The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
relegated to a few lines of holy poetry, a ‘muscular girlhood’ had apparently
superseded evangelical discourse.
However, contented marriage and home, though decreasingly discussed
in 1930s girls’ magazines, was still an imbedded meaning, especially evident
in what Tinkler classifies as mother–daughter magazines. 130 This reflected
greatly what was happening to the depiction of the mother as symbolised
by Mrs Miniver. What changed in the 1930s and 1940s was that contentment
displaced anxiety in moral discourse. The artefacts of male temptation
– drink, betting and pre-marital sex – were no longer the problem; it was
discontented rather than immoral manhood which the woman had to
combat in the home, and to do this she had to make the home an unremittingly
happy place. This necessitated a broadening of girlhood from the
pursuit of goodness to the achievement of personal happiness upon which
a contented home could follow. The happily married woman was turned,
in discourse, from an anxiety-inducer into a cheerleader.
In this, there was more troublesome internal contradiction. It called for
a cheerfulness and contentment which still demanded absolute moral virtues
of thrift, sobriety, self-discipline, chastity before marriage and suffering of
others’ faults. Men were being discursively ‘freed’ from the moral constraints
of anxious pious women; instead, their morality was to be achieved by
women’s achievement of a contented household. But embedded meanings
remained for women. They were still expected to seek their femininity from
a religious-based coda which, however liberated from conversionism, was
still tied to an evangelical vision of the ‘good woman’. However, to some,
this linkage appeared fragile by the late 1930s. As David Kyles, a prolific
tract writer, told women in 1938, ‘we have seen a moral paralysis creeping
over our people’. The Great War, he wrote, ‘unleashed a pagan flood which
swept away many a sacred sanction’ and drove the nation into ‘a remarkable
surge of pleasure-seeking, heightened by a not disinterested devil’s brew
of press, cinema, wireless, tobacco and drink combines, gambling and other
vice industries’. As a result, said Kyles, ‘women ceased to prize their womanhood’.
131 On the eve of World War II, pious femininity and feminine piety
both seemed endangered, and the ties between them threatened.
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