The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
tance who led her to a City Mission run by Sister Faith who persuaded
Lucy that her skills as a doctor should be combined with mission work ‘in
the East’. Lucy hesitated for long, but was convinced when Sister Faith
told her on her deathbed: ‘Ask them – those women over there – to accept
the Lord Jesus Christ as their own personal Saviour. Tell them – how much
He means, especially to us women.’ 88 It was not merely new jobs for women
to which the evangelical discourse on female religiosity had to adapt. In
‘Red Emily and Her Changed Creed’ of 1937, Emily was described as ‘an
incorrigible rebel’ at the age of fourteen, and at sixteen was sent to be
trained as a domestic servant on a farm where she stole and was forced to
leave. ‘That was the beginning of her career as a revolutionary’, and Emily
joined a band of disaffected young communists in the Midlands, reading
Marx on economics and urging violent overthrow of capitalism, and
becoming a street-corner orator. But she happened upon a late-night gospel
meeting, attracted by the oratory, and heard the message within it and came
forward to be saved, whereupon she became a happy and contented
domestic servant. 89
In these and other ways, the evangelical narrative responded to changes
in the wider discourse on women’s economic and social lives, and thereby
sustained core characteristics of female piety and femininity. This could be
seen in stories for the very young girl. The Good Way and Daybreak of
the Edwardian period (both priced at a penny-ha’penny) contained stories
and homilies with simple messages imparting a notion of good behaviour
in young children: ‘Mamma, I wish I might always dress in white . . .
Because, Mamma, the angels dress in white, and I want to be like them.’
Mamma: ‘white is the emblem of purity, and that is the reason it is spoken
of as the raiment of heaven.’ 90 Stories for young girls tended to be less
melodramatic than for teenage females, but they utilised a whole range of
‘feminine’ contexts to explore simple moral issues of goodness, meekness,
obedience and self-discipline: contexts like gardening, pretty clothes and
household duties. 91 The almost constant concern with girls’ clothes, with
the prettiness of ‘Sunday best’ dresses especially, symbolised the way in
which female religiosity and femininity were closely allied in discourse. As
the next section contends, the sites for these discourses were also closely
allied.
EVANGELICAL NARRATIVES IN THE
SECULAR WOMEN’S PRESS
From the 1830s, the massive popular press of weekly and monthly magazines
absorbed the evangelical narrative structure into a ‘secular’ context.
The connection was so close that it is almost inappropriate to speak
of separate ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ popular magazines until at least the
79