Subversive Habits

Shannen Dee Williams offers the first full historical account of Black women who became Catholic sisters in the United States. Drawing on sources that have seldom been used, including church records that were previously sealed and oral histories, the author reconstructs the lives and work of these women.

The book shows Black sisters in many roles: religious leaders, teachers, nurses and other medical workers, front-line participants in school desegregation, activists in the Black Power movement, and womanist theologians.

Williams also examines female religious life in the Roman Catholic Church as a bastion of white supremacy and racial segregation. In that same setting, she argues, the church became a key arena in the long African American fight for freedom.