The Death of Christian Britain

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