Title: "The problem of the land is the problem of the woman"
Description: This dissertation brings current theoretical understandings of the relationship between religion, gender, and ecology to bear upon a socio-historical analysis of the evolution of the U.S. Grail at its main center in southwestern Ohio called Grailville. Founded in the Netherlands in the 1920s, the Grail today is a small international women's movement with a spirit of high idealism and deep roots in the Roman Catholic tradition. Grailville, a partially converted old farm on 300 acres of land, has been the organizational heart of the U.S. Grail since 1944. A genealogy of ecofeminism at Grailville demonstrates that the roots of ecofeminism extend farther back than, and well beyond the bounds of, the radical political movements of the 1970s and 80s with which it is commonly identified. Proceeding in reverse chronological order and drawing on archival and ethnographic sources, the dissertation examines the emergence of ecofeminism at Grailville in the late 1970s through 90s and then the mid-century forms of praxis that facilitated that emergence.

At Grailville in the 1940s and 50s, women cobbled together new ideological variants out of the discourses of surrendering womanhood, valiant lay sainthood, and Catholic rural life. Although explicitly opposed to feminism and endorsing an instrumentalist appraisal of nature, the Grail's early ideals of valiant Catholic womanhood and Catholic rural life--when deliberately "lived" at Grailville--cultivated modes of subjectivity that emerged later as forms of feminism, environmentalism, and ecofeminism. This study complements work already done on the U.S. Grail and Grailville by focusing on the persistent emphases on women and the land and on the longstanding effort to "make ideas live." In doing so, it establishes Grailville as an important site of pre-conciliar Catholic agrarianism as well as later forms of ecofeminism, and it places Grailville along the spectrum of U.S. forms of "lived religion." With respect to the interdisciplinary study of religion, gender, and ecology, the dissertation makes several contributions. It deepens and broadens scholarly accounts of ecofeminism; it demonstrates the importance of historical, ethnographic, and case-study approaches; and it highlights the eco-social implications of understanding embodied practice--including ritual practice--as pedagogical and normative.