Subversive Habits, Shannen Dee Williams's pioneering study of Black women religious in the United States, is an intense, demanding, extremely ambitious book. It is a heavily documented narrative, grounded in myriad mini-biographies, mined from archival sources, newspapers, and over one hundred oral interviews with sisters and former sisters. Williams does not sugarcoat her history. She is not afraid to use terms such as “white supremacy” with reference to the policies and proclivities of superiors in white (or predominantly white) congregations. At first, Subversive Habits (especially the endnotes) can feel like a slap on the cheek to those of us who have been writing the history of Catholic women over the past several decades, attempting to include Black women whenever possible, aware of how much of the history eludes us. Another metaphor might be more apt: Subversive Habits is like an ice water facial. It can wake us up, sharpen our awareness, and prepare us for the crucial journey to which Williams beckons us.
Williams's first chapter on “early struggles” in the nineteenth century covers some material that is familiar to American Catholic historians, approached from a distinctly different angle. For example, it explores why Black offspring of the Founding Fathers and victims of the plaçage system in Louisiana (which she accurately calls “sexual slavery”) sought to enter the convent. Williams recovers for us the “emancipatory dimensions of Black female celibacy within religious life” (11–12) and the importance of the habit for African American women religious, even into the twenty-first century. She addresses the reasons for, and implications of, racial passing on the part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black candidates for membership in religious orders. She identifies the elitism and colorism within two pioneer Black congregations: the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of the Holy Family.
Chapter 2, which addresses the first four decades of the twentieth century, probes the workings of Catholic institutional racism as experienced by Black sisters and how it was related to that of adjacent non-Catholic (even anti-Catholic) communities. American congregations responded to the challenges posed by rising teacher certification standards from the 1920s through the 1940s by sending sisters to summer schools, usually at Catholic colleges and universities. When many white bishops, priests, and sisters who supported (white) “missions” to Black Catholics opposed integrated summer schools, or even the racial mixing of professors and students, Black sister-administrators running Black Catholic schools were left with few options. Those Black sisters who were admitted to summer programs grappled with the correct approach to racist professors and fellow students. Some tried to speak discreetly to the perpetrators; “others embraced a code of silence and deference that would come back to haunt them years later” (88).
One of Williams's most important contributions is her detailed account of how Black sisters, occasionally supported by a small cadre of white allies, desegregated Catholic institutions during the critical years between the Second World War and the mid-1960s. Her granular examination of the Sisters of St. Mary (SSM) in St. Louis illuminates the shift that occurred after the war. In July 1946, this nursing order admitted three African American women, including Elizabeth Louise Ebo, a former US Cadet Nurse who had trained in the SSM's segregated nursing school. (As Sister Mary Antona Ebo, she would be a vocal, visible force in the fight for social justice within her order, the Catholic Church, and American society-at-large until her death in 2017 at age ninety-three). For years, the St. Louis SSMs had been known for their support of Black Catholics in the surrounding community, even as they strenuously avoided integrating their congregation. Williams shows how their shift toward integration appears to have persuaded others to take the same step. Integrated orders were still a tiny minority, but by the late 1940s, allies were able to publish lists of potential congregations, a veritable Green Book for any Black Catholic woman who believed that she had a vocation.
Among the most disturbing (and enlightening) aspects of Williams's narrative is the negative trajectory that she draws from the successes of the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 1960s through the setbacks of the final decades of the twentieth century and beyond. The monumental achievement represented by the establishment of the National Black Sisters’ Conference in 1968 is followed almost immediately by the virtual abandonment of Black Catholic schools and the Black sisters who ran them. During the same period, for a variety of reasons examined by Williams, the ranks of African American sisters are decimated, some by exhaustion and illness (possibly stress-related), some to pursue other ministries. Williams tracks down pioneering Black sister-activists who had left their religious congregations and shares the reasons for their departures (often in their own words). In an evocative chapter on the recent past entitled “The Future of the Black Nun Is Dubious,” one hears traces of resignation in Williams's argument that after two centuries of grueling effort and sacrifice on the part of African American sisters, the most hopeful signs now come from the “reverse-missions” originating in sub-Saharan Africa.
Williams generalizes boldly from interview material and occasionally from small samples of data. This could raise eyebrows, but it is the only way to proceed when recovering the (often suppressed) history of a neglected subset of the American Catholic community. Williams has gathered material on a small percentage of women religious who have great significance for our understanding of the church's past legacies and prospects for the future. Her research is timely, capturing the voices and stories of Black sisters while they are still with us. Generations of scholars will be in her debt.
