Labor and Environmental Activism in Twentieth-Century American Women's Catholicism

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the United Farm Worker movement inspired Catholic women to adapt their relationship to the environment. Liberal nuns, who had participated in the civil rights movement, initially saw advocating for worker rights as part of their social justice mission. By the 1970s, these women used their positions as teachers, nurses, and administrators to publicize the plight of and agricultural laborers. They incorporated information from the fields into their curriculum and supported fruit and vegetable boycotts by not purchasing them for their hospitals. In the process, these nuns became environmentalists, as they realized the connection between worker rights and responsible stewardship of the land. This dissertation also explores how laypeople such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement (CWM) developed a green form of Catholicism that evolved over the course of forty years. The organization started as an alternative to socialism but soon adopted environmental politics which they eventually used to support the UFW movement. These lay Catholic women supported the UFW as a part of their religious expression. Beginning in the 1940s, lay Catholic women’s groups in the Midwest aided migrant workers and their families. By the 1960s, these groups started to fade as Catholics began to question the Church hierarchy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. In response to changing understandings of Catholicism, many lay Catholic women began to view good works as a valid form of practicing their religion. Other acts of lived religion became an important way to see how the UFW movement spread through an evolving religious framework. Labor movements united Catholic women to contemplate issues of social justice and environmental movements.