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 />
<strong>of</strong> joy and gladness. <strong>The</strong> father will go forth in the morning strong,<br />
well fed, and well clad to his daily toil, and will return in the evening<br />
with pleasure and gratitude, to his now happy home. 24<br />
Working-class girls were particularly targeted by evangelicals. A woman<br />
who advocated girls’ clubs wrote in 1889: ‘if we raise the work-girl, if<br />
we can make her conscious <strong>of</strong> her own great responsibilities both towards<br />
God and man, . . . we shall give her an influence over her sweetheart,<br />
her husband and her sons which will sensibly improve her generation’. 25<br />
Unless mothers did their duty, <strong>The</strong> General Baptist Repository said in 1848,<br />
our children ‘will be morally, and intellectually weak’. It went on: ‘As<br />
women, it does not become us to stand upon platforms, or to fill pulpits.<br />
No, we are entrusted with a more important mission. We have to mould<br />
and cultivate the minds <strong>of</strong> those who will be called upon to stand in such<br />
positions.... We are accountable to our children – our country – and to<br />
God.’ 26 <strong>The</strong> discursive injunctions on the mother were by the late 1840s<br />
unremitting:<br />
She is responsible for the nursing and rearing <strong>of</strong> her progeny; for<br />
their physical constitution and growth; their exercise and proper sustenance<br />
in early life. A child left to grow deformed or meagre, is an<br />
object <strong>of</strong> maternal negligence. She is responsible for a child’s habits,<br />
including cleanliness, order, conversation, eating, sleeping, and general<br />
propriety <strong>of</strong> behaviour. ... She is responsible for the principles which<br />
her children entertain in early life. For her it is to say, whether those<br />
who go forth from her fire side shall be imbued with sentiments <strong>of</strong><br />
virtue, truth, honour, honesty, temperance, industry, benevolence and<br />
morality, or those <strong>of</strong> a contrary character – vice, fraud, drunkenness,<br />
idleness, covetousness. 27<br />
Mothers had to sacrifice their sons and daughters to the dangers and loss<br />
<strong>of</strong> overseas mission work: ‘To send a son to heathen shores is like burying<br />
him alive.... <strong>The</strong> record <strong>of</strong> such mothers is on high; to the end <strong>of</strong> time,<br />
the church shall call them blessed.’ 28 Wives <strong>of</strong> missionaries, as with one<br />
Mrs Cargill <strong>of</strong> the Wesleyan Methodists in 1832, had to be ‘literally torn<br />
from her mother’s arms’ at the dockside before sailing to Tonga and Fiji<br />
where she died in ‘exalted heroism’. 29<br />
Whilst such accounts in the religious press established women as heroic<br />
sources <strong>of</strong> piety, female piety was centrally located in the home. A temperance<br />
tract from Preston in 1837 described the ideal woman: ‘<strong>The</strong> care <strong>of</strong><br />
her family is her whole delight; to that alone she applieth her study; and<br />
elegance with frugality is seen in her mansions.’ 30 In 1890, <strong>The</strong> <strong>Christian</strong><br />
Miscellany and Family Visitor wrote in its regular ‘Hints for Home Life’<br />
column: ‘She is the architect <strong>of</strong> home, and it depends upon her skill, her<br />
foresight, her s<strong>of</strong>t arranging touches whether it shall be the “loadstar to all<br />
63