Conclusion: Catholic Girls, Grown Up: Parting Thoughts from a Catholic Woman

Abstract

The women writers of Catholic literature that this study has addressed originate from vastly varying geographical locations and cultural histories. Even when they write from similar social and spatial positions— the contemporary United States, for instance—they represent widely ranging backgrounds and education, as well as offer broadly different interpretations of their experiences. While these experiences come together in the form of girlhood narratives, the girls in such narratives face an assortment of oppressions in their lives, ranging from racism to sexism to clas-sism to homophobia to colonialism. These girls confront both their individual and their collective obstacles in a variety of ways as well, whether by actively contesting the oppressive reality of their everyday lives, as Rigoberta Menchú does in her memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala, or by offering a more fictionalized response to oppression, as La Loca does with her magic in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God.

The more one becomes a feminist, the more difficult it becomes to go to church.

—Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Ttieology

I am still an Anglo-Catholic and I am still a feminist, but neither party finds me good or orthodox.

—Sara Maitland, A Map of the New Country

But what if these two seeming ends of a continuum were shown to meet? What if this continuum were molded in the form of a circle, with each of the two polarities then joined?

—David Danow, The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque