Women have frequently been credited with greater religious sentiment and commitment than men, but they have always been accorded less importance in the institutional manifestations of Christianity, which have always favoured male leadership and control. But in spite of this limitation, women have frequently employed church teaching and structures in order to position themselves within the wider scope of religiously inspired activities and to achieve a degree of autonomy. For example, women belonging to the Religious Society of Friends were active in relief work aimed at ameliorating the sufferings of prisoners and the sick from the mid-seventeenth century, many of those they helped being victims of persecution by both Cromwellian and monarchist governments in England. Elsewhere in this volume, Anna Clark has drawn our attention to those nuns who created a role for themselves in managing institutions that aimed to reform prostitutes through a strict regime of privation, regimentation, prayer and work and, as will be shown, during the nineteenth century this process of creating specifically female task-oriented space increased. During the eighteenth century, such work was not limited just to combating recognised social evils. Convents and monasteries had long-established teaching functions, generally directed towards boys intended for the monastic life or girls of wealthy parents. In addition, teaching orders, such as the Ursulines, which originated in Italy, were given official papal recognition in the mid-sixteenth century for the work of educating poor girls and were firmly established by the eighteenth century. Many other, often smaller and more locally based orders also helped to address hitherto unmet needs. Relief of poverty and care for the sick provided the impulse for the foundation of some orders. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Sisters of Charity in France provided nuns to work in at least 200 hospitals or institutions for the poor and destitute. By the 1789 Revolution, the number had more than doubled. They, together with members of other religious orders, whose congregations by then numbered about 55,000 women, were abolished in France in 1792, as were all male orders, and revolutionary antipathy to religion was further manifested in the public disrobing and whipping of some Sisters of Charity.23 Resistance to actions of this sort by the revolutionary powers was, to a great extent, led by women who were reputed to have held more fiercely to their vows and their faith than were men: it was women who hid priests and provided secret spaces for worship, they who occupied churches and defended holy objects, and they who gave secret Christian burials to the dead and invoked the traditional saintly help for women in childbirth.24 It was women, too, who in the early days of Revolution led demonstrations against attempts to destroy the conventional religious symbols that ornamented cemeteries.25 While it is possible to suggest that this might have been informed as much by primitive and proprietorial anxieties that the last resting places of loved family members were being attacked as by a sense of outrage at the desecration of sacred monuments, religious sentiment attaching to the understanding of the nature of death and memorial may well have played its part. One consequence of the active resistance by women, whether professed religious or not, led, in Gisela Bock’s words, to the fem-inisation of Catholicism and, because of the central role played by the Virgin in their demonstrations, to its greater Marianisation. This is a process which, it has been argued, accelerated during the nineteenth century.26
But however dramatic or significant their activities, whether they taught children, cared for the sick or devoted themselves to prayer and contemplation within an enclosed female space, women religious were a minority. Most women would have expected to marry and anxieties about the place of women in the home, and their relationships with men, have given rise to discussion and prescription in European churches throughout Christian history and particularly since the Protestant Reformation when, as Olwen Hufton has argued, traditional teaching that emphasised the importance of filial obedience to parents was interpreted to mean obedience to all hierarchies. Within the domestic arena, both Catholics and Protestants expected women to accept a subservient role. That churchmen found it necessary to inveigh against women’s attempts to live parts of their lives outside the constraints of a patriarchally ordered household suggests that some challenge was being mounted to their essentially masculine interpretation of religious tradition and, by extension, to the priestly or ministerial authority of those who claimed to know the mind of God because ‘the church of their persuasion was the repository of divine truth’.27
Although the debate is couched in Christian terms in eighteenth-century Europe, some light may be thrown on its origins by the Muslim sociologist, Fatima Mernissi, who has argued that the ideological underpinning of notions of inferiority is not unique to Christianity. She claims that all monotheistic religions, as inheritors of a common tradition, are shot through with the conflict between the divine and the feminine.28 The seedbed for that conflict may be found in the Genesis creation myths, central to Jewish, Christian and Muslim constructions of woman. The notion that she was made after man, from man and for man’s use is fundamental. Fashioned from one of his ribs, she was a late event in the creation process and was made as a helpmeet, although there are some significant differences between Judaeo-Christianity and Islam in the ways in which this has been interpreted.29 The Hebrew Scriptures are accepted by Christianity as an essential propaedeutic for the Christian narrative and incorporated into the canon. Thus Judaism and Christianity have both made woman instrumental in man’s fall into sin - ‘the woman gave me of the tree and I did eat’, Adam protested, thereby shifting primary responsibility for his failure to his partner.30 This theme is taken up by the Christian Scriptures, with Eve made responsible for the Fall and the subsequent expulsion from Paradise. God cursed Eve before he cursed Adam and made her subject to her husband. The first epistle to Timothy is unequivocal: ‘Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.’ This inequality then extended to other areas, the implication being that her responsibility for tempting Adam carried with it the penalty of silence and subjection.31 The first epistle to the Corinthians carries the refinement that man is the image and glory of God, but that woman is the glory of the man, allowing the interpretation that woman, as well as being easily led, is a creature of a lower order - she, unlike man, was not made in God’s image. 32 Although Mohammed was clearly familiar with some of the Hebrew myths, their appearance in the Koran is distinctive. There Adam and Eve are represented as being jointly responsible for transgression and its consequences, allowing Islam to claim that, unlike the other monotheistic traditions, it accords woman an essential spiritual equality with man.33 But spiritual equality is a slippery concept. Both Catholicism and post-Reformation Protestant Christianity have made similar explicit claims for this notion of parity, although, as in Islam, in the practicalities of daily life any such ideal has frequently been of little effect. That women are accorded inferior positions in their relationships with men is rationalised by an appeal to an essential equality that, nevertheless, permits the imposition of divinely designed sex-specific roles for men and women. However great the potential theoretical differences between the three religions, they share a conceptualisation of womanhood that leads to similar treatment of women both within the religious institution and in wider society for much of the period from 1700: inferior beings, weak in the face of temptation and liable to tempt men, women must be protected and controlled.34
Traditional, conservative exegesis of all three sets of sacred texts defined women’s essential roles in relation to men - they are made for men’s delight and their responsibility is to cater to men’s domestic and sexual needs. This assumption of female utility and consequent inferiority is, however, mitigated by the claim that women possess an inherent dignity, a superior essence, that is denied to men. For example, both male and female Jewish commentators argued for women’s spiritual equality, while denying the exercise of that equality in any but the most limited way and demanding that women be restricted both spatially and religiously. Such arguments lay considerable emphasis on the glories and responsibilities of motherhood and the privilege of serving husband and family. Gerda Lerner has plotted a progression from the eighteenth-century patriarchal glorification of motherhood, with its roots in an ancient ‘marginalisation of women in the formation of religious and philosophical thought’ that allowed men to appoint themselves ‘as the definers of divine truth and revelation’, to its culmination in the nineteenth-century glorification of women’s domestic role.35 Small wonder that the developments in the twentieth century that have mounted vigorous challenge to nineteenth-century conceptions, whether they be religious or secular, have given rise to heart-searching as well as hostility.
The glorification of domesticity to which Lerner alludes has its roots in the Hebrew scriptures. The ‘woman of worth’ described in Proverbs 31:27, who has traditionally exemplified the ideal for the Jewish woman, rises before dawn and works tirelessly into the night to provide for her household and to assist the needy.36 She has also been held up for emulation by Christian women. Although adhering to the traditional position as outlined in the Hebrew Scriptures, Christians have also used examples of Jesus’s encounters with women in the Gospels both to underline the distinctiveness of their religion and to argue that its founder showed them a degree of consideration and respect that was unusual in first-century Judaic Palestine. It is noteworthy, however, that such commentators have frequently been content to overlook the fact that he declined to criticise those social structures that oppressed them.37
Thus, supposedly fully occupied with their household tasks, women who made excursions outside the home during the eighteenth century, especially if in the quest for greater intellectual stimulation, occasioned disapproval and anxiety and, sometimes, chauvinistic comment. For example, some few Parisian women - many of them Jewish - enjoyed the experience of the salons, in which both men and women met to discuss cultural and scientific matters. This met with unqualified disapproval in some quarters. As Linda Colley has pointed out, the conservative evangelical Christian Thomas Gisborne claimed that such women were the least eligible of wives, but that their sort was, fortunately, rarely seen in Great Britain.38 While they may have wished to distance themselves from such nationalistic stereotypes, women frequently colluded with the conventional view of the dutiful wife, which was an important element in both evangelical and Catholic teaching and which was compounded in the early part of our period by an understanding of femininity that ruled out the possibility that women might demonstrate intellectual interests or abilities.39 For instance, in the eighteenth century, Sophia Hume argued that women should not exhibit any interest in mathematics, science or philosophy, claiming that the result of such pursuits would engender pride and a vain mind - pride and vanity being the antithesis of truly feminine qualities informed by religious teaching, which stressed humility, subservience and, increasingly, domesticity.40
But if excluded from those scientific and cultural activities that were coded as masculine, some women attempted to increase their active participation in religion, also coded as masculine, albeit in a specifically feminine way that avoided posing an overt challenge to their exclusion from the performance of ritual associated with their cult. For example, Judaic law has traditionally assumed the male to be the normative Jew for religious observance; men have been obliged to obey all the commandments, but women have been required only to observe the negative ones. Women have, therefore, been relieved of such positive requirements as saying daily prayers (compulsory for men), with the result that religious education has been deemed essential for boys so that they are equipped to perform that function, but, by the same token, unnecessary for girls. Nevertheless, as Lerner has shown, many Jewish women in our period led satisfying religious lives, albeit quite separate from those of their menfolk. Evidence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has revealed collections of prayers to be recited by women in the course of their work in their homes. Lerner suggests that this demonstrates a close identification for women between their domestic tasks, such as bread-making, and the spiritual activities of the men in the synagogue: the home was their, essentially feminine, place of worship. Synagogue worship could be left to men because women had created for themselves an exclusively female sacred space. This was reinforced by the requirement that the preparation of the traditional Sabbath meal, with all its attendant ritual, was traditionally a female duty that accorded to women an important liturgical role, even though it was confined to the safe and private space of the household. For some, appeal to the matriarchs, such as Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, in their function as saviours of their children, reinforced the importance of women by celebrating their power as mothers to save the people of Israel,41 but for some Jewish women this was inadequate to their spiritual needs. A short-lived movement in eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Poland and Russia, initiated by Hannah Rachel Werbermacher, tried to emulate male religious practice by constructing a parallel organisation. They practised all the customary religious ceremonies and adopted religious dress. This radical departure from tradition had limited appeal, however, and when the movement faded the women concerned returned to the home and to conventional practice.42
Like their Jewish sisters, most Christian women during the eighteenth, nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries were expected to adopt a non-participatory position in relation to religious services. They were reminded of the injunctions attributed to St Paul, that they should be subject to their husbands, resist any temptation to teach men and remain silent at meetings of the community. But some post-Reformation sects such as the Religious Society of Friends had among their membership women who were prepared loudly to protest that these were false readings of Scripture, and in this their founder, George Fox, supported them. A notable example of this defiant attitude was Margaret Fell. In the mid-seventeenth century, while in prison on charges of refusing to swear an oath to the king - itself a daring challenge to the relationship between the church and the state - she wrote a pamphlet entitled Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures, All Such as Speak by the Spirit and Power of the Lord Jesus and How Women Were the First that Preached the Tidings of the Resurrection of Jesus, and Were Sent by Christ’s Own Command before He Ascended to the Father (John 20:17). Hers was a voice that had few echoes during the eighteenth century, but the strains were to be taken up a hundred years later by women of faith who believed themselves called to step outside the bounds of what had been traditionally allowed to them.
Another element in traditional teaching that is gradually subject to challenge in our period is that which states that women are a constant source of temptation and distraction. Some interpretations of the Genesis myth of the Fall have focused on the possibility that the temptation was a sexual one and have pointed to this as the origin of Christianity’s unease about human sexuality. But it might also be argued that this unease owes more to Christianity’s Hellenistic origins than to its Jewish ones; its almost Stoic emphasis, derived from St Paul, on celibacy and mastery of the body contrasts sharply with the celebration of human sexuality that can be detected in Judaism. The dangers that sexual expression held for spiritual growth had been enunciated in the early third century by Tertullian, who argued that a man was enabled to think spiritual thoughts only if he kept away from sexual contact with women. Other influential early Christian writers such as Jerome (c. 340-420 ce) and his near contemporary Augustine (c. 354-430 ce), perpetuate the repugnance felt for activity that results in the loss of control, for however short a time. Jerome, though, allowed himself mild dissent. He conceded, grudgingly, that sexual activity within marriage has some purpose - if nothing else, it could produce virgins. But why should sexuality produce such anxiety? Is it possible that the fear engendered by a basic biological function may well have been occasioned by men’s anxiety about the power of their own sexuality and their inability to resist sexual temptation rather than any active attempts at seduction by the women they encountered? However complex its origins, the unease persisted and has been evident in the ways in which churches and churchmen have always interested themselves in the control of sexuality, particularly of female sexuality. It is common to all branches of European Christianity, from sixteenth-century Protestant reformers such as Luther in Germany and John Knox in Scotland, who believed that women should be controlled and kept under the authority of men, to twentieth-century popes who sought to regulate women’s dress as well as their fertility. The need to control and regulate female sexual behaviour also intersected with the impulse to reform those women thought to be behaving inappropriately and to protect society from them, while it also was subject to pressure from religious women anxious to carve a space for themselves in activities outside the home. Like their sisters in mainland Europe, Irish Catholic nuns became involved in these reforming activities and established so-called
Magdalene homes in the mid-eighteenth century, where women thought to be guilty of sexual misdemeanours were given religious teaching and taught to be hard-working and subservient.
Women’s danger to men lay not only in their ability to lead them astray but also in their power to render them ritually unclean. Purity laws, particularly those related to the ‘polluting’ effects of menstruation, are to be found in the traditions of all monotheistic religions. Formulated in the Hebrew scriptures, where, it must be acknowledged, they run alongside regulations for dealing with the potentially polluting effects of male sexuality, they restricted physical contact with menstruating women and required them to take ritual baths in order to cleanse themselves at the end of their period, a practice that is still followed by many Orthodox women. In their essentials, notions of ritual purity have been absorbed into both Islam and Christianity. Although influential churchmen such as Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540-604 ce) expressed some doubt about the necessity for menstruating women to absent themselves from church, women’s access to religious buildings or to particularly sacred spaces was frequently restricted in the medieval and early modern periods and beyond in order to avoid the risk of ‘contamination’. Similar restrictions on female access to holy places are to be found in Islamic practice. Menstruation mythologies, often linked to quasi-religious or magical beliefs have a history that extends well into the twentieth century. Childbirth, too, was deemed to require purification, with women believed to be unclean for a longer time after the birth of a female child than after a male. The ‘churching’ of Christian women after childbirth, originally a ceremony designed to cleanse women after parturition, although now generally metamorphosed into a service of thanksgiving for the safe delivery of a child and explicitly distanced from earlier practices by most churches, is still associated with notions of purification in some communities.
The eighteenth century, therefore, saw both continuity and discontinuity. Although attempts were made to control women and to deny them their own space, arguably one of the least women-friendly consequences of the Protestant Reformation, moves by women to break free from some of the restraints and to create for themselves opportunities for service are also evident. The Catholic Reformation, too, provided stimulus for action. As Rosemary Raughter has shown, Catholic women throughout western Europe responded to the spirit and teachings of the Reformation by aligning themselves with parochially based activities and by joining the emerging movement of lay, devotional and charitable associations; by this means they both expressed their Christian commitment in devotion and service and, in the process, developed a new and active, specifically female, apostolate.43
World History
