Changing Old Habits: Dress of Women Religious and Its Relationship to Personal and Social Identity |
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| Authors: | Susan O Michelman |
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| Institution: | an assistant professor in the Department of Consumer Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Her research and publications focus on dress, identity, and social change. Her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Minnesota and associated publications analyze cultural symbolism of dress in women's societies of the Kalabari people of Nigeria. |
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| Abstract: | Dress has played a critical and visible role in constructing social and personal identities of Roman Catholic nuns, or as those in noncloistered orders prefer to be called, women religious. This research utilizes symbolic interaction theory to examine how social identity, symbolized by the religious habit, communicated an image that was incompatible with the personal identities of the women religious who wore habits. To explore this issue, the author uses the concepts of identity distancing and embracing. During the 1960s and 1970s, following the mandates of Vatican II in 1962, the process of identity distancing was evidenced by relinquishing the habit. Identity embracing was at first symbolized by the ambivalence expressed in wearing the modified habit and more clearly conveyed through secular dress. |
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