Women in Black

"You either went to a Catholic school or you were a dummy," says one interviewee of the prevailing attitude in his neighborhood regarding quality K-12 education during the '50s. But, as Claudia Sherwood's funny and disturbing documentary about childhood Dances with Nuns (pre-Vatican II) points out, you were at the mercy of the sisters of mercy. Although New Testament in their teachings, the "women in black" could be decidedly Old Testament in their punishments, applying thick rulers to the backs of knuckles, pulling hair, or--in one very odd reported chastisement--locking a student's head between a nun's knees (of course, there are probably grown men today who would pay good money for this kind of treatment). Combining interviews with former students (and current and former nuns), together with archival footage of sisters and old Hollywood clips, Women in Black goes beyond a simple litany of classroom horrors to explore the psychological landscape of '50s and '60s Catholicism, including the likelihood of working class poor parents agreeing 100% with an abusive nun regarding their misbehaving child, the pressure cooker situations that nuns with 50 student classrooms (and few outlets for expressing frustration) often faced, and the possibly negative effects of being obsessed with pain and suffering (e.g., the detailed study of the lives of the martyred saints). While constantly reassuring the viewer that many perfectly well-adjusted sisters taught children prior to the sweeping reforms of the early '60s, the film nevertheless makes it quite clear that corporal punishment in Catholic school left its scars. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)