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 />
late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century <strong>Britain</strong> and America is now a key<br />
concept in feminist historiography. In the context <strong>of</strong> the Enlightenment,<br />
urban-industrialisation and the formation <strong>of</strong> a class society, ‘separate<br />
spheres’ for men and women emerged to impose domestic ideology as a<br />
heavily religious and moral discourse on angelic confinement from the<br />
public sphere. Historians have placed religion as central to the lives <strong>of</strong><br />
middle-class women <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth century as they developed identity<br />
and a moral agency over their own destinies, as well as developing a ‘space’<br />
in religious, temperance and philanthropic organisations within which they<br />
cultivated a worldly role. Further, such space and functions within the ‘religious<br />
sphere’ provided a seedbed for feminism through a collaborative<br />
tension between women’s purity and suffrage movements and their notionally<br />
oppositional discourses. 7 From the standpoint <strong>of</strong> women’s history,<br />
British religiosity became highly feminised, and evangelicalism created a<br />
vital site for the discourse on women’s identity and role.<br />
For the student <strong>of</strong> religion’s social history, the implications <strong>of</strong> this work<br />
are very great. <strong>Christian</strong>ity remained an ecclesiastical system in which<br />
women’s role was institutionally marginalised. Yet really quite suddenly<br />
around 1800, women’s religiosity became privileged. This was to be an<br />
enduring and extremely important discourse change which established the<br />
place <strong>of</strong> religiosity in popular culture on a new foundation. As well as feminising<br />
piety, evangelicalism pietised femininity. Femininity became sacred<br />
and nothing but sacred. <strong>The</strong> two became inextricably intertwined, creating<br />
a mutual enslavement in which each was the discursive ‘space <strong>of</strong> exteriority’<br />
8 for the other. Each would endure for as long as the other did.<br />
EVANGELICAL SOURCES FOR DISCOURSES<br />
ON FEMALE PIETY<br />
<strong>The</strong> journal <strong>of</strong> the Baptist New Connexion said in 1848:<br />
It is our mothers and our sisters that mould nations and impress<br />
communities. It is the nursery song, the impression <strong>of</strong> infantile years,<br />
the instructions <strong>of</strong> the fireside, that are to guide and influence. We<br />
hear little, very little <strong>of</strong> the fathers <strong>of</strong> great men. It is the mother and<br />
sister <strong>of</strong> Moses that interest us. We almost forget that such a man as<br />
the father <strong>of</strong> Moses lived. 9<br />
After 1800, the religiosity <strong>of</strong> women was paramount to the evangelical<br />
scheme for moral revolution. <strong>The</strong>y were regarded as having special qualities<br />
which placed them at the fulcrum <strong>of</strong> family sanctity. In addition the<br />
very same qualities which made them special in the home rendered them<br />
extra special in the wider reformation <strong>of</strong> communities and the nation as a<br />
whole. <strong>The</strong>irs was a privileged and pivotal religiosity.<br />
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