At the book signing: Mary Erdmans (sitting) with Dr. Becky Stoddart (PSY)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2005 “Nuns and Moms: The role of religion and motherhood in the life choices of white working-class women” A LECTURE BY Dr. Mary Erdmans, PhD (SMC 1981) Department of Sociology Central Connecticut State University Friday, September 30, 2005 SOCIOLOGY BROWN BAG with DR. ERDMANS "Life Histories as a Research Method”

“Nuns and Moms:
The role of religion and motherhood in the life choices of white working-class women”

Dr. Erdmans’ talk will focus on the life choices of Catholic working-class women who came of age in the domesticity of the 1940s and 1950s and were "called" to life careers as mothers and nuns. Understanding that we make choices within a particular set of circumstances, she shows that their careers were influenced by class position, shaped by religious expectations, supported by ethnic culture, and privileged by racial standing. Based on oral histories with her mother and four aunts, Erdmans’ work makes visible the private lives of women that social scientists often overlook, the lives of women tending gardens, praying in church pews, and caring for the family. She also compares the lives of this pre-feminist generation with the choices and opportunities available to her post-feminist generation, challenging us to examine what women have gained and lost by moving into the public sphere.

Dr. Erdmans is the author of The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and The Choices They Made (Ohio University Press, 2004). The Grasinski Girls were working-class Americans of Polish descent, born in the 1920s and 1930s, who created lives typical of many women in their day. They went to high school, married, and had children. For the most part, they stayed home to raise their children, and they were happy doing that. Like most women of their generation, they did not join the women’s movement, and today they either reject or shy away from feminism. This book exams the complex "ordinary" lives of these ethnic, Christian, working-class women in the post-World War II generation, comparing them, at times, to the post-feminist generation. The oral histories of these five sisters show how they are acted upon and actors, they are privileged and disadvantaged, they resist and surrender, they petition the Lord and accept His will.