From Emancipation to Exclusion:Secularism, Gendered Biographies, and Nationalist Reproduction among French Catholic Senior Women in Québec

This article develops a gendered life course approach to secular politics, showing how secular nationalist commitments are shaped through gendered biographies in sociopolitical contexts. Drawing on 400 hours of fieldwork with senior French Catholic women in Québec, I examine how experiences of patriarchal regulation under Catholicism are reinterpreted as moral justification for supporting laïcité. I argue that the same secular rupture that enabled women’s emancipation from clerical rule also equips them with the authority to regulate minority religions. In doing so, secularism emerges as a double-edged project: a resource for feminist liberation and a framework for racialized exclusion. Extending feminist theories of nationalism, I show that secular worldviews are not only products of anti-immigrant discourse but are also formed over time through embodied experiences of religious control. While grounded in Québec, this article showcases that aging women are not merely symbolic bearers of the nation but active agents in reproducing exclusionary belonging.