The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America is now a key
concept in feminist historiography. In the context of the Enlightenment,
urban-industrialisation and the formation of a class society, ‘separate
spheres’ for men and women emerged to impose domestic ideology as a
heavily religious and moral discourse on angelic confinement from the
public sphere. Historians have placed religion as central to the lives of
middle-class women of the nineteenth century as they developed identity
and a moral agency over their own destinies, as well as developing a ‘space’
in religious, temperance and philanthropic organisations within which they
cultivated a worldly role. Further, such space and functions within the ‘religious
sphere’ provided a seedbed for feminism through a collaborative
tension between women’s purity and suffrage movements and their notionally
oppositional discourses. 7 From the standpoint of women’s history,
British religiosity became highly feminised, and evangelicalism created a
vital site for the discourse on women’s identity and role.
For the student of religion’s social history, the implications of this work
are very great. Christianity remained an ecclesiastical system in which
women’s role was institutionally marginalised. Yet really quite suddenly
around 1800, women’s religiosity became privileged. This was to be an
enduring and extremely important discourse change which established the
place of religiosity in popular culture on a new foundation. As well as feminising
piety, evangelicalism pietised femininity. Femininity became sacred
and nothing but sacred. The two became inextricably intertwined, creating
a mutual enslavement in which each was the discursive ‘space of exteriority’
8 for the other. Each would endure for as long as the other did.
EVANGELICAL SOURCES FOR DISCOURSES
ON FEMALE PIETY
The journal of the Baptist New Connexion said in 1848:
It is our mothers and our sisters that mould nations and impress
communities. It is the nursery song, the impression of infantile years,
the instructions of the fireside, that are to guide and influence. We
hear little, very little of the fathers of great men. It is the mother and
sister of Moses that interest us. We almost forget that such a man as
the father of Moses lived. 9
After 1800, the religiosity of women was paramount to the evangelical
scheme for moral revolution. They were regarded as having special qualities
which placed them at the fulcrum of family sanctity. In addition the
very same qualities which made them special in the home rendered them
extra special in the wider reformation of communities and the nation as a
whole. Theirs was a privileged and pivotal religiosity.
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