The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
but those who tried too hard courted the label of ‘gutter-snipe’, ‘promiscuous’,
or ‘asking for trouble’, and would be restrained by mothers who
advised to ‘keep Pure’. 80 In turn, these moral issues were inseparably
linked, most often by mothers, to religious morality. This might be the
simple avoidance of blasphemy and Sabbath desecration, or could be the
avoidance of pregnancy out of wedlock. Winifred Foley recalled a ditty
current among her peers which she said to herself when tempted by her
first sexual encounter:
There was a young lady so wild
She kept herself pure undefiled
By thinking of Jesus
Venereal disease
And the dangers of having a child. 81
Discourses could be turned into rules by churches. A woman who had a
child out of wedlock was frequently unwelcome: the Girls Friendly
Society, one interviewee recalled, ‘had a very, very strict rule because
they wouldn’t accept as a member any girl who had fallen . . . They were
there to keep out anyone who had made a mistake. They should have
been trying to lift them up again, I thought.’ 82 Where before 1800 the
church would have sought the woman in church to ‘purge the scandal’,
a hundred years later she was summarily excluded. 83 But popular religious
discourse on female behaviour was in many ways more severe, more
uncompromising, and less forgiving than official ecclesiastical censure.
Official religious discourses on female morality were powerfully enforced
– by the role of gossip, parental supervision and peer-group pressure. 84
A woman’s destiny in life was heavily hedged in a maze requiring finely
balanced judgements. Individuality could be suppressed to a degree to
which men were not expected to submit. 85 Indeed, autobiographies tend to
recall evangelical discourses as a community product, not one from pulpit,
tract or magazine.
Oral history has recently demonstrated the existence of a much more
complex world of women’s religious ritual which reveals what Sarah
Williams has called ‘the elusive and eclectic dimension of religious belief’. 86
Both women and men alive in the late twentieth century recall the observance
of a myriad of practices to ward off bad luck, but it was women
who had the most varied liturgy, adhered to it most fervently and passed
it on from mother to daughter. This world was composed of liturgies
recalled by Christian female interviewees within a narrative structure of
drama and even melodrama which linked women’s bodies, health and piety.
Birth rituals were the most potent and widespread, centred on the act of
‘churching’ a woman after giving birth, a ceremony without which women
were barred (seemingly entirely by other women) from entering many
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