The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henriette Delille (Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality)

Henriette Delille was born into a nineteenth-century American society that condoned the attitude that women of color existed for white male use whether they were enslaved or free. Repudiating prevailing societal norms and customs, Delille founded a religious congregation, the Sisters of the Holy Family, for free women of color, and thereby asserted black women as fully capable of chastity and of possessing, choosing; and disposing of themselves and their own bodies.
Delille's vision challenged commonly held readings of those bodies; contravened slavery's vicious stereotypes of black women as impious, promiscuous, and lewd; and constructed an alternative to Louisiana's system of placage, or concubinage between a white man and a free black woman. Drawing on her own research as well as a range of historical and theological resources, Shawn Copeland paints a compelling portrait of an intrepid woman who is being considered for elevation to sainthood in the Catholic Church.