Vocational Habit(u)s: Catholic Nuns in Contemporary Poland

This chapter focuses on modes of selfhood engendered in contemporary women's working and intimate lives, and considers how they may relate to projects of the self authorized by religious and spiritual practices and communities in the West. Traditional forms of women's work and aspects of traditional femininity have persisted partly because there has been no revolution in patterns of masculine work, identity and privilege resulting in what Arlie Hochschild calls a stalled' gender revolution. The consequences for religion are correspondingly complex, and mean that we cannot simply assume that male experience is the leading edge' of a secularization process with women falling into line once they come under the sway of the same processes of modernization. The chapter explores number of data sources, including interviews and participant observation carried out by myself with women in Kendal, Cumbria (UK) and Asheville, North Carolina (USA) between 2000 and 2006.