Submissions:2025/Writing biographies of notable Catholic sisters: challenges and techniques
This submission has been noted and is pending review for WikiConference North America 2025.
Title:
- Writing biographies of notable Catholic sisters: challenges and techniques
Type of session:
- Lecture (15-30 min)
Session theme(s):
- Credibility
Abstract:
Although sexism partly explains why so many notable women are not on Wikipedia, in the case of Roman Catholic sisters we also encounter common customs of their congregations. For those who were cloistered and habited, clues to true notability may be obscured. For example, most are buried with tombstones that simply list three dates: birth, entrance into religious life, and death. Before Vatican II sisters rarely wrote their own memoirs unless asked to do so. Instead, more typically a surviving sister who may not have known the deceased well wrote the biography post-mortem in 2-3 formulaic paragraphs, stating that she was the most devout and obedient, experiencing a stoic, sometimes mystically heightened, death. Even when reading about those founders of congregations and prominent educators who were occasionally featured in newspapers, magazines, and books, the alert biographer will detect evidence of folklore, hearsay, and outdated stereotypes that compromise secondary sources. And that's just for the habited congregations. Even for women out of habit post-Vatican-II, clichéd narratives persist, especially in the secular media. Congregation archivists can be useful partners, but many sanitize sisters' lives, withholding information deemed controversial. Much of what is available falls into Wikipedia’s banned "original research" category. This session presents some powerful best practices: (1) Creating secondary source materials, such as the monographs produced by Colleen Hartung and her team, and books and articles I have published in the Catholic and secular media; and (2) finding notable sisters tucked into books about other events, or in biographies of notable priests, since men were generally better documented. I'll offer lively examples from the 75 articles I have researched and published, 29 for Catholic sisters (2 with official Good Article status) and 6 for Catholic priests.
Author name(s):
Wikimedia username(s):
- Oh-Fortuna!
Affiliated organization(s):
- Georgetown University, WikiProject Women in Religion
Estimated length of session
- 30 minutes
Will you be presenting remotely?
- I will present in-person
Okay to livestream?
- Livestreaming is okay
Previously presented?
- No
Special requests: