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superseded evangelical discourse.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