Women who step forward:

...She thinks of this omission primarily in terms of women's friendships and of supportive groups of women...

...The campaign fast was another attempt to focus attention on the homeless...

...She lists such famous pairs as Benedict and Scholasti-ca, Paula and Jerome, Clare and Francis of Assisi, Jeanne de Chantal and Francis de Sales", Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac, etc...

...Women have not been allowed ambition, self-realization, or the acquisition of power except under some disguise or other...

...A second look at the women's stories in these pairs is now due...

...Literally hundreds and thousands of women have done so and many lived lives of heroic accomplishment as a result...

...It is a thought-provoking little book about the depiction of women in biography and autobiography...

...Some cried out against her...

...Thus she felt she had to act...

...Certainly Fennelly became an activist as a follower of Snyder...

...When we think of the further insights into the politics of Carmel, of which we catch glimpses in the story of Therese of Lisieux, we can only wonder, as Heilbrun evidently does, whether women would really prefer, as many claim they do, "a world without evident power or control...

...Occasionally women have put God or Christ in the place of a man...

...They reported her as "stepping out from the shadow of Mitch Snyder" and asserting leadership for women in the cause...

...As the result of one (during which he was supported by prominent government wives and film personalities) he extracted from President Reagan himself the promise of the renovation of a government building as a model shelter...

...Another theme of Heilbrun' s is that the part other women play in any one woman's story is seldom told...

...But here I would quarrel with Heilbrun about her use of the word "occasionally" in saying that occasionally women have put God or Christ in the place of a man in their lives...

...These communities, like women's colleges and women's organizations, may be subcultures, but their study will illuminate the stories of women...

...Columbia professor Heilbrun holds that the truthful telling of a woman's life-even the self-telling (and even the authentic living of it)-has been impossible until very recently because of the age-old view of woman's role...

...To be a woman has meant' 'to put a man at the center of one's life and to allow to occur only what honors his prime position...

...If one is to reexamine the telling of women's lives, the stories of the saints, canonized or not, are a wonderfully fertile source of exploration...

...Sympathetic newspeople saw it a bit differently...

...The above was borne home to me by the headlines about the disputes at the Morristown Carmel where five nuns barricaded themselves in the infirmary in protest against their new superior...

...The impulse to personal accomplishment and leadership is almost always, Heilbrun asserts, depicted in the self-telling of women's stories, as the response to a spiritual call "to an accomplishment and an achievement in no other way excusable in a female self.'' Fennelly's story recalls another thesis of Heilbrun's-that women seeking spiritual achievement discover themselves through identification with some "other...

...As is often the case with books with interesting theses, or with ideas which interact with my own, I find it coloring my thought about events in the news...

...But why, I wondered, did she join the fast herself this time after being a supportive figure for many years, nursing Mitch Snyder through one crisis after another, and content to act as his spokeswoman...

...In every case, however, McGinley argues that each one of the pair would have been less without the other...

...Exactly because they bring these two themes together, it would seem to me that the study of religious communities, only recently initiated by women historians, is another very fertile source...

...They must do so because the plight of homeless children is dire-they are living their whole lives in shelters, abandoned cars, slum-like motel rooms...

...It culminated in a march on the Capitol led by Snyder and Cher among others-by that time Carol Fennelly was too weak to join them...

...To fast almost to death must require great courage, a strong will, steadfastness, and devotion to a cause-all traits exhibited by Carol Fennelly...

...Fennelly says it was because it was time for women, especially mothers like herself, to step forward in the cause of the homeless...

...It is worth looking into...

...others for her...

...She is the long-time companion and co-worker of Mitch Snyder, activist for the homeless, who has survived several such life-threatening fasts...

...There are very interesting parallels here in the stories of saintly women...

...Anonymity, we have long believed, is the proper condition of women,'' she says...

...Teresa sent to be prioress at the convent of the Incarnation!' 'When . . . she entered the choir, an angry group attempted to bar her way...

...She limned strong women like Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Mere Jahouvey...

...The pandemonium was increased when some of her supporters attempted to sing the Te Deum and the rest shouted them down" (Peers, Mother of Carmel...

...Actually a very good start at exploring this source has already been done by Phyllis McGinley in Saint-Watching...

...She also included a fascinating and sophisticated study of the attachments between many men and women saints-"the comradeship between men and women geniuses...

...This was in my mind as I watched and read the news reports of Carol Fennelly, member of the Community for Creative Nonviolence, who narrowly escaped death from fasting during the last six weeks of the presidential campaign...

...Whatever we may think of the tactic of fasting to make or gain a point-at its best it is a kind of spiritual blackmail and, used too often, may promote callousness-it has sometimes been very effective, at least in the short run...

...And in not all of them is the woman the follower...

...the results are the same: one's own desires and quests are always secondary...

...Shades of St...

...Still another theme is the issue of power and control in women's lives...

...Identity is grounded through the relation to the chosen other...