Exploring Women's Roles at a Catholic College

As early as the 1950s, students sought to understand the impact of feminism on spiritual life. Abigail McCarthy, in speaking to the Institute for Spirituality at Saint John's University, described women of her generation as "stifled", caught between a feminist impulse and a male clergy who do not understand their frustrations.  

In 1982, Professor Annette Atkins formed Listening to Women's Voices at Saint John's to illuminate the experience of women at predominantly male SJU.  Participants, including many Sisters as well as employees, wrote essays for the Listening to Women’s Voices series (LWV), now in the SJU Archives. Their papers reflect the patriarchal nature of a men's college, and the larger context of women's experience of Catholicism.  One woman struggled to be under the Roman Catholic Church's oppressive restrictions with regard to the its stance on birth control, the role of women in the family, and sexuality. Another questioned how many of the women in the Bible met the qualifications for apostles as they were the messengers of Jesus’ resurrection. A contributor wrote about how some things were getting better because of the revised 1983 Code of Canon Law, which when compared to the 1917 law, gave women in the church much more basic rights, including the ability to discuss situations concerning the good of the church with priests and pastors. These essays pointed out the inequality women faced in the church: in addition to not being allowed to be priests, women were not acknowledged in the church, their voices were not heard, and often churches did not keep records of nuns, they only recorded priests.