What did not go away for FOCIS members and their husbands was the tireless commitment to breathe hope and life into the people of Appalachia and other regions that commanded their attention.
Reviewing the history of this remarkable band of committed people, the reader learns that on the one hand, the formation of FOCIS represented a cessation of warfare with an unrelenting hierarchical church.
FOCIS's relinquishing of institutional support, moral and financial, in some instances slowed the progress and increased the hardship of the new community.
Parts 1 and 2, "The Glenmary Years" and "Forming FOCIS," comprise more than half the volume and provide the basic story.
While Appleby and Lewis admirably attempted to include the voices and remembrances of all involved with the Glenmary Sisters and with FOCIS, this inclusiveness contributes to a volume which is at times repetitive and unwieldy and at others deeply resonant.
One striking example of such repetition appears in Chapter 7, "Major Changes." The chapter begins with an epigraph: "obedience went first, then chastity, and then poverty" (100), and the abstract describes FOCIS as a sort of "halfway house" for adolescents who had committed to convent life and never fully matured as females.
Veramente io sono stato legno sanza vela e sanza governo, portato a diversi porti e
foci e liti dal vento secco che vapora la dolorosa povertade [...]"
dique deaeque omnes quibus est tutela per agros praebebant uestris uerba benigna
focis: `et leporem, quicumque uenis, uenaberis, hospes, et si forte meo tramite quaeris auem: et me Pana tibi comitem de rupe uocato, siue petes calamo praemia siue cane'.
In her pamphlet, Aris et
Focis (For Altar and Hearth, circa 1870), Davis explains that voting and job equality for females did not make sense because women and men were not equipped to do each others' work.
Pacific
focis. In 1984, Irwin-Hentschel created jetabout North America as a division of An to handle Americans traveling to Australia and the Pacific (the division has since been split off as a separate partnership with Qantas).