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Reviewed by:
  • Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800–1940 ed. by Sue Morgan, Jacqueline deVries, and: Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century by Rebecca Styler
  • Maria LaMonaca Wisdom (bio)
Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800–1940, edited by Sue Morgan and Jacqueline deVries; pp. ix + 244. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, £70.00, £22.99 paper, $115.00, $35.95 paper.
Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, by Rebecca Styler; pp. 180. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £55.00, $99.95.

Feminist scholars of the second wave, as we now recognize, were more than a little dismissive of Christianity and its place in the lives of nineteenth-century women. Subsequent scholarship on women, gender, and nineteenth-century religion, therefore, has shaped itself in reaction to simplified understandings of meek, churchgoing women imprisoned in stained-glass cages. Yet these noble attempts at iconoclasm can yield equally flat and stereotypical results. Literary critics can be strangely prone to a “You go, girl!” school of feminist inquiry, in which every Victorian woman writer under consideration eerily prefigures Mary Daly in her bold attempt to reconfigure oppressive religious discourses. As I read the opening paragraphs of Sue Morgan and Jacqueline deVries’s new essay collection, I confess to feeling some apprehension. I could hardly disagree with their opening claims that women were “both the inheritors and makers of their own religious cultures,” and that “religious discourses were never passively received” but were instead “constantly reinterpreted by women and invested with new meanings” (2–3). I’d heard this argument before, and seen where it could lead. By the end of the volume’s introduction, however, my fears had been laid to rest. One of the major accomplishments of this project is how it works to “problematise familiar truisms, stimulate questions rather than provide answers, and generate future, as yet unimagined, ways of thinking about religion and gender” (7–8).

Although the editors and most of the other contributors to this book are historians by training, the essays employ a cross-disciplinary approach, drawing upon history, literature, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, theology, and religious studies. At first glance, the project’s goal is quite modest. It “attempts to map existing scholarship and propose new possibilities for inquiry” (7). The authors tease out relationships between gender and religion in ten distinct realms of nineteenth-century British culture, including theological literature (Julie Melnyk), philanthropy (Susan Mumm), preaching (Pamela J. Walker), missionary work (Rhonda A. Semple), and reform movements (Claire Midgley). Some of these essays cover fairly well-trodden ground, but I learned something of value from all of them, especially since many follow [End Page 339] religious and cultural developments in Britain through the interwar period. A key problem plaguing much of the study of nineteenth-century religious cultures, as the writers of this volume remind us both implicitly and directly, is the assumption that Christianity ceased to be a significant cultural force after the nineteenth century.

The quiet impact of this volume builds as one reads along. The first essay, Sarah C. Williams’s “Is there a Bible in the House? Gender, Religion and Family Culture,” provides an incisive analysis of the limitations of existing scholarly approaches to the closely related topics of women, religion, and the home. These themes, argues Williams, “are rarely studied in an integrated scholarly manner. The study of modern religion, the study of gender, and the study of the family remain discrete and at times dichotomized areas of enquiry each with their own research methods, agendas and theoretical approaches” (11). Williams points out how the “rapidly developing arena of family history” has gone far to dismantle entrenched understandings of the family and reductive constructions of polarized public and private spheres. However, she notes, “these new directions have emerged largely in isolation from religious themes, ideas and considerations” (27). “Piety continues to be narrowly associated with the middle class and with particular models of public life, while a singular coherent respectable version of evangelicalism is seen as the glue which holds the static tableau of Victorian family life together” (15).

The other showcase essays in this collection are clustered at the...

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