Her mother, Gladyce (Cunningham) Rodez, was a singer from New Haven, Connecticut, who had moved to Chicago to search for work with the big bands.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, in her book I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation, writes: "Toni remembers sitting on her grandmother's knees by the radio listening to her mother sing, loving the mellow, soothing voice.
[2] When Carole was twelve, Gladyce enrolled her as a boarder at St. Frances Academy, in order to provide her with a stable life and a proper education.
In the summer after ninth grade, her mother Gladyce had been fired, so the pair were homeless and destitute, sleeping rough and wandering the streets during the day in search of work and lodgings.
They stayed for several months in a hotel run by Father Divine, a religious figure with a cult-like following, while her mother looked for work.
[1] At the convent, she followed a daily schedule full of hard manual labour, hours of prayer and imposed silence, but she relished this routine and the structure it provided: "The regularity was wonderful.
[1] Mary Antoinette Schiesler did her teacher training at the Oblate Institute (later the Mount Providence Junior College).
She began working as a teacher at the St. Augustine elementary school in Washington, D.C. She hated her time there because she had never been taught how to keep control of a class, and was bullied and humiliated by the institution's mother superior.
Lawrence-Lightfoot writes that "The grueling physical labor of the convent felt light in comparison to the demands of the students."
Instead, she studied for her undergraduate degree in chemistry while working as a teacher, attending college classes on Saturdays and enrolling full time during the summer.
[1] The program would involve a full year of scientific immersion followed by a summer of thesis writing for a Master of Science degree.
Through mostly independent study, she earned a master's degree in chemistry in 1969 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with a thesis titled "The Inactivation of Pancreatic Lipase by Gamma Radiation".
[2] In 1971, at the age of thirty-seven and after nineteen years as a nun, she left the religious order to pursue a career in chemistry.
[7] For a time, she worked as a lecturer and lab coordinator for the University of Maryland, and rewrote the math and science workbooks because "they were not good".
[2] In her book I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (1994), Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot describes her first meeting with Schiesler: "Toni does not fit my fantasy of what a former nun would look like.
"[2] During her time as a nun, Schiesler describes several "particular friendships", including one with her colleague at St. Joseph's School, Sister Esther.
She explains that "despite the official regulations against particular friendships and the harsh admonitions from superiors, there was a lively underground of these illicit love affairs, and everyone knew of their existence.
Schiesler fell in love with Father Joseph Walker, a Josephite priest, after completing her master's degree at Oak Ridge.
"[2] However, her husband initially opposed her decision to leave academia to become an Episcopal priest, explaining that she was too old to start a new career (she was fifty-two at the time), and would have to take a major cut in salary.
Schiesler eventually realised that his real fear was that this career change might create some competition between them, and that his wife might be better liked by their parishioners.
[1][2] While at Cabrini College, Schiesler started a woman's spirituality group which met once a week to "discover the spirit".
[1] She wanted it to be a circle of equals with a broad definition of spirituality which included "taking care of yourself, growing up, understanding yourself, your talents and strengths...
[1] Since 1996, there has been an M. Antoinette Schiesler Memorial scholarship at Cabrini University (a college until 2016), sponsored by her family, reserved for African-American or Hispanic-American women students in education.