2022 Letitia Woods Brown Prize Winner
2022 Publishers Weekly's Top Books in Religion
A01=Shannen Dee Williams
Association of Black Women Historians book awards
Author_Shannen Dee Williams
Category=JBSL
Category=QRMB1
Category=QRVS5
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Religion
Product details
- ISBN 9781478018209
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 17 May 2022
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Subversive Habits, Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women’s religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters-such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965-were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women’s religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation-and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle.
Shannen Dee Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton.
