Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857–1957 by Timothy Willem Jones (review)

On 26 January 2015 the Right Reverend Libby Lane was consecrated as the eighth bishop of Stockport, becoming the first female bishop in the Church of England. This event took place after Timothy Jones completed his book, but his concluding remark is that “women’s entry to the historic episcopate … will remove one of the last major symbols of sexual subordination from the British religious imagination” (188). His compelling and deeply informed study stops in the mid-twentieth century, but he makes it quite clear that the debates within the established church over the previous century had already moved its understanding of gender and sexuality a considerable distance, paving the way for much that was going to follow, including the ordination of women priests and the consecration of women bishops.

Jones claims that historians of religion in Britain have largely neglected questions of gender and sexuality and that historians of gender and sexuality need to rethink their negative portrayal of the church as an overwhelmingly sex-negative, gender-conformist, repressive, and reactionary force hostile to change. In the period between 1857 and 1957 he sees six principal and overlapping controversies in which the church was compelled to talk about sex. The first concerned marriage, specifically the debates around divorce after the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1857, around polygamy when missionary prescriptions met local practices in various parts of the empire, and around “incest” (that is, whether a man could marry his deceased wife’s sister or a woman her dead husband’s brother). Here the story was indeed one of resistance—and increasingly so, since the rise of Anglo-Catholicism privileged the sacramentality of marriage and its attendant patriarchal assumptions about female subordination. This insistence on subordination, however, needs to be balanced against the church’s introduction into the Prayer Book in 1925 of an alternative marriage service by which a wife no longer had to swear to obey her husband.

The second controversy, concerning the nineteenth-century revival of Anglican religious orders of nuns and deaconesses, also had a very limited impact in challenging the orthodox understandings of gender roles. The public spaces that these women were able to carve out were heavily circumscribed and gender specific. But, Jones argues, in a repeated refrain, it was small changes that in the long run had a significant impact, in this case the opening up of the possibility of women’s ordination to the priesthood many decades later. This segues to the third and fourth controversies, around the struggle for women’s suffrage and—a logical corollary—the interwar debate about the claim of women to be priests at a time when the gender barriers to the other professions were breaking down and female participation in the lay councils of the church was becoming well established. The debate, Jones tells us, “exposed a rift in beliefs about sex and gender within the institution that has not yet closed, and inaugurated a century of Anglican institutional obsession with sex” (126). It ended in a resounding defeat for the advocates of women vicars: women were not ordained until 1992.

The fifth controversy surrounded contraception. The Lambeth Conference’s emphatic “no” to artificial birth control in 1908 gave way to a cautious “yes” in 1930. Jones cannot quite make his mind up whether this represented an “amazing shift” or a “modest shift” (132), but he seems to settle on the latter: by decentering reproduction in marriage it “opened up possibilities for radical new understandings of sexual pleasure and identity” (132). One of these new understandings concerned homosexuality, the sixth controversy. The Church of England Moral Welfare Council’s 1954 report, The Problem of Homosexuality, marked the full incorporation of the language of sexology by at least a segment of the church, and this change in stance was influential in the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee to consider the state of the law on...