The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
between 9 am and 12 noon to choose from, allowing a much greater female
attendance which characteristically occurred at the early services so that
they could get home in time to prepare Sunday lunch.
Meals had what Camporesi calls ‘dietary protocols’, 76 and Sunday lunch
had developed by the late nineteenth century as an essential symbolic
resource in the British family. The aspiration was to a joint of beef, roasted
with ‘all the trimmings’. In the north of England by 1900, and even in
much of the south and in Scotland and Wales, the key trimming was
Yorkshire pudding, served very often as the savoury preliminary course to
the meat and eaten separately. With soup and a dessert (bread-and-butter
or milk pudding being common), this was the aspirational working-class
Sunday lunch. For the middle classes, the roast joint and soup also featured,
but the dessert was often cake- or sponge-based. Oral and autobiographical
testimony is universal on the special significance of Sunday lunch, and
even in the poorest of houses some special meat, be it only ‘lips and lugs’,
was obtained. Lunch was a weekly affirmation of family life, its relative
‘luxury’ over the diet of the rest of the week subscribing each family
member to complex religious, family and community values.
Sunday lunch and Protestant Sunday worship clashed. The ironic situation
arose in nineteenth-century Britain that evangelical discourses put
extra pressure upon women to be ‘religious’ yet deprived them of a convenient
morning time for worship. Many Protestant clergy sought remedies
for this. Special afternoon services for women were extremely common in
Scotland, and many Nonconformist and Anglican clergy and missions did
likewise in England. In one Scottish parish the women’s afternoon service
was held at the front of the church whilst their children were taken in
Sunday school at the rear. 77 Many female interviewees had contact with
church out-reach agencies aimed specifically at women, including missions.
Doris Tarlking of Finsbury recalled that in 1910 she was befriended by a
wealthy woman who did ‘a lot of good works’, and who invited her to
a Sunday afternoon women’s mission meeting she conducted. Doris
slipped in a rear pew where the attitude of other attenders made her cynical:
‘there were three old ladies in front and I heard one say to the other: “Just
butter her up, dear, and she’ll give you anything you want.”’ 78 Special afternoon
worship only accentuated the sense of ‘otherness’ amongst poor
female attenders.
If women’s narratives illustrate the problems of working-class women
attending church, they show that the moral construction of womanhood
was subject to irresistible community and family pressures. Edith Hall
recalled that in inter-war London ‘the greatest stigma against a woman was
to be considered lazy’, 79 and those single young women who failed to work
were considered unrespectable. Finding a husband – and being seen to want
a husband – was the most serious area of application. Those who did not
get married in Grace Foakes’ community ‘were looked upon with pity’,
134