Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgments -- Note on transcriptions -- Prologue -- Introduction: Creative conformity, clerical guidance, and a rhetorical turn -- 1. What's a good woman to do? Recasting the symbolics of moral exemplars -- 2. Surprises from the laps of mothers: leveraging the gaps in procreative virtues -- 3. Scripture, sacred law, and hermeneutics: exploring gendered meanings in textual records -- 4. Performance beyond the pulpit: presenting disorderly bodies in public spaces -- 5. Republication of moral discourse: compromise and censorship as political freedom -- Conclusion -- Epilogue: Revisiting Shahla Habibi.

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Much feminist scholarship has viewed Catholicism and Shi'i Islam as two religious traditions that, historically, have greeted feminist claims with skepticism or outright hostility. Creative Conformity demonstrates how certain liberal secular assumptions about these religious traditions are only partly correct and, more importantly, misleading. In this highly original study, Elizabeth Bucar compares the feminist politics of eleven U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi'i women and explores how these women contest and affirm clerical mandates in order to expand their roles within their religious communit.