The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
the fading fortunes of the Nonconformist and dissenting presbyterian
churches, the decline of evangelical campaigns for temperance and abolition
of gambling, and decline in the religious press. On the surface, it
appeared that religion was disappearing as an issue in the discursive
portrayal of British womanhood. However, the change was less radical
and more subtle than this. The religiosity of woman was being shorn of
its literal religious conversionist character, but was left in an intensified
metaphorical character. Women were being shown not as striving to create
an anxiety-driven climate of Christian rebirth in the home, but as effortlessly
attaining a state of moral domestic contentment.
The decay of conversionism and the rise of the cult of contentment was
most discernible in literature for teenage girls and young women. Between
the 1880s and the 1920s, the Girl’s Own Paper was dominated with stories
of ‘waiting for the right man’: a man of good morals, sensitivity and interest.
In the main serial of 1886, the heroine weighed up her leading man: ‘He
had his taint of worldliness; he was by no means perfect – kind-hearted,
frank, and generous as he was. He had a high regard for the world’s standard
of gentlemanly decorum, and would have felt as much ashamed of
failing in a point of etiquette as of committing a far graver error.’ 118 The
heroine waited on him day and night: ‘There were days when he did not
come to the house, mornings when I lingered till the last moment in the
garden without seeing him’. The Girl’s Own Paper urged women to train
to please men; the ultimate danger was not a ‘moral fall’, but spinsterhood.
One article provided the precise demographic data of women’s problem:
in London in the mid-1880s there were 1,123 women to every 1,000 men,
with the clear message that moving to London in search of ‘a position’
reduced the odds in the lottery of man-hunting. 119 Women’s role remained
unremittingly domestic. On the problem page, a male inquirer worried
about finding a woman to teach geometry to his future sons, and was told:
‘it is more essential for her to study the art of nursing the sick and the
care and rearing of young children; the arts also of teaching needlework in
all its branches, of housekeeping and cookery, and of guiding and directing
a household, and the work of each servant, as well as the etiquette, under
all circumstances to be observed by the mistress of the house who receives
and goes into society.’ 120 In ‘Between School and Marriage’ (by the much
published author of How to be Happy Though Married), a woman’s years
between the ages of 18 and 21 were delineated as ‘golden girlhood’ when
boys might go to university or training, and girls must guard against
‘uselessness’. 121 Jobs for women remained before World War I not vocations,
but moral interludes: women should select positions in ‘thrift’, not
finance, as church organists, or sanitary inspectors. 122 Prize essays for
readers were on ‘My Daily Round’, calling for and getting lists of domestic
or work duties placed in a moral framework, ending with homilies from
hymns: ‘Labour is sweet, for thou hast toiled,/And care is light, for thou
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