01/07/2026 15:00 - 16:00

HALL: Pola - A206b

Contact: Papis V.S.

Chair: Bottanelli V., De Gruttola R., Federica C.

The panel explores the role of Catholic women in changing ideas and practices of womanhood in China from the late Qing to the mid-twentieth century. At the turn of the century, Chinese women's lives were largely shaped by patriarchal family structures, Confucian norms, and social and legal inequalities, with marriage and domesticity as central expectations. At the same time, war, political upheaval, and reform movements intensified debates on women's education, morality, and social participation. Catholic missionary, as members of female religious congregations, operated within male-dominated church hierarchies, yet differed sharply from most Chinese women in being unmarried, institutionally supported, professionally trained, and mobile. Through schools, hospitals, orphanages, and charitable work, they exercised forms of authority and autonomy that challenged prevailing gender norms, while remaining embedded in unequal religious and transnational power relations.
The panel examines Catholic institutions as spaces where alternative models of womanhood were constructed and negotiated. These institutions both reproduced social and gender hierarchies and offered limited but significant opportunities for agency, including access to education, skills, public service, and life paths beyond marriage. Using perspectives from gender history and the study of religious feminization, the panel treats women's agency as relational and situational, shaped by everyday negotiations between missionary women and local Catholic women.
Comparative and connected approaches are welcome, including studies of Protestant missions, Buddhist nuns, indigenous religious initiatives, or transnational networks, contributing to broader debates on religion, gender, and inequality in modern China and East Asia.