The marginalisation of gender

Of all the ways in which secularisation has been imagined and studied by scholars, the least explored has been gender. As a category of analysis, it is now pretty standard across the historical and sociological professions, and has transformed areas of study, established entirely new ones, and generally invigorated intellectual thought about past and present societies. But few studies of religious change and secularisation in the twentieth century have considered gender seriously. Some of those, notably by Hugh McLeod, have concluded that class remained more important than gender in differentiating people's religious behaviour. Peter van Rooden has conducted a small-scale oral-history project in the Netherlands to test the involvement of women in the 1960s in the ‘strange demise of Dutch Christianity’. This chapter explores further gendered aspects of the British experience of secularisation since the 1960s. It does this through a reading of both women's and men's autobiographies as a source revealing the transformation of the place of religion in British culture. Like any approach, this has its difficulties. The voices heard recalling mid-twentieth-century Britain tend to lean strongly towards a group of people involved in the political and cultural changes represented by the term ‘the sixties’ and its counter-culture. Many of the people who talk of the cultural transformation were participants in it, and seemed to be inhabiting a world predominantly of London and the south-east of England; the term of choice was, after all, ‘swinging London’.