Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Committee Chair

Rosemary Hathaway

Committee Co-Chair

Michael Germana

Committee Member

Michael Germana

Committee Member

Cari Carpenter

Committee Member

Debra Lattanzi Shutika

Committee Member

Susan Kalcik

Abstract

This project examines the reciprocal and evolving relationship between American women’s culture, vernacular religion, and the social development of American ethnicity. This project focuses on the roles of white ethnic women, both literary and real, in the construction, maintenance, and transmission of ethnic identity. The project highlights the connections between the folkloric performances of vernacular religion and the discursive articulation of ethnicity by focusing on two women writers and two groups of Slovak American women. The fiction of Kate Chopin and Anzia Yezierska illustrates how literary authors bring their contemporary concepts of folklore into their writing. The writings of these two women reveal the development from group-based difference to ethnicity in the early twentieth century. These literary depictions are paired with the life experience narratives collected from two small groups of Slovak American women: a subset of American Catholic sisters from the Vincentian Sisters of Charity and a group of women who belong to the Slovak Heritage Association of the Laurel Highlands. Together, these oral history-based chapters illustrate the ways in which women’s culture is fundamental to the development of American ethnicity. The stories of these women challenge the boundaries of what are considered stable boundaries of racial and ethnic groups. Through this research, I provide an overview of the techniques through which women’s engagement in informal religious traditions fuels the social dynamism of ethnicity.

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