The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
of joy and gladness. The father will go forth in the morning strong,
well fed, and well clad to his daily toil, and will return in the evening
with pleasure and gratitude, to his now happy home. 24
Working-class girls were particularly targeted by evangelicals. A woman
who advocated girls’ clubs wrote in 1889: ‘if we raise the work-girl, if
we can make her conscious of her own great responsibilities both towards
God and man, . . . we shall give her an influence over her sweetheart,
her husband and her sons which will sensibly improve her generation’. 25
Unless mothers did their duty, The General Baptist Repository said in 1848,
our children ‘will be morally, and intellectually weak’. It went on: ‘As
women, it does not become us to stand upon platforms, or to fill pulpits.
No, we are entrusted with a more important mission. We have to mould
and cultivate the minds of those who will be called upon to stand in such
positions.... We are accountable to our children – our country – and to
God.’ 26 The discursive injunctions on the mother were by the late 1840s
unremitting:
She is responsible for the nursing and rearing of her progeny; for
their physical constitution and growth; their exercise and proper sustenance
in early life. A child left to grow deformed or meagre, is an
object of maternal negligence. She is responsible for a child’s habits,
including cleanliness, order, conversation, eating, sleeping, and general
propriety of behaviour. ... She is responsible for the principles which
her children entertain in early life. For her it is to say, whether those
who go forth from her fire side shall be imbued with sentiments of
virtue, truth, honour, honesty, temperance, industry, benevolence and
morality, or those of a contrary character – vice, fraud, drunkenness,
idleness, covetousness. 27
Mothers had to sacrifice their sons and daughters to the dangers and loss
of overseas mission work: ‘To send a son to heathen shores is like burying
him alive.... The record of such mothers is on high; to the end of time,
the church shall call them blessed.’ 28 Wives of missionaries, as with one
Mrs Cargill of the Wesleyan Methodists in 1832, had to be ‘literally torn
from her mother’s arms’ at the dockside before sailing to Tonga and Fiji
where she died in ‘exalted heroism’. 29
Whilst such accounts in the religious press established women as heroic
sources of piety, female piety was centrally located in the home. A temperance
tract from Preston in 1837 described the ideal woman: ‘The care of
her family is her whole delight; to that alone she applieth her study; and
elegance with frugality is seen in her mansions.’ 30 In 1890, The Christian
Miscellany and Family Visitor wrote in its regular ‘Hints for Home Life’
column: ‘She is the architect of home, and it depends upon her skill, her
foresight, her soft arranging touches whether it shall be the “loadstar to all
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