Multiple modernities. Men’s and women’s Catholicism in XIXth and XXth Europe.

My contribution to this research collaboration deals with gender constructions among Catholic missionaries in Scandinavia in the era of Ultramontanism.

Catholicism was a counter-culture in modern society, and in Protestant Scandinavia with its strong anti-Catholic traditions in a double sense. Here, it not only represented an alternative worldview, but also an unfamiliar belief system, regarded as a threat to the Protestant-influenced national culture and gender order with marriage, reproduction and family life as the norm.
Yet, in what way did this effect the representation of Catholicism and its gender constructions? In Were Catholic women religious working as missionaries in Scandinavia around 1900 representing an alternative form of feminism? What about clerical manhood? Was the male members of religious institutes perhaps sticking to what could be labelled as "feminine" ideals? I will try to respond to this questions in analysing the missionary work of members of religious orders in Scandinavia as reflected in their letters and reports.