Radboud100: Catholic Stans Küller couldn't wait to study (1923)

Your grandmother ended up working for the mission in the Dutch East Indies, as the wife of one of the first Catholic mission doctors. Your grandparents seem to have been motivated by more than an urge to spread the faith.

'Much more. They wanted to combat poverty, to help people live a healthy life, to introduce them to a certain way of life, and to teach them a craft. For Stans, autonomy for women was not in conflict with her faith. She believed that strong women could play an important role within Catholicism. They could act as role models for others, becoming as it were Catholic model women and mothers. Before her marriage, she was the director of the first Catholic social work school in Sittard, aimed at miners’ wives and socially disadvantaged people. As a staunch supporter of what we would now call empowerment, she was actually far ahead of her time.'

At the same time, hers was also a colonial attitude; she taught the local population Western line dances.

'When you’re so deeply convinced of your faith, you want to share it with others. The traditional, and in her eyes immoral, local dances had to be replaced by a more civilised form, the line dance. In the end, she did grow with the times, in part due to all the suffering she witnessed, for instance in the Japanese internment camps where she was imprisoned for two years. She learned that ‘white people coming to explain how things are done’ was not a tenable stance. But it was a long and painful learning process.'