Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion, and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–1914 by Laura Schwartz, and: Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God by Gail Turley Houston (review)

These two new books are welcome additions to the growing number of critical works examining the interrelationship of women, religion, and feminist thought in nineteenth-century Britain. In Infidel Feminism, Laura Schwartz argues that the relatively small number of women involved in the freethought and secularist movements was nevertheless significant in the development of feminist discourse. Fully acknowledging both the small numbers of women involved and their social marginalization, Schwartz neverthless ably makes her case that these women and their beliefs deserve our attention. Objecting to views that ignore the intellectual content of secularism, treating it as “just another form of evangelicalism,” she contends that taking women’s unbelief seriously is an important advance in post-secularist feminist criticism (22).

Schwartz analyzes the intellectual journeys, beliefs, and activism of freethinking women throughout the century, from early freethinkers such as Frances Wright and Eliza Sharples, through women leaders of secularism such as Harriet Law and Annie Besant. She also discusses the careers of freethinking women not explicitly connected with organized freethought but active in feminist causes, including Harriet Martineau and Frances Power Cobbe. Secularist discourse helped free women activists from traditional expectations of feminine propriety, allowing them access to the public sphere; these women fused the secularist attack on Christianity with a female attack on masculine social power and the patriarchal church. Unlike Christian feminists, who saw Christianity as elevating women’s status, secular feminists represented religion as the root of women’s oppression. They foregrounded issues of sexual freedom, the critique of marriage, opposition to the sexual double standard, and the promotion of birth control. Schwartz recounts their unique contributions to major feminist campaigns, including the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act and the fight for women’s suffrage.

Schwartz also traces significant continuities between the aggressively secular feminism associated with organized freethought in the early nineteenth century and the more socalled respectable and Christianized women’s movement later in the century. In particular, she argues carefully and convincingly that discussions of sexuality and sexual freedom in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s movement should be seen as a reemergence of the critique of sexual morality initiated by freethought feminists early in the century and kept alive by secularist feminists such as Law and Besant.

Schwartz’s book is a pleasure to read: lively, free of jargon, and accessible enough even for undergraduate teaching. In under three hundred pages, she not only revitalizes an important part of feminist history—the freethinking critique of patriarchal religion and religiously-motivated sexual repression—but also helps to untangle the multiple threads of late-century feminist thought.

Gail Turley Houston’s book is more literary, mostly focused on female images of the divine in canonical writers, including Charlotte Brontë, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, and George Eliot. Like Schwartz, Houston wants to draw connections between early radical, marginalized religious voices and later, more moderate and mainstream feminist positions. She begins her book by arguing for the existence of a “mother-god-want,” a deep desire for a divine female symbol in Protestant Christianity, particularly among Protestant women (1–2). She first discusses the radical voices of the pre-Victorians who offered to meet this need, mostly working-class women whose followers regarded them as divine: Mrs. Luckie Buchan, who identified herself as the Holy Ghost; Ann Lee, regarded by the Shakers as the female incarnation of God to balance a masculine Christ; and Joanna Southcott, who proclaimed herself Revelation’s “woman clothed with the sun” (15–16). She then links these female incarnations of God with the exaltation of the feminine...