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Cover of Women and Belief, 1852-1928

Women and Belief, 1852-1928

  • Published: 12 Oct 2010
  • DOI: 10.4324/9780415472180
  • Set ISBN: 9780415472180

Over recent years, research into religious belief during the Victorian period and the early twentieth century has grown in diversity and importance. The centrality of faith-based discourses to women of the period has long been recognized by scholars in the field. But until now relatively little significance has been attached to the fundamental relationship between women’s faith and women’s rights. This new title in the History of Feminism series remedies that omission. Women and Belief, 1852–1928 is a six-volume collection of primary materials covering a wide range of opinions about women, their self-identity, and the combination of their spiritual and political beliefs.

Addressing the most debated aspects of women’s religious, social, cultural, and political rights, the collection adopts an historical overview of the period and provides an authoritative representation of the wide body of literature written by and about women’s faith. Beginning with an example of how religious discourse provided a model for acceptable female behaviour and a satirical take on women’s rights and spiritualism and ending with an economist’s psychoanalytic study of female belief from 1928, Women and Belief, 1852–1928 provides a unique collection of different viewpoints. It brings together the work of women writers, theologians, philosophers, and economic and cultural historians to illustrate the multiplicity of voices and opinions on the issues of suffrage and religious faith. This diversity is equally reflected in the broad geographical coverage of the collection which draws on works not only from the United Kingdom and United States but also includes materials from Canada and India, and moves beyond the Christian into the spheres of theosophy, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. The gathered materials include works of non-fiction, poetry, analytical works, satires, pamphlets, sermons, spiritual (auto)biography, and periodical articles.

Making readily available such materials—which are currently very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use—Women and Belief, 1852–1928 is a veritable treasure-trove. The gathered works are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. And with detailed and comprehensive introductory, biographical, and contextual material in each volume illustrating the ways in which the materials chart the gradual evolution of feminist thinking about belief, spirituality, and faith that directly fed into the emerging discourses of political and social rights for women, the collection is destined to be welcomed as a vital reference and research resource.

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General Introduction

Julia Kavanagh (1824–77) was born in Thurles, Tipperary, Ireland, to Morgan Peter and Bridget (née Fitzpatrick) Kavanagh on 7 January 1824. The family relocated to France during the early years of Kavanagh’s childhood and she was raised and educated in Paris and Normandy before moving to London in 1844. Her experiences in France as well as her Catholic faith proved a key influence in her writing: a number of her novels are set in France and her interest in French literature and culture is further reflected in her works of non-fiction, Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century (1850) and French Women of Letters (1862). Kavanagh’s father, himself an author of poetry, novels and a number of poorly received texts on the subject of linguistics, abandoned his family in the 1840s. Following this, Kavanagh took up writing in order to provide for herself and her mother and she did so for the rest of life, remaining unmarried throughout. She experienced poor health, suffering from neuralgia for many years, but continued to write: her final work, Forget-Me-Nots, was published posthumously in 1878. She died suddenly at the age of 53 on 28 October 1877 in Nice, southern France, where she had moved with her mother some years previously. She was survived by her mother and obituaries appeared in a number of leading periodicals of the day, including The Athenaeum and The Argosy. Victoria Magazine declared that ‘By the death of Miss Julia Kavanagh […] English literature has been deprived of an accomplished novelist and skilled writer of biography’, while The International Review mourned the loss of ‘a careful and conscientious artist’.

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This volume contains two works published by American writers in the early 1850s, a crucial decade for the American women’s movement following the seminal women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls in 1848. Luther Lee’s Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel (1853) addresses a question that provoked persistent debate throughout the nineteenth century – the legitimacy and role of female preachers within the Christian church – while the pseudonymous Fred Folio’s satirical novel Lucy Boston (1855) engages with the emerging popular interest in spiritualism and its particular appeal for women.

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The period covered by this volume (1859–68) was a tumultuous one, not least in terms of the tensions surrounding gender roles and religious beliefs and practices. The women’s movement in Britain was gathering momentum and had already made significant gains (in particular with regard to child custody, via the 1839 Custody Act, and access to the divorce courts, via the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act). Among the demands of women’s rights campaigners was the equal recognition of women within religious organisations, while religious doctrine was employed by both feminists and anti-feminists to justify their respective positions.

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The period covered by this volume (1869–91) was a time of immense change and development in both Britain and North America. It marks the height of the first wave of the women’s movement and, by 1891, women had made large strides towards legal and social equality, although there was still much to be done. Improvements were made to women’s access to education and the professions, married women’s property rights, access to the divorce courts, and legal protection from abusive husbands. In America, 1869 witnessed the formation of both the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, and in the same year women in the state of Wyoming were granted the right to vote. By the end of the nineteenth century, three more states (Idaho, Colorado and Utah) had followed suit. In Canada, women were granted limited voting rights in a number of provinces in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Although British women were not enfranchised until 1918, suffrage was a major focus of the Victorian feminist movement throughout this period. Among the arguments employed against female suffrage was the notion that it would contradict the role of women as prescribed by the church and bible, as Horace Bushnell’s entry in this volume demonstrates.

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Focusing on the years immediately preceding and following the turn of the century, this volume provides a selective yet illustrative sample of the diverse writings on women and religion in the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s. It includes extracts from seminal as well as underexplored works by both well-known and obscure writers from Britain, India, Ireland and the United States. While some of the texts reproduced here are representative of feminists’ continued efforts during this period to expose what they perceived as the inherent sexism of organised religion, other writers of various faiths and political persuasions also explore the relationship between women’s social position and religious doctrines, often with particular emphasis on issues surrounding female education and the effects of religious and secularist instruction on women as a group and, in turn, on society as a whole.

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The final volume of Women and Belief, 1852–1928 takes us firmly into the twentieth century. The texts collected here were written and published during a key period of feminist activity, legislative change and international conflict, including the militant activism of the Nation Union of Women’s Suffrage (NUWS), the founding of church-based groups campaigning for women’s suffrage, the First World War, the 1918 Qualification of Women Act and, eventually, the Equal Franchise Act in 1928.

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