John Wesley’s version of evangelical Christianity was distinguished by its insistence on the universal availability of salvation (‘Free Grace’), an insistence which rapidly led to the definition of Wesleyan theology as ‘Arminian’ in contradistinction to the Calvinist evangelicalism of Whitfield, Toplady, and others. Controversy was violent in the 1740s, and flared up again in the 1770s. It was against this background that John Wesley founded the Arminian Magazine in 1778. It was to function in defence of Arminianism, and to consist of ‘tracts on the universal love of God, wrote in this and the last century’, together with ‘Original Pieces’. This might seem an unlikely place for women to speak, or even to be spoken about, but Arminianism was not defended solely by means of tracts. By the year of Wesley’s death (1791), besides significant amounts of poetry and short anecdotes (the latter characterized by Wesley in 1781 as ‘bits and scraps’, with which he would scorn to fill up the Magazine), there are also fifteen letters written by women, and eleven accounts of women’s lives (slightly outnumbering both letters from and accounts of men). Later years show an even greater preponderance of women’s ‘Lives’. Leaving on one side the value of this source to the historian, this paper seeks only to analyse women’s opportunities to speak publicly in their own voice in the Arminian (later Methodist) Magazine under John Wesley’s editorship and later.

In 1807 Carolus Boers published his Manual for Young Clergymen. He started this introduction to the ministry with an overview of prerequisites for theological students. Physical requirements come first. A strong body, a good voice, a hardy constitution are necessary. Bodily disfigurements will expose a minister to ridicule. A weak or sickly clergyman will perhaps be pitied, but certainly not respected by his flock. The body bearing these physical perfections is male. This, for Boers, went without saying. Dutch Protestants did not seriously discuss opening the ministry to women before the twentieth century; and even then it was solely the growing number of women having finished their studies in theology that made this an issue at all. The Dutch minister around 1800 was a man. Yet maleness is not the same thing as masculinity. What kind of man was the minister supposed to be?

During the nineteenth century, the High Church revival tradition initiated by Henric Schartau (1757-1825) was widely spread and accepted in western Sweden. According to Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury, Schartau ‘had something of the character of Dr. Pusey in his relation to those who consulted him, but, in his position at Lund, and his general influence, he was perhaps more like his English contemporary, Charles Simeon (1759-1836), at Cambridge’. Wordsworth found great merit in his teaching, being ‘strong and spiritual, and without the defects of Moravian or Pietistic sentimentality’. During his Scandinavian journey in 1889, Randall Davidson characterized the followers of Schartau as a High Church party in their emphasis on private confession and their strict rules of conduct. On the other hand he found them to be zealous about the Sabbath, and preaching conversion in a quasi-Methodist way. Here, we shall study this movement through the examples of three women of urban culture. The Schartau tradition has been studied mainly with emphasis on its doctrines and clergy, and as a rural tradition connected to the unchanging values and structures of the old rural society. Through these examples of urban women, the general impact of the tradition is widened, and the emphasis is put on the changes in reception of the tradition among lay people in a changing society.

When the Cornish lay evangelist, William O’Bryan, founded the first Bible Christian societies in the late autumn of 1815 he was responding, in the main, to female initiatives. This is not altogether surprising. For several decades before 1815 women had been playing a much larger role in English evangelical Christianity than they had done in the early years of the Evangelical Revival. The informal groupings which came into existence in its second phase, c. 1790-c. 1830, gave women opportunities to initiate, organize, and exhort on a much more extensive scale. As cottages and farmsteads became centres of worship, women were well placed to play a more important role as initiators and organizers, especially in those areas barely affected by John Wesley, George Whitefield, and their travelling preachers. The more articulate went even further and followed the example of some eighteenth-century Quaker women by speaking in their own localities and further afield. Before the eighteenth century came to an end a number had acquired the reputation of being gifted preachers and ‘holy women’, ‘owned by God’, and called to instruct others, both men and women, in the Christian faith. For a short while women were poised in Wesleyan, and later, Primitive Methodism to play a major role in evangelism and church-planting; but it was only amongst the Bible Christians that they, for a time, played perhaps an even more significant role as evangelists than their male colleagues. As such they were in no way inferior to men; but when the denomination acquired a governmental structure copied from Wesleyan Methodism the patriarchal ordering of contemporary society set limits to their Bible-based notions of sexual equality.

The history of the family, at least for the nineteenth century, has reached a certain maturity. Though not yet incorporated into mainstream history – that would be too much to expect – it now boasts a considerable specialist literature and some useful general surveys. Undoubtedly the driving force has been the aspiration of women’s history to reconstruct the lives of women in the past. Now that the personal records of women are being studied with such attention, there is a wealth of insights into their experience as daughters, wives, and widows. Jeanne Peterson’s account of the Paget family and their circle in Victorian England is a typical example. For the nineteenth-century women’s historian, there is the added bonus that this was the period when the claims of women to have the dominant influence in the family were taken most seriously – as witness the persistent appeal of the Angel Mother. Hence to research the history of the Victorian family promises results which will feature women as agents, and not merely as victims of patriarchal oppression.

He role and place of women in the nineteenth century has been the subject of much recent debate. In their influential book, Family Fortunes, Davidoff and Hall traced the development of separate spheres, which, they argued, was linked to the process of industrialization and the emergence of the middle class during the period 1780–1850. They emphasised that both nonconformists and evangelical Anglicans had played a determining role in this development. Amanda Vickery, amongst others, has questioned this thesis. She believes that the premises are flawed, and that early modern studies have shown that neither industrialization, nor the development of separate spheres, can be located at the end of the eighteenth century. Additionally, Helsinger and others have pointed out that there was a contemporary debate over the issue of women, with several varieties of ideology under discussion. Whilst these criticisms of Davidoff and Hall need to be recognized, nevertheless, as Helsinger acknowledges, the ideal of the passive, home-based woman was a major influence in mid-nineteenth-century society.

Mary Ann Middleditch, a young woman of twenty in 1833, living in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and working in a school, confided in her letters her passionate feelings about Jamaica and the emancipation of slaves. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she had grown up in the culture of dissent and antislavery and felt deeply identified with the slaves whose stories had become part of the books she read, the sermons she heard, the hymns she sang, the poems she quoted, and the missionary meetings she attended. In 1833, at the height of the antislavery agitation, Mary Ann followed the progress of William Knibb in Northamptonshire. Knibb, who was born in nearby Kettering, had gone to Jamaica as a Baptist missionary in 1824 and been radicalized by his encounter with slavery. In the aftermath of the slave rebellion of 1831, widely known as the Baptist War because of the associations between some of the slave leaders and the Baptist churches, the planters had organized against the missionaries, burnt their chapels and mission stations, persecuted and threatened those whom they saw as responsible. Faced with the realization that their mission could not coexist with slavery the Baptist missionaries in Jamaica sent William Knibb, their most eloquent spokesman, to England to present their case. Abandoning the established orthodoxy that missionaries must keep out of politics, Knibb openly declared his commitment to abolition. The effect was electric and his speeches, up and down the country, were vital to the effective organization of a powerful antislavery campaign which resulted in the Emancipation Act of 1833.

The Oxford Movement has been portrayed in its classic historiography as both clericalist and, in so far as all nineteenth-century Anglican clergy were male, a movement of masculine leadership and initiatives. This is not to deny that the movement was largely priest-led and therefore male in its leadership but ‘largely’ does not mean ‘exclusively’. By looking at the introduction of the Oxford Movement into Scotland, a neglected aspect of its dissemination can be restored, that is, the importance of the laity and of women in the spread of Tractarianism. In Scotland the initial impetus given to Oxford Movement ideals and projects lay not with the clergy but with the aristocratic laity. It also was not the preserve of men, for among its first great supporters in Scotland was a woman, Cecil Chetwynd, widow of John William Robert Kerr, seventh Marquess of Lothian. She would become one of the leading Scottish Tractarians during the 1840s until her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1851 as a consequence of the Gorham judgement.

For many Evangelical clergy and lay people, the ‘annual conference’ became a vital feature of Christian life during the second half of the nineteenth century. Dominant among these was the Mildmay Conference, only later rivalled by the convention held at Keswick. The small beginnings of ‘conference going’ were a group of friends who responded to the invitation of the Revd William Pennefather to meet together in his parish at Barnet in 1856. He had not intended to found an annual gathering, but the momentum of the movement he set off was such that after he left Barnet in 1856 for the parish of Mildmay in London’s northern suburbs, the Conference which followed him grew into a powerful organization which not only brought together some three thousand Evangelical clergy and lay people each year, but also involved itself in welfare work which extended beyond the parish boundaries into other areas of London, and supported a wider network of workers in Britain and overseas. The Convention which began to meet at Keswick in 1875 was far removed from the social concerns of Mildmay, and its commitment to a controversial teaching of’holiness’ kept it on the fringes of Evangelical respectability for the first decade of its existence; but by the 1890s the popularity of ‘Keswick teaching’ could no longer be denied. While other Evangelicals sought to attack or denounce the perceived evils which were creeping into both Victorian Church and society, these conference goers sought to renew Evangelicalism from within in a way that would enable them to speak to that changing world with a new, but still distinctively Evangelical, voice.

Despite the enduring popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1857, the reputation of its author, Thomas Hughes, has suffered from the general reaction against Victorian values which characterized the first part of the twentieth century. Even as late as 1965, out of sympathy both with Hughes’s Christian beliefs and with his moral didacticism, Kenneth Allsop could dismiss him as a writer ‘fluctuating between a facetious smugness and a creepy piety’. However, in recent years scholars such as George Worth and Norman Vance have provided us with a more sensitive and nuanced picture of his thought, and one which severely qualifies the traditional image of Hughes as an exponent of a muscular Christianity which exalted an anti-intellectual credo of schoolboy athleticism and adult male toughness perfectly attuned to the ethos of high Victorian imperialism. This paper examines some of the ambiguities which are to be found in Hughes’s attempts to encapsulate and transcend the ideals of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour within the specifically Christian context from which they arose, and in so doing cast some light on the way in which Victorian Christianity both contributed to, and was influenced by, the construction and maintenance of gender roles for both men and women.

A historiographer of recent literature on masculinity might be forgiven for assuming that nineteenth-century definitions of Christian manliness were solely the domain of male commentators. The shifting and often conflicting emphases of the manly ideal proposed by critics such as Arnold, Kingsley, Hughes, and Carlyle exerted a prevailing influence upon the Victorian ruling classes – this much is beyond doubt. That codes of manliness were also subject to considerable attention by women, however, is suggested by this preliminary study of the prescriptive writings of the High Churchwoman and leading moral reformer Ellice Hopkins, whose discourse of social purity emerged as a force in the search for regulation of male sexuality during the 1880s and 1890s.

In 1890, the General Assembly of the established Church of Scotland appointed a Commission on the Religious Condition of the People, with instructions to carry out a comprehensive review of the state of religion and morals in the country. The aim was to determine the reasons for non-attendance at church services and for the Church’s declining social influence. The Commission visited the presbyteries, and issued a series of reports between 1891 and 1896. These revealed widespread irreligion, non-attendance, intemperance, and vice. Among the most disturbing revelations, however, were the high levels of illegitimacy in many regions of the country. Sexual immorality, according to the report for the synod of Galloway, in the south west of Scotland, was ‘a rampant sin in the district, and makes a dark blot on the moral life of [the] community’. In the Presbytery of Strathbogie, in the north east, sexual misconduct ‘has so permeated family life, and is so prevalent in the community, that it is difficult to arouse a healthy and vigorous public opinion against it’. The problem seemed to lie in the nature of ecclesiastical discipline within Scottish Presbyterianism. The mode of administering discipline’, the Commission observed in its final report, in May 1896,

The interaction of gender and religion affects a developing as much as a developed church. A missionary church raises appropriate issues not merely as they affect those spreading the message, but as they affect the receivers, both immediately and in a later period of establishment. This paper deals with such matters as they appear in the history of the Anglican Church in Sarawak, where the missionary activity began in 1848.

There was nothing unusual in the inauguration, in December 1909, of a Church League for Women’s Suffrage (CLWS). By January 1914, suffrage had become so expansive that fifty-three organizations competed for or shared a membership divided by tactics, religion, political allegiance, ethnic origin, or metier, but united in their desire to see the parliamentary franchise awarded to women. At the time of the League’s formation, the centre stage of suffrage politics was largely occupied by three groups: the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), suffragettes whose commitment to direct militant tactics brought them spectacularly into both the public eye and the prison cell; the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), whose suffragist members condemned all militancy, describing themselves as ‘law-abiding’; and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), militants who had quit the WSPU in 1907 in a dispute over constitutional democracy. Whilst they were often virulently opposed to each other, these three groups shared a commitment to an all-female membership and also the political will to prioritize the franchise above the broader feminist issues which adjoined their public campaigns. By contrast smaller suffrage groups, including the Church League, added extra dimensions to the suffrage campaign. They allowed members of the three main groups to explore issues other than suffrage whilst simultaneously providing alternative arenas for suffrage activity to those who did not feel able to commit themselves to the larger bodies. Thus the Church League did restrict its membership to practising Anglicans, but welcomed both militants and constitutionalists, and men as well as women into its ranks. Whilst the achievement of the parliamentary franchise remained its main aim, it also provided space for those who wished to explore ‘the deep religious significance of the women’s movement’. This paper uses the example of the Liverpool branch of the Church League to examine in greater detail to what extent, if any, such explorations resulted in an alteration of the gendered nature of space within Edwardian Anglicanism.

One of the cultural features of South Africa’s new democracy is the prolific publication of autobiographical narratives by previously marginalized people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has also focused attention on the plight of oppressed groups under apartheid, and many of the voices being heard are those of women. These personal accounts are breathing life into the sinews of organized political protest and – to mix metaphors – unearthing the ‘hidden past’ interred in apartheid history. As Alison Goebel also reminds us, life histories or personal narratives have long been identified as ‘an ideal feminist method’, and have frequently been used in work about African women.

In September 1992 a periodical published by a conservative evangelical campus ministry led by an Anglican clergyman based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney published an editorial under the heading ‘Is homosexuality next?’ It began with an imaginary dialogue: