The Victorian female civilising mission and women's aspirations towards priesthood in the Church of England

Women's History Review

Volumn 10, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 651-670

  Daggers, Jenny ^a  

^a LIVERPOOL HOPE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CLERGY; CULTURAL FACTOR; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; FEMINISM; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; HUMAN; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; RELIGION; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL CLASS; UNITED KINGDOM; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

CLERGY; CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; FEMALE; FEMINISM; GENDER IDENTITY; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; RELIGION; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION; SPIRITUALISM; WOMEN; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 34247736418     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020100200604     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Written in a letter to Dean Stanley in 1852. Edward T. Cook (1913) The Life of Florence Nightingale, 2 volumes, 1, p. 57 (London: Macmillan)
2. See Jonathan David Francis Inkpin (1996) Combating the 'Sin of Self-Sacrifice?' Christian Feminism in the Women's Suffrage Struggle, 1903-1918, PhD thesis, University of Durham
3. Sean Gill (1994) Women in the Church of England: from the eighteenth century to the present, pp. 11-31 (London: SPCK)
4. Re 'the cult of True Womanhood', see Gill, Women in the Church of England, pp. 77-78
5. and re the 'cult of domesticity', see Dorothy C. Bass (1979) 'Their Prodigious Influence': women, religion and reform in antebellum America, in Rosemary Radford Ruether & Eleanor McLaughlin (Eds) Women of Spirit, pp. 279-300, p. 287 (New York: Simon & Schuster). As I argue in the closing section of this article, spiritual womanhood, and its successor, True Womanhood, performed a parallel function within Protestantism regarding the cultural positioning of women to that of Mariology within Roman Catholicism. The Virgin element continues in the construction of spiritual woman as maternal, yet asexual
6. Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 22 (New Haven: Yale University Press)
7. Virginia Woolf (1992) A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, ed. and Introduction, Morag Shiach, p. xix (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
8. Thus, Elizabeth Blackwell argued that women's special qualities were required in medicine (see Margaret Forster [1986] Significant Sisters: the grassroots of active feminism, 1839-1939, pp. 56-57 [Harmondsworth: Penguin]), just as Nightingale's founding of nursing as a female profession took 'the Angel in the House' to the hospital ward. Similarly, Jane Rendall describes the political purpose of The Englishwoman's Journal as 'rooted in the experience of the different sphere of life to which domesticity and philanthropy were more central than the experience of earning a living' ([1987] A Moral Engine? Feminism, Liberalism and the Englishwoman's Journal, in Jane Rendall [Ed.] Equal or Different: women's politics, 1800-1914, pp. 112-137, p. 137 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell]). Her article explores the tension between this different sphere and equal rights feminism within the Langham Place circle. My argument is that campaigns for women's education and employment gained support from those arguing on grounds of women's specific (superior) qualities - spiritual womanhood - as well as from feminists arguing in terms of equal rights, despite the tension between these two positions
9. Studies of 'first wave' feminism inevitably highlight feminism against a background of broader nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's activity. The work of authors who define 'relational feminism', e.g. Karen Offen (1988) Defining Feminism: a comparative historical approach, Signs, 14, pp. 119-157, or emphasise feminist arguments of women's 'difference' as existing in tension with those of 'equality', e.g. Carol Lee Bacchi (1990) Same Difference: feminism and sexual difference (London: Allen & Unwin) and Jane Rendall, Equal or Different, examine more closely the relation between feminism and the intricacies of women's lives. However, the continuing focus upon feminism perpetuates the inattention to conservative women within the Church of England. By emphasising the importance of spiritual womanhood as vehicle, I draw together disparate threads of activity as sharing a common motivation. In the various threads of the female civilising mission, orthodox constructions of femininity (in terms of spiritual womanhood) were manipulated and subverted to enhance the quality of women's lives
10. See Barbara Taylor (1983) Eve and the New Jerusalem: socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century (London: Virago)
11. Thirsk, cited in Joanna Bowen Gillespie (1987) Gasping for Larger Measures: Joanna Turner, eighteenth century activist, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 3, pp. 31-55, p. 36
12. Charlotte Yonge's novels are instructive on this point. See June Sturrock (1995) 'Heaven and Home': Charlotte M. Yonge's domestic fiction and the Victorian debate over women. English Literary Studies, Monograph 66 (Victoria, Canada: University of Victoria), and Georgina Battiscombe & Marghanita Laski (Eds)(1965) A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge (London: Cresset)
13. Both the female civilising mission, and 'first wave' feminism brought women together across ecumenical lines. See Rendall, 'A Moral Engine', for a useful analysis of tensions arising from differing denominational affiliations among women involved in the Langham Place Circle. It is beyond the scope of this article to compare the degree and character of women's ecumenism with that of Christian men, though an obvious difference is that men predominated in leadership/ministerial roles, and thus in official ecumenical engagements, whereas women were by definition lay, with the exception of a minority of Unitarian women ministers
14. Brian Heeney (1988) The Women's Movement in the Church of England, 1850-1930, p. 77 (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
15. Heeney, The Women's Movement, pp. 77-78, 94-96
16. Martha Vicinus (1985) Independent Women: work and community for single women, 1850-1920, pp. 46-84 (London: Virago); Gail Malmgreen (Ed.) (1986) Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930 (London: Croom Helm); and Rendall, Equal or Different
17. However, Gill comments that support for Butler within the Church of England was 'lukewarm' in comparison with that of Quakers and Wesleyan Methodists {Women in the Church of England, p. 99). Although Butler herself was Anglican, and was married to a senior clergyman, she positioned herself within the Broad Church, and expressed an affinity with Christian Socialism. She sat lightly to the institutional church, though her own religiosity was strongly influenced by the Christian mystical tradition. Whereas the social purity movement reflected a respectable middle-class evangelical religiosity, Butler was to dissociate herself from the predominant assumed distinction between middle-class spiritual womanhood and the fallen 'Magdalene', instead asserting solidarity between women. See Alison Milbank (1987) Josephine Butler: Christianity, feminism and social action, in Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper & Raphael Samuel (Eds) Disciplines of Faith: studies in religion, politics and patriarchy, History Workshop (London: Routledge). The 'lukewarm' Church of England support, on which Gill comments, reflected the distinction between the dominant social purity ethos and Butler's more radical stance. Judith R. Walkowitz's (1983) Male Vice and Female Virtue: feminism and the politics of prostitution in nineteenth-century Britain, in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell & Sharon Thompson (Eds) Desire: the politics of sexuality, p. 44 (London: Virago), emphasises the contribution of radical working men to the social purity campaigns, alongside evangelicals and feminists - a form of solidarity across gender lines which Butler did much to promote
18. Owenism was associated with radical activity, gaining a mainly urban following in the early years of the nineteenth century. See Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, re Southcott and for details of women's involvement in Owenism
19. Catherine Booth's belief that women should take full roles in evangelism, including preaching, was significant in the formation of the Salvation Army. From the early nineteenth century, women preachers were discouraged within Methodism; see Jacqueline Field-Bibb (1991) Women towards Priesthood: ministerial politics and feminist praxis, p. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, the first woman Unitarian minister in a British church - Gertrude von Petzold - pursued an active ministry until this was curtailed during the First World War on account of her German nationality; see Keith Gilley (1985) Women and the Unitarian Ministry, in Growing Together: the Report of the Unitarian Working Party on Feminist Theology, report to the Unitarian General Assembly, p. 3.4 (Unitarian General Assembly: n.p.) There were significant Free Church ex officio women's ministries in the early years of the twentieth century, of which Hatty Baker's was the most notable (Inkpin, Combating the 'Sin', pp. 250-251), leading to the eventual ordination of Constance Coltmann Todd as the first woman Congregationalist minister in 1917; see Sheila Fletcher (1989) Maude Royden: a life, p. 164 (Oxford: Blackwell)
20. Thus, Malmgreen, in Religion in the Lives of English Women, p. 1, comments upon Catherine Booth's lack of respectability
21. Rendall, Equal or Different, p. 19
22. Margaret Maison (1986) 'Thine, Only Thine!' Women Hymn Writers in Britain, 1760-1835, in Malmgreen, Religion in the Lives of English Women
23. See Fletcher, Maude Royden, for an informative biographical assessment of Royden's contribution