Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius

4. Jane Leade

73 a 4 Jane Leade Behold I am God’s Eternal Virgin-Wisdom, whom thou has been enquiring after; I am to unseal the Treasures of God’s deep Wisdom unto thee, and will be as Rebecca was unto Jacob, a true Natural Mother; for out of my Womb thou shalt be brought forth after the manner of a Spirit, Conceived and Born again. —Jane Leade, A Garden of Fountains General Introduction Four women’s lives and work form the centerpiece of this book. The first of the four women is Jane Leade, who was born in Norfolk in 1624. Leade has been described as a mystic and visionary.1 Her visionary writing is poetic, employing a striking literary style and a range of elaborate images and metaphors , including many references to the figure of Wisdom, the female personification of God’s creativity who figured little in mainstream Christianity at the time. In old age Leade became a prolific publisher of spiritual writings and the acknowledged leader of the Philadelphians,2 a society that met in 1 See Julie Hirst, Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005); and Nigel Smith, “Pregnant Dreams in Early Modern Europe: The Philadelphian Example,” in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680, ed. Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 190–201. 2 Named after the sixth of the seven churches in Revelation (3:7-13) which has “but little power and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.” 74 Because of Beauvoir London for worship and reflection and included both men and women in its leadership. The second woman, Hannah More, was born in Gloucestershire in 1745. Though politically and theologically far more conservative than her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, renowned champion of the rights of women,3 More was no less concerned than Wollstonecraft with promoting women and girls as serious, rational individuals who could wield considerable power and influence. The duties and dispositions required by her evangelical faith strike the modern liberal feminist reader as restrictive. However, More was a passionate and intelligent woman who sought with extraordinary energy and determination to pursue her own careers as writer, abolitionist campaigner, and Christian social reformer. Her writing was influential in framing a publicly acknowledged role for women—especially of the middle and upper classes— in relation to spiritual leadership and social responsibility. The third woman, Maude Royden, was born in Liverpool in 1876. While she is an heir to More’s notions of spiritual womanhood4 within the established Church of England, Royden speaks in a much more recognizably feminist voice. Taking an active role in the suffragist campaigns in the early years of the twentieth century, she turned her attention to the Anglican Church after the First World War. She was a gifted speaker and preacher and became a controversial figure who campaigned for women to be allowed to preach and to be ordained to the priesthood within the Church of England. Like More, her vision for herself and for the world evinces a thoroughly rational view of human society, but it is combined with a far more liberal theology and social politics than More’s. The fourth woman, Michèle Roberts, is still very much alive at the time of this writing. Born in 1949 and growing up in London, Roberts separated herself in large part from the Roman Catholic Church in which she was brought up in the wake of the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, her journey as writer and female genius takes the shape of a critical but still passionate engagement—as a novelist and poet— with the traditions and sensibilities of her background, including the power and influence of a patriarchal Christian church. 3 See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth , UK: Penguin, 1992). 4 See Jenny Daggers, The British Christian Women’s Movement: A Rehabilitation of Eve (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). Jane Leade 75 These four women, then, have all been formed in some way by Christianity , its praxis, its beliefs, or its ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. The significant question, of course, is how—or whether—they have achieved female genius in the sense defined so far. Drawing on Beauvoir’s understanding of subjectivity, female genius here describes the struggle to avoid being objectified within male-normative...