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152 Chapter Six The Divine Hermaphrodite and the Female Messiah Feminism and Spirituality in the 1890s Until recently, the 1890s were dismissed as a decade of relative inactivity in British feminism, a quiet period between the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts and the emergence of a militant suffrage movement in the early twentieth century. More recent studies suggest that the 1890s were actually a very lively period, in which feminist debate flourished and new kinds of feminist organizations emerged.1 These new studies have broadened our understanding of late nineteenthcentury feminism, shifting the focus away from women’s suffrage narrowly defined and toward a range of other issues—women’s employment , higher education, marriage and the family, and sexuality and social purity. Among other things, this new scholarship has shown that religious concerns played a significant part in feminist culture.2 But many historians remain reluctant to take seriously the spiritual content of nineteenth-century feminism. It is a historical truism that the Victorians and their successors believed motherhood to be a sacred vocation, and women’s special excellence to lie in their moral and spiritual superiority. But in most cases, these concepts are invoked only to underscore the gulf between prescriptive ideology and the realities of women’s lives. To this end, for example, Susan Kingsley Kent quotes Mona Caird’s Hadria, the heroine of Daughters of Danaus (1894): “It is such insolence to talk to us—good heavens, to us!—about holiness and sacredness.”3 For feminist critics like Caird, who was a member of the TS from 1904 to 1909 and a contributor to G. R. S. Mead’s Quest magazine, “holiness and sacredness” were not hackneyed platitudes. Caird took men to task for presuming to instruct women on a subject on which women were the true experts; “holiness and sacredness” were, she suggested, far more than mere words to women. Women like Caird were not simply paying lip service to the evangelical legacy of women’s moral superiority and spiritual mission, nor were they using a religious vocabulary to express other kinds of political concerns.4 Where spiritual rhetoric is recognized on its own terms (that is, as making an explicitly spiritual claim), it is too often read unproblemati- the divine hermaphrodite 153 cally as a conservative appeal to Christian orthodoxy. There was no shortage of texts invoking Christianity’s claims to absolute truth. But this was not the only influence, or even a dominant influence, within feminist culture in the late nineteenth century. Orthodox Christianity is itself a problematic concept, given the theological uproar of the time. And a too easy conflation of women’s religiosity with that orthodoxy erases the considerable work that contemporary feminists did to reshape Christian and other faiths to their own ends. The effort to articulate a specifically feminist spirituality was a crucial part of much feminist activity in England during this period, and a fuller exploration of the spiritual concerns within the feminism of the 1890s yields a richer and more varied picture than is otherwise available. At the same time, we must recognize that much of the rhetoric about women’s spirituality was founded on the assumption of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and imperial destiny, of class hierarchy, and of the immutability of sexual difference. As women (and some men) struggled to create a feminist culture, they also negotiated its limits. There was a great deal of debate about whether and on what terms less privileged women—colonized women, working-class women, or women engaged in prostitution, for example—were to be incorporated into a feminism informed by notions of women’s spirituality. These debates helped shape the visions of women’s spirituality that emerged within English feminist culture. From the mid-nineteenth century, a range of individuals and organizations in England had begun to address different aspects of women’s inequality. Some, like the women of the Langham Place group, sought to increase women’s employment and educational opportunities, especially in new professions like teaching and office work. Through the English Woman’s Journal they helped open public debate on a range of issues relating to women.5 Feminist efforts to reform marriage and divorce law were accompanied by a wider critique of men’s behavior within marriage, a critique that spilled onto the pages of the popular press in 1888, when the Daily Telegraph received twenty-seven thousand letters to the editor in response to an article...

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