“Fifty years ago last June,” Bernard Bellush recalled, “our naval vessel, LST 379, plowed through the choppy waters of the English Channel under overcast skies. We were part of the vast Allied armada heading for the D-day invasion of Omaha Beach in France. Despite briefings,” he admitted, “not one of us was prepared for the cliffs bristling with German armament.” Raised in a socialist Jewish home, Bellush joined the army to fight in World War II like tens of thousands of other American Jewish men. His recollections deserve our attention not merely for the time and place that they recall—though the experience of the D-Day invasion is inherently interesting—but also for what happened on LST 379 as it crossed the Channel in 1944.

This article explores the relationship between gender ideology and popular culture in one particular time and place—a Catholic family magazine called the Ave Maria during the latter part of the nineteenth Century. This case study yields an interpretive sociological account of how women were portrayed in this magazine, an account that sheds light on our understanding of the construction and negotiation of religious ideologies. When I speak of “ideology,” I refer to highly articulated and explicit meaning Systems that construct and regulate patterns of conduct. “Official ideologies” are endorsed and promoted by organizational officials and/or community elites.

A systematic examination of Ave Maria from 1865 to 1889 reveals that two-thirds of the articles reproduce some version of the official ideology of the True Catholic Woman. On the other hand, about one-third of the articles produce what I call “alternative interpretations”—“alternative” because they are critical of the limits that the official versions placed on women's character, activity, or autonomy.

A social order reveals the limits of its imagination in two particular ways. The first is in the methods of fear by which it constructs the unspeakable (the “monstrous” or the “inhuman”) as symbolic center of social energy. The second is in the means, legal and extralegal, then used to repudiate and silence that energy.

It was half past nine on a quiet Monday night in April 1818. Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury, known throughout Worcester as “Madame Salisbury” in deference to her family's wealth and social position, was passing a serene evening at home with her niece and adopted daughter, Eliza Weir. Her husband, Stephen, a merchant and the town's wealthiest Citizen, was away on business. The Salisbury mansion's comfortable drawing room was pleasant, graced by Elizabeth's harp and a piano bought expressly for Eliza.

Suddenly, the peace was shattered as something crashed violently against the front window. Salisbury immediately “call'd in the people” (the servants) for protection. Venturing outside, they spotted no one lurking about but did find two good-sized stones, one weighing over half a pound. Peering out into the now still night, Elizabeth Salisbury noted that “it was very dark, & no one appeared to be in the street. [Y]ou may suppose I did not recover my tranquil[l]ity very soon.”