Nuns and Other "Odious Women"

“On principle, I refuse to speak badly of another woman, even if she has offended me intolerably.” – Elena Ferrante

I read a short essay of mine last week at VAMP, a storytelling showcase in San Diego, about the nuns at my Catholic “all-girls” high school.¹ This month marks 25 years since I graduated high school, and I think I needed all 25 years to figure out what I actually think about those nuns and the way they educated me. In fact, I still don’t quite know what to make of them. 

They weren’t only retrograde monsters who were trying to pump out a bunch of Amy Coney Barretts—although some of the sisters I know certainly must have swelled with pride when Barrett, alumna of a girls Catholic high school and white-supremacist complicit ass, became this country’s fifth-ever female Supreme Court justice.

Nor were the nuns only sage stewards of young women, a la Mother Superior in “Sound of Music.” The nuns were not uniformly sadistic, nor timid, nor out-of-touch, either. They were all of these things; they were none of these things. They were more than these things: they were human. So, they contained multitudes, to paraphrase a line from “Song of Myself,” a poem the nuns taught us. 

As I fleshed out my essay for VAMP, I leaned on another essay (not by me) as a guide. It’s an essay by Elena Ferrante called “Odious Women.” It begins: 

“On principle, I refuse to speak badly of another woman, even if she has offended me intolerably. It’s a position that I feel obliged to take precisely because I’m well aware of the situation of women: … I know that there is no woman who does not make an enormous, exasperating effort to get to the end of the day. Poor or affluent, ignorant or educated, beautiful or ugly, famous or unknown, married or single, working or unemployed, with children or without, rebellious or obedient, we are all deeply marked by a way of being in the world, that even when we claim it as ours, is poisoned at the root by millennia of male domination.” 

I thought of the sisters who ran my high school, and their enormous, exasperating efforts. Could I, as an ex-Catholic and current wishy-washy atheist, write an essay about them while “refusing to speak badly” of them?  Our culture prioritizes calling people out publicly as the best/only form of accountability. Could I find another way to speak of the sisters, even of the sisters who were truly odious?  

Ferrante continues: 

Women live amid permanent contradictions and unsustainable labors. Everything, really everything, has been codified in terms of male needs—even our underwear, sexual practices, maternity.”

I thought about the limited choices the nuns would have had, 60 or 70 years ago when they were deciding on the sisterhood. Marry God, or marry a man.

“It’s a condition that makes it easy to become odious to others and to ourselves.”

As I constructed my essay, I grappled with sisters whom I remember as both devoted to a patriarchal institution that has wreaked colonial havoc around the world, and also,  nonetheless a sisterhood. As anyone who has ever belonged to any kind of sisterhood can tell you: a sisterhood always conjures an undeniable, unvanquishable power. Even when its power is mostly smothered by a world “codified in terms of male needs,” as Ferrante puts it, male domination could never completely stamp it out. And I could feel that power as a teenage girl. 

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That’s a “behind-the-scenes” view of what I was thinking while I was writing the essay. I will share the actual video of my reading next week, and I’ll make an audio file so you can listen in the car, while cooking, etc. Then you can judge for yourself whether I did justice to the sisters. ;-)

In the meantime, Read Elena Ferrante’s full essay on Odious Women here.² Let me know what you think in the comments. 

XO, 

Maggie

1. The idea of gender fluidity was not discussed in the 1990s, and I assume that in the present day my high school alma mater would not accept gender-fluid or nonbinary people, or trans-girls. But I don’t know for sure,

2. If you like this Ferrante essay, it’s part of a collection called Incidental Inventions, which you can get at your local library or used for $5. Highly recommend.