The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Table 7.5 Impact of female servants on churchgoing, London, 1902–3: correlations
and regressions
Dependent variables regressed against % female servants per household for
28 Metropolitan boroughs
r Adjusted t sig.
R 2 statistic
All 28 boroughs
% women attending Morning 0.6067 0.345 3.900 .001
church Evening 0.0546 –0.035 0.286 .777
% men attending Morning 0.6163 0.355 3.982 .000
church Evening 0.3501 0.088 1.896 .069
% total population Morning 0.6759 0.437 4.683 .000
attending Evening 0.2648 0.034 1.400 .173
household economy, with the presence of servants releasing large numbers
of middle-class women to attend church who, in their turn, allowed and
cajoled their female servants to attend church later in the day. As Arthur
Sherwell noted in 1904, domestic servants were heavily concentrated in west
London where their employers were mostly Church of England and where
they were accustomed to be sent to church, often as a condition of employment.
According to Sherwell, the servants characteristically went to church
in the evening, and the boroughs with the most intense levels of female
servants – Kensington, St. Marylebone and Paddington – created the
unusual anomaly of higher female churchgoing in the morning rather than
the evening, and also accentuated the high level of Church of England attendance
in those boroughs. 51
If the female domestic servant enabled the distinctive morning-centred
pattern of middle-class churchgoing, the role of the wife-mother in the
working-class and servantless household was just as important. The critical
factor in both cases was Sunday lunch. In the middle- and upper-class
household, the servants were expected to stay at home in the morning to
prepare lunch for the family and to look after babies. In the workingclass
family, it was the wife-mother who performed this function. As we
have seen in the last chapter, autobiographies and oral testimony demonstrate
both the symbolic importance of Sunday lunch and the role that the
wife-mother played in staying at home to prepare it for the rest of the
family. Sunday lunch thus becomes the key to understanding the low
attendance of women at Protestant church services, especially in England,
between 1800 and 1950. If a woman did not go to church in the morning,
the mildly apathetic man would also not go. In London in 1902–3, the
most working-class Protestant denominations saw women attending
160