The Ladies in Hats Have Their Say: The National Council of Catholic Women, Vatican II, and the Women's Movement, 1962–75

This paper focuses on the National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW), a conservative umbrella organization for Catholic laywomen’s groups.  This organization is of particular interest because it provides one of the best opportunities to take the pulse of the “women in the pews” on a large scale at a most tumultuous time in the American Catholic church and in the nation as a whole.  This paper fits into a larger project designed to map American Catholic responses to the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), a massive modernization effort within the church.

I will argue that the NCCW’s response to Vatican II was positive, at least initially.  These women tentatively embraced church renewal, and most intriguingly, linked it to a mild form of women’s rights talk.  This finding is certainly surprising; the NCCW was not considered to be a feminist organization, certainly not by Catholic feminists or by anyone else for that matter.  It was housed in and funded by the American Catholic hierarchy and was singled out by many a frustrated feminist for its negative stand on the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights. 

This raises several key questions: how did the NCCW define for itself the renewal process that would drastically reshape its membership’s experience of the sacred?  How did their conception of themselves as women influence their positions?  The papers of the NCCW make clear that assumptions about how conservative Catholic women might have responded are inadequate.  Their reactions changed over time and were very complex, richly so, showing a group of women who do not fit standard definitions.  Though viewed by the left as old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy obstructionists in pill-box hats, the NCCW proved quite interested, if not whole-heartedly committed, to renewal and women’s rights.  Their approaches to both movements complicate our understanding of each.