lifeblood of American social and political protest in the 1960s, are now largely a historical memory. But Mary Fainsod Katzenstein argues that protest has not disappeared--it has simply moved off the streets into the country's core institutions. As a result, conflicts over sexual harassment, affirmative action, and the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and people of color now touch us more than ever in our daily lives, whether we are among those seeking change or those threatened by its prospects. No one is more aware of this than women demanding change from within the United States military and the American Catholic church.

Women in uniform are deeply patriotic and women active in the church are devoted to their callings. Yet Katzenstein shows that these women often feel isolated and demeaned, confronted by challenges as subtle as condescension and as blatant as career obstruction. Although faithful to their institutions, many have proved fearless in their attempts to reshape them. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred women in the military and the church--including senior officers, combat pilots, lay activists, and nuns--this book gives voice to the struggles and vision of these women as they have moved protest into the mainstream.

Katzenstein shows why the military and the church, similarly hierarchical and insistent on obedience, have come to harbor deeply different forms of protest. She demonstrates that women in the military have turned to the courts and Congress, whereas feminists in the church have used "discursive" protests--writing, organizing workshops and conferences--to rethink in radical ways the meanings of faith and justice. These different strategies, she argues, reflect how the law regulates the military but leaves the church alone.

Faithful and Fearless calls our attention to protest within institutions as a new stage in the history both of feminism and of social movements in America. The book is an inspiring account of strength in the face of adversity and a groundbreaking contribution to the study of American feminism, social protest, and the historical development of institutions in American society.

The fireworks set off by the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and '70s barely registered in the United States armed forces and the American dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church. More than a quarter century later, these male bastions are just starting to respond to the challenges feminists have repeatedly issued. Faithful and Fearless handily shows how some women who support these institutions, yet chafe under restrictions and belittlement aimed at their sex, have brought about changes. Beneath some heavy academic trappings, Faithful and Fearless is a wellspring of pungent quotes from military women who invoked the law to redress injustices and female religious who merely spoke louder when condemnation rolled down from the Vatican. Said Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister when Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the ban on ordaining women: "After 2,000 years of teaching errors on matters as global and major as anti-Semitism, usury, the Inquisition, slavery, the nature of the universe, and meat on Fridays, it is hard to believe that concern for the recognition of the fullness of grace in all creatures can be considered a distortion of the faith. I'll take my chances." --Francesca Coltrera