The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
hearts,” or whether it shall be a house from which husband and children
are glad to escape either to the street, the theatre, or the tavern.’ 31 Female
vices would undermine the home: ‘Gossiping often leads to disorder. A
woman who “looks well to the ways of her household” never has leisure
to stand for an hour or two during the day in a self-constituted court of
busybodies to discuss the character of her neighbours.’ 32 Gossip, the
woman’s column in the British Messenger reported in 1930, is always to
be found amongst women having tea together, but warned that ‘when we
are retailing tit-bits of gossip, even should it be true, it is neither more nor
less than evil speaking’. 33 Bad temper was a particular vice; one moral tale
was told of a Mrs Bryson who had ‘marred her son’s character for life by
her variable, uncertain treatment of him in childhood’. 34 The Girl’s Own
Paper in 1883 advised the teenager that ‘no trait of character is more valuable
to a woman than a sweet temper. Let a man go home weary and worn
by the toils of day . . . [and] it is sunshine on his heart.’ 35 Obstinacy in
curmudgeonly old women was frequently harangued: a minister rebuffed
on district visiting at a door grieved that ‘a woman of seventy-five, so soon
to take her trial before the judgement seat of God, should have so little
concern for her soul’. 36 The codes of female respectability were many and
varied. Yet, obsessive regard for some codes was unhealthy: in 1890 ‘a
respectable maid’ thought it improper to take all her clothes off for a bath,
even when alone, and as a result had not washed her chest and back for
sixteen years, giving her ‘blocked sweat glands and pimples’. 37 In these
ways, piety and femininity were explored and discursively constructed by
mutual cross-reference.
Meanwhile, other’s virtues were endangered by female faults. ‘Our light
words, our frivolous treatment of sacred things, may often have helped to
lower another’s standard of goodness.’ 38 Mothers could also do harm by
their innate goodness. In a tract of the 1870s, a mother was criticised for
not being honest with her dying seventeen-year-old son, whom she had
‘always comforted, telling him that the Lord will never suffer such a poor
suffering creature to perish, but will take him to heaven’. This was ‘a fearful
mistake’ by ‘the affectionate mother’, an ‘unscriptural and most dangerous’
lie, leaving the son ‘at death’s door, I fear, unprepared, and needing to be
warned to seek mercy where alone it could be found, and to cry, “Lord,
save me; I perish.”’ 39 Evangelical magazines carried long and detailed articles
for young men on how to detect the flawed future wife and mother.
The Christian Miscellany advised in 1867 to ‘get to know . . . the stock’
from which a bride-to-be came: ‘Moral as well as physical qualities must
be considered. Dirty, slatternly, brawling mothers have sometimes clean,
tidy, gentle daughters; but, I am afraid, not often. In most cases the scold
and the slattern are reproduced.’ 40
If the godly mother was the ideal of pious womanhood, the young girl
had detailed injunctions for every step of the way to that condition.
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