Adventure with a rule. Missionary sisters in South Africa

The book analyses life stories of Austrian and German missionary sisters. Combining approaches of missionary history with those of gender and cultural studies, the study centres on oral narratives of missionary sisters who entered the order of the Precious Blood Sisters after World War II and started their mission duties in the 1950s and 1960s in South Africa. The mission order of the Precious Blood Sisters was founded in 1885 by the Austrian Trappist monk Franz Pfanner in Mariannhill, South Africa. The order developed rapidly and became one of the largest female mission orders worldwide. Within a few decades the mission was extended to several other African countries, while convents were founded in Europe to provide the European candidates with preliminary training. The congregation saw rising entry numbers from World War II up to the 1960s and 1970s. At this period the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and social changes caused a permanent decline in new candidates. The interviewees thus form part of the last large generation of European mission sisters. By analysing the interviews within the framework of three social and geographical spaces (the space of social background, institutional convent space and mission space), different aspects of the life stories are identified which in their sum generate a kind of group portrait of the interviewed women. Furthermore, the narratives of the women are interpreted as tales of a controlled adventure. The leaving behind of the familiar space of family and village life, first by entering the new social space of the convent, and later the unknown world of the mission space, happened within a system of strict rules and hierarchies. The narrative self-representations thus deliver a view on the intrinsic tension between individual and social restriction and attempts to break out. The interviews show aspects of womens lives hitherto neglected in historical studies. They allow the reconstruction of life conditions and possibilities of a group of women who chose an unusual but - within a catholic environment - very much accepted way of life.