The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
Zeal and activity are, in their own places, excellent and essential qualities;<br />
but <strong>Christian</strong> women require to be very cautious, lest, even in<br />
the midst <strong>of</strong> praiseworthy exertions, they sacrifice those meek and<br />
lowly tempers which are so calculated to adorn and promote the cause<br />
they love and advocate. Female influence should shed its rays on every<br />
circle, but these ought to be felt, rather in their s<strong>of</strong>tening effects, than<br />
seen by their brilliancy. <strong>The</strong>re are certain duties which sometimes call<br />
<strong>Christian</strong> women out <strong>of</strong> their quiet domestic circle, where both taste<br />
and feeling conspire to make them love to linger; such duties will, we<br />
humbly think, be best performed by those who enter this enlarged<br />
field, not from any desire <strong>of</strong> a more public sphere, but because, in<br />
obedience to the precepts <strong>of</strong> their divine Lord, the hungry are to be<br />
fed, the sick comforted, the prisoners visited. 53<br />
Each denomination negotiated, <strong>of</strong>ten very slowly, the extension <strong>of</strong> female<br />
roles. Whilst small numbers <strong>of</strong> women preachers were known by midcentury,<br />
usually in the smaller English evangelical churches, many<br />
mainstream denominations experimented from the 1850s with the formal<br />
role <strong>of</strong> women in nursing and parochial work. But the years 1887–91 were<br />
critical, with the Church Missionary Society admitting single women as<br />
foreign missionaries, the Church <strong>of</strong> England solemnising deaconesses, and<br />
the Church <strong>of</strong> Scotland appointing deaconesses and forming the Woman’s<br />
Guild. 54 By 1900, women were an accepted part <strong>of</strong> the pr<strong>of</strong>essional mission<br />
scene, and female missionaries became role models in the popular magazines.<br />
55 <strong>The</strong>ir part in converting men <strong>of</strong> industrial towns <strong>of</strong> the north <strong>of</strong><br />
England – the archetypal ‘home heathens’ – was especially prominent. 56<br />
What is important in all <strong>of</strong> this was not just the content <strong>of</strong> the discursive<br />
injunctions that were being circulated in the religious press, but the intensity<br />
<strong>of</strong> the link that was being established between the social construction<br />
<strong>of</strong> female piety and the social construction <strong>of</strong> femininity as a whole. From<br />
the 1840s these two were envisioned in discourse as being inseparable. Piety<br />
and femininity were mutually enslaved discursive constructions, each providing<br />
the primary exterior site (or exteriority) for the other. Just as piety<br />
was constructed as an intrinsically feminine quality to be expressed in female<br />
duty, biology, dress and recreation, and femininity was enshrouded in a<br />
pious respectability, so the woman’s magazine emerged as a shared religioussecular<br />
‘site’ for discourse. <strong>The</strong> religious press pioneered the format <strong>of</strong> the<br />
girl’s and woman’s magazines. It was in magazines like the Girl’s Own, <strong>The</strong><br />
Leisure Hour and Chatterbox that the very format <strong>of</strong> the woman’s magazine<br />
emerged: the agony aunt, the columns on cookery, gardening and<br />
thrifty hints, and the fashion pages. <strong>The</strong> agony aunt’s column in the British<br />
Weekly <strong>of</strong> 1886 gave detailed advice to a reader’s earnest inquiry:<br />
I hope your winter costume is <strong>of</strong> the ever-fashionable navy blue, for<br />
there’s nothing so becoming to a complexion as fair as yours. You<br />
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