The process of moving out into more public areas of activity became unstoppable as Christian women claimed what they were convinced were the responsibilities of their religious commitment, whatever their denominational allegiances. By the 1870s, Catholic women involved in orders devoted to teaching, nursing and education outnumbered the combined forces of the clergy, both secular and religious. Raughter has drawn examples of the ways in which women internalised the teachings associated with the Catholic Reformation from Ireland, but the development of activities inspired by Christian teaching, albeit with different denominational and therefore theological emphases, may be seen in the deeds of other notable Christians such as Elizabeth Fry, a member of the Society of Friends, best known for her pastoral and evangelistic work in the dangerous and unpleasant world of early nineteenth-century prisons in London. She also engaged in more ‘normal’ activities for well-to-do women; she set up a village school, provided food and clothing for the poor and helped to vaccinate the children of the parish against smallpox.44 In Germany, the Protestant Amalie Sieveking established the Female Association for the Care of the Poor and the Sick in Hamburg in 1832 in order to combine spiritual and moral assistance to the poor.45 Concern to provide for the needy or outcast, for which unequivocal dominical authority could be claimed, provided a satisfying outlet for women whose comfortable social and financial circumstances allowed them to distance themselves from their domestic tasks.46 But although later generations might applaud their courage and initiative, some contemporaries took a more jaundiced view. Both Josephine Butler, who waged campaigns against legalised prostitution in England, India, France and Switzerland, and Elizabeth Fry were criticised for neglecting their families, demonstrating only too clearly the contemporary expectation that married women should fulfil a private, domestic role and that involvement in ‘political’ or public activity, however laudable, was inappropriate.
Jewish women, too, found useful activity in philanthropic and educational work of various sorts. In 1872, Henriette Goldschmidt of Leipzig opened kindergartens for lower-class children, so that their mothers could more easily take up employment; at the same time, Betsy Park set up a women’s club in the Netherlands which aimed to help women to use their needlework skills as a source of income. Lina Morgernstern of Berlin founded soup kitchens, as did Helene Mercier in Holland. No less than their Christian sisters, these Jewish women understood their activities to be inspired by the precepts of their religious faith. As Bock has shown, Bertha Pappenheim, the founder in 1902 of the Women’s Care Club and in 1904 of the Jewish Women’s League, gave unequivocal expression to the powerful link between spirituality and service in the numbers of prayers she composed, one of which was designed to be recited by the chair before a meeting.47
Although Protestant Christianity and Judaism inspired their adherents, it was Catholicism, as the dominant Christian tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that provided the motivation for most of the religious associations that flourished in Europe. Many of these were actively involved in teaching and in hospital work as well as in care for the poor, while contemplative orders attracted those women who believed that their calling was to the work of prayer rather than activity. They were joined by Protestant sisterhoods and orders of deaconesses, which began to appear from the 1830s, one of the most influential being that at Kaiserwerth, founded in 1836 in order to train women for nursing and social work on lines that were thought to resemble those of the early Church. In addition, a range of other charitable organisations owing their origins to faith and Christian principles must also be added to the roll. Like those of their Catholic sisters in active rather than contemplative orders, they frequently worked to alleviate forms of social distress. Nineteenth-century Christian Norwegian women, although denied a role in the administration of their churches, were permitted enfranchisement in the temperance movement and proved themselves to be active participants in the fight against drunkenness. The picture in Norway was as varied as elsewhere. Some radical Christian communities were prepared to allow women to take a fairly active part in the social outreach of the church, but it has to be noted that this was not universal. In spite of evidence that they were able and willing to make a valuable contribution to pastoral and evangelistic work, they were denied full membership rights of at least one Norwegian missionary society until as late as 1974.48 The money they contributed to such work was, of course, gratefully accepted. But although they sometimes chafed under the limitations imposed on them, middle-class Christian women throughout Europe found ways to engage in a wide range of reforming and philanthropic activities, including the establishment of homes for ‘fallen’ women and orphanages, while their working-class sisters might find themselves recruited as Bible women. In cities such as London, their task was to visit the homes of the poor both to evangelise and to encourage improvement in their standards of housewifery.49
By contrast, some elements in German Protestantism, even its female wing - the League of Protestant Women - resisted any movement towards anything that could be perceived as emancipatory for women.50 But this was not a necessary feature of Lutheranism. Trying to ease their way into the public sphere, some Danish women utilised the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, which confined women’s activities to the home and family, in order to rationalise their missionary work on behalf of the Lutheran church. Constructing themselves as society’s housewives, they employed the metaphor of the home in order to argue that, just as they would not hesitate to clear the dirt from their domestic cellars, so they had a responsibility to clear society of the ‘filth’ of prostitution.51 Such activities, whether performed by Catholic or Protestant women, have received differing treatment from historians. James McMillan and Karin Lutzen have pointed to them as illustrative of ways in which women have been able to devise socially useful vehicles for the expression of their Christian commitment, at the same time as achieving a public role and in the process subverting traditional restrictive teaching. In contrast, Eric Hobsbawm has suggested that we need to examine critically the readiness of the Church to modify its position in relation to women’s activities of this sort and to yield reluctantly to the increasing pressure from women to escape the restraints of domesticity. He has argued that the institution’s support was bought at the cost of a continued commitment to subordination and a condemnation of the competing discourse of female emancipation, which was being offered by contemporary socialism. The church won. Hobsbawm has shown that before the First World War - a period when there were ‘more female religious professionals than at any time since the Middle Ages’ - the women who opted for the defence of their sex through piety and Christian service enormously outnumbered those who opted for liberation by secular means.52 If that is the case, then we have to ask why religion was the more attractive option for participant women. Could it be that the old and familiar Gospel injunctions to love and service had been so successfully internalised that they could not easily be dislodged by new dogma, whatever its potential for personal liberation?
The personal satisfaction that women could gain from putting Christian teaching into practice could sometimes run alongside more earthly ambitions and serve useful social purposes, particularly for those families that aspired to influence and status. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have cited examples of early nineteenth-century evangelical family networks in England, particularly among clergy families, where women were used both to further family alliances and to satisfy the need for Anglican clergy to be married, thus marking clearly the difference between themselves and the celibate Catholic priesthood.53 As in late medieval and early modern aristocratic and mercantile networks, mutually convenient marriage arrangements could be an effective way to satisfy family ambition, especially at a time when clerical status was high. But ambition for a good, and even financially advantageous, match must have been only one element in the attraction of a clergy daughter to a man in holy orders looking for a wife - and in the attraction of a cleric to a marriageable young woman. He would be rewarded with a well-trained partner who would almost certainly have internalised the current expectations of a clergy wife and mother and who would be ready to play her part in the mission of the church. From the woman’s point of view, even though she was denied any official role, the social status she would gain would be augmented by the possibility of a potentially satisfying, if unpaid, occupation of a parson’s wife.
Women who found meaning and fulfilment within church-based activities also provided the church with a degree of validation, female religiosity balancing institutional ambition. Karen Offen has shown that in both France and Germany in the midnineteenth century, the notion of women’s difference from men and their dissimilar but equally beneficial involvement in communal life provided grounds for valorising the contribution that women could make. The Virgin Mary, whose importance in popular spirituality increased through the nineteenth century, provided a powerful resource for women, many of whom took their personal anxieties to her and positioned her at the centre of their devotional lives. It is not surprising that her miraculous appearances in the nineteenth century were frequently witnessed by women and girls, thus reinforcing the feminine element in Catholic belief by increasing the devotion to Mary. Simultaneously these visions gave both fame and a reputation for privileged sanctity to those who claimed to have seen her. If, in Lynn Abrams’s words, ‘the visionaries were using the church’s construction of woman as the spiritual and pious sex for their own ends’ the church, too, found ways to exploit the revived devotion.54 Pope Pius IX, fleeing from the revolution in Rome in 1859, invoked its positive power when he called for the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary - the notion that Mary was without original sin. The essence of this dogma was that sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could take effect in her soul, with the result that holiness, innocence and justice were conferred upon her and she was free from all depraved emotions, passions and debilities. Taken to its conclusion, the topos accords to Mary a form of perfection and freedom from sin already accorded to Christ and, it may be supposed, allowed women who emulated her submissive behaviour to bathe in the reflected rays of glorified womanhood. Little is known about Mary, but the mythologies that surround her stress her willingness to yield to the divine purpose and to play her part as a mother. In spite of some of the titles that have been applied to her, titles such as ‘Seat of Wisdom’ or ‘Mother of Good Counsel’, she was primarily extolled for her holiness and used to provide a model of womanhood characterised by maternity and domesticity rather than intellectual or worldly activity. As men defected from the church, the Pope hoped that by according enhanced recognition to the Virgin he would retain women’s allegiance and harness the power of Christian mothers in its service. But the price of enhanced recognition was subordination, offered on terms that stressed the vital role that women as mothers could play in a project that emphasised the importance of the home in the education of future Catholics.55
The nineteenth century saw many changes in women’s role and participatory activity within religious institutions, largely reflective of changes in society as a whole. In so far as these affected European Judaism, there were major variations in practice between different Jewish communities. Jewish schools that admitted girls began to be established in the mid-nineteenth century. This overturning of the traditional practice of denying education to girls was the result of activity by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which argued for a better integration of Jews through the reforming of Jewish society and culture so that it was brought more into line with modern European society. This process extended to the training of women teachers, generally at the Alliance’s school establishment in Paris.56 The move to improve the quality of secular education was mirrored in some sections of Jewish society by the impulse to include women and girls in religious education. This was a consequence of assimilation to European society and accommodation to its mores, based on the conviction that Judaism was a historical religion in constant interaction with its environment, rather than an outright challenge to established practice.57 It was the urge to consider the implications of greater assimilation that led the Frankfurt Conference of Reform Jews to establish a committee in 1845 to investigate the religious status of women. Abraham Geiger, one of the major philosophical spokesmen of the German Reform, and an articulate advocate of Jewish women’s spiritual equality with men, argued in 1846 that the traditional position regarding Jewish women could no longer be upheld. As a result, some steps were taken to improve their position, as part of a number of measures taken in the formation of Reform Judaism: for the first time, women could be included in the quorum necessary for worship, the minyan; the benediction recited by men to express their gratitude to God that they had not been born women was abolished; formal religious instruction for girls was introduced; and, in the Reform synagogue in Berlin, women and men were seated on same floor during worship, instead of women being confined to the balcony, often sitting behind a screen. Some parts of the service were read and sung in German, in order to allow women to participate more fully.58
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 remained subject to their husbands, did not presume to teach men and remained silent at meetings of the community.59 But, unlike Judaism, where women’s attendance at synagogue was not considered vital to their spiritual health and was, therefore, markedly lower than that of men in the mid-nineteenth century, historians of women estimate that church membership in England showed a persistent female majority of between 60 and 70 per cent.60 Certainly, the 1851 religious census in England revealed that churchgoing was a largely female activity, and in the 1880s Charles Booth commented that ‘the female sex forms the mainstay of every religious assembly of whatever class’. A survey conducted in the early years of the twentieth century by Richard Mudie Smith claimed that nearly twice as many women as men attended Church of England services.61 The picture in the rest of Europe was remarkably similar. A study of Saxony in 1902 commented on the proportion of female churchgoers and fifty years later, in an Andalusian rural community, religion was seen as women’s business.62 By the end of the nineteenth century in France, women’s attendance at the key services of the Catholic church greatly outnumbered that of men, and in Protestant Berlin at about the same time, women formed about two-thirds of the congregations.63 Furthermore, what Abrams has called the ‘feminisation of popular religion’ in the nineteenth century is so dramatic as to demand comment.64 As she has shown, in parts of Europe, notably France, Belgium and Spain, there was a huge increase in the numbers of nuns professed during the nineteenth century.
Across the English Channel, the ideal of the religious life exerted a similar attraction. By the end of the century, there were more than ninety women’s sisterhoods claiming allegiance to the Church of England as very large numbers of women took advantage of this opportunity to express their faith. Like their Catholic sisters, many of them became involved in the work of rescuing women from prostitution and established institutions for so-called ‘fallen women’. The Clewer sisters ran houses of mercy in their mother house in Berkshire and also in Soho, where William Gladstone took some of the women he had rescued from the London streets. These were representative of numerous organisations, frequently run by women for the reformation of other women and informed by an urgency to impose Christian standards on society.65 Susan Mumm has argued that this received a guarded welcome from the Anglican Church hierarchy, which preferred deaconess orders to sisterhoods as channels for women’s work because deaconesses enjoyed a reputation for obedience to episcopal authority. Women, however, appeared to have preferred sisterhoods, for the same reason - membership enabled them more successfully to resist institutional control. Sisterhoods, owing obedience primarily to their mothers superior, attracted considerably greater numbers than orders of deaconesses.66 Nearly all were actively involved in socially useful work. In addition to reforming work with ‘fallen women’, sisterhoods ran orphanages and schools, provided skilled nursing staff for hospitals and engaged in innovatory missionary work in the poorest parts of English cities.
The state, too, involved itself in the work of reformation of women, although this took the form of regulation and, in England, the forcible gynaecological examination and incarceration of those suspected of working as prostitutes. This excited a variety of responses from churches. The Church of England supported it, to the fury of Josephine Butler. The wife of an Anglican priest, she perceived the flawed nature of legislation designed to reduce the spread of venereal disease by targeting women but failing to curb the activities of their clients. She was given greater encouragement by the Roman Catholic hierarchy than any in her own church for her attempts to persuade parliamentarians of the need to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain and to fight against the institution of state-regulated prostitution in Europe, particularly in France and Switzerland.67 She would have taken some satisfaction from the knowledge that the Church of England, which distanced itself from her activities at the end of the nineteenth century, claimed her as an Anglican saint in the twentieth!
In spite of the many reservations entertained by some church authorities, even the establishment of sisterhoods and orders of deaconesses did not challenge fundamentally the received views about women’s subordination in the religious arena - neither sisters nor deaconesses attempted to usurp any priestly role, for example - but the more upfront activities of women were something different. Even the feisty Catherine Booth, wife of the founder of the Salvation Army, in nineteenth-century England, entertained some doubts about whether it was proper for women to be religious leaders, although she entertained no scruples about her right to preach.68 And in spite of its commitment to egalitarianism, the Society of Friends imposed limits on the exercise of female power. Matilda Sturge, for example, found herself excluded from the main national governing bodies of the society, which limited their membership to men. This was despite her active involvement in the society’s work as an energetic member of her local monthly meeting, her work as a teacher in the Quaker First Day School in Bristol, as superintendent of the Sunday School for Girls, organiser of a mothers’ meeting, Clerk of her local women’s monthly meeting, assistant clerk to the national women’s yearly meeting and a member of the Quaker Home Mission Committee.69 For those who believed that they had God-given gifts that they were ready to use in the service of the institution, the denial to them of the right actively to participate found its rationale in the nineteenth-century division of life into public and private, with women’s role being located firmly in the private domain, reinforced by biblical injunctions that were read as giving divine authority to female silence and inactivity. In some cases an appeal to biblical authority barely concealed a vicious misogyny. Bjorg Seland has related how Bishop Johan Christian Heuch buttressed his argument that Swedish women should be barred from participation in all public life by appealing to the Scriptures and by warning against the dissolution of family life and the disintegration of morals, which he believed would result from the entry of women. He also added a note of mockery by inviting parliamentarians to imagine their mother being allowed to speak in the national assembly:
Imagine the venerable lady in her pitiable falsetto holding forth with all the eagerness and fanaticism that so easily seizes the woman. . . am I the only one who would have fled in terror from the Chamber, if one imagines one’s mother in such a situation?
In order to reinforce the Christian imperative that woman’s God-given role was to obey and serve her husband or father, appeals were made to both the sort of biblical injunctions already discussed and those given emphasis by reference to other presumed feminine characteristics, including loyalty and devotion. Accounts of women’s faithfulness during Christ’s passion and death allowed the construction of women as God’s closest workers, as more faithful to Christ when he was on earth than were his male followers, for example, and both flattered women and legitimised their subordination. As Bjorg Seland has argued in her discussion of the nineteenth-century Norwegian church, by the use of such ‘romanticising and laudatory rhetoric’ men could legitimise formal discrimination.70
Woman’s responsibility was not merely to ensure the physical well-being of her family, but also, by so doing, to demonstrate its spiritual health. Christians who contested this exclusively domestic role for women sometimes framed it within the campaign to permit greater educational opportunities and, by extension, greater employment opportunities to women. For example, practising Anglican Christians, such as Emily Davies, gave lip service to Pauline teaching about the subjection of women while also appearing to undermine it. As Laura Morgan Green has shown in her recent work on cultural conflict and Victorian literature, such pioneering women frequently spoke with a forked tongue, using an apparently orthodox vocabulary to express ideas of potentially radical import, in Davies’s case in favour of the higher education of women.71 This was not an exclusively English device to subvert inconvenient biblical injunctions. In Sweden, Sophie Leijonhufvud, while protesting an adherence to traditional doctrine as taught within Lutheranism (Luther had envisaged few other functions than childbearing and domesticity to women, whom he believed to be childish and muddleheaded), rebutted theological arguments against giving women the opportunity to pursue their education, arguing that this posed no danger to true Christian femininity.72 In Iceland, in the 1880s, Briet Bjarnheinsdottir took a similar line.73
Those northern European women who campaigned for the provision of opportunities in higher education and employment for women challenged the ways in which the sacred texts had generally been used by claiming to discern their ultimate intentions. Marie Maugeret, for example, editor of monthly periodical Le Feminisms chretien in Paris insisted that feminism could be reconciled with Christianity, and asserted women’s right to work.74 Nevertheless, the right of women to seek employment outside the home was a grey area, reflecting the difficulty that Christian preachers and writers experienced when they tried to delineate precisely the female role. Women were bound to care for and influence their families, but what if the financial support of the family required that the mother undertake paid employment? The tension was created between the ideal of the home-loving pious wife and mother whose husband was able to support her financially and the equally home-loving and pious woman whose conscientious fulfilment of her role demanded that she leave the home to help to support her family. Inevitably, there were different expectations for women of different classes. Only those with financial resources had the luxury of trying to reconcile their Christian duty to remain at home servicing their families with their aspirations for employment or even philanthropic activity outside the home. Poor women had no such choice, and it is significant that Christian charities working with poor women did not hesitate to find work for them, even if that necessitated putting their children into the care of strangers or into an orphanage while the mothers worked to pay for their keep.
Not all Christian women were prepared to accept teaching that restricted their opportunities outside the home. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century the editors of a Swedish periodical, Tidskrift for hemmet, used both Old and New Testament references to give a scriptural - some might say fundamentalist - spin to the argument that women, especially single women, should be properly prepared for employment both to mitigate the contempt in which unmarried women tended to be held and to fulfil the ungendered prophecy in Genesis that ‘You shall work in the sweat of your brow’. No one should think that she or he was immune from the divine requirement to work. Moreover, Christ’s parable of the talents, which condemned those who failed to make good use of the resources they had been given, was used to underline the antiChristian nature of failing to develop God-given abilities. To counter those who protested that allowing women into higher education - and, by extension, into the workplace - would be detrimental to morality, they argued cogently that the lecture room was probably a more moral place than the ballroom and pointed out that orthodox Church members had entertained few scruples about women being educated in order to perform a social and decorative function on the dance floor.75 Unlike Josephine Butler, who appeared to argue that there were exceptions to general rules (among which exceptions she counted herself), Sophie Leijonhufvud, the editor of Tidskrift for hemmet, adopted the more radical - and divisive - stance of reserving to women the right to choose and interpret for themselves those biblical passages that they considered central to women’s position.76
Not all women were convinced by feminist readings of the holy books, however. Jenny P. d’Hericourt, a French Protestant woman, contested established views about women in the middle of the nineteenth century, by insisting that claims for the equality of the sexes based on Christian belief could not be sustained. She argued that both the Old and New Testaments proclaimed the inferiority of woman, imposing on her the
Most absolute submission to her father, to her husband, refusing her every right as daughter, spouse, mother, alienating her from the priesthood, from science, from instruction, denying her intelligence, outraging her modesty, torturing her feelings, permitting the sale and exploitation of her beauty, preventing her from inheriting or owning property.77
The picture she drew may have been a crude one, but many European women writers in the past three hundred years fundamentally would not want to disagree with her.
World History
