Routledge Revivals: The British Christian Women's Movement (2002)

A Rehabilitation of Eve

Jenny Daggers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815348450
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351166980
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The British Christian Women's Movement charts the British Christian women's movement and its inception in the post-sixties decades, amid new currents generated in the British denominational churches, and the wider current of Women's Liberation. Focusing on Christian women's concern with the position of women in the church, this book identifies core Christian women's theology which affirms a (rehabilitated) 'new Eve in Christ', and contrasts with a paradigm shift taking shape in North American feminist theology. It argues that this divergence is primarily because of the effect of prolonged Church of England women's ordination debates upon the ethos of the British Christian women's movement.

Chapter 1

Eve and Spiritual Womanhood, 1800–1960

This chapter sets the stage for our exploration of the rehabilitation of Eve in the British Christian women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The dynamics of the relationship between Eve and Christian women, in the years between 1800 and 1960, illuminate aspects of post-1960 concern with the position of women in the churches. Here we investigate Owenite and Miltonic antecedents to the Christian women’s Eve, in relation to cultural conceptualisations of femininity during the period 1800-1960. In particular, by locating Eve in relation to ‘first-wave’ feminism, and to the position of women in the churches, we can pinpoint strands, which are continued into the post-1960 period.

In later chapters, these strands are relevant in one of two ways. They may be either reinvigorated, or subject to a decisive challenge. As we will discover, reinvigorated strands were significant in the post-1960 Christian women’s movement. Conversely, analysis here illuminates the nature of the decisive challenge to other ongoing strands which, is also important in the life of the post-1960 Christian women’s movement.

Returning to our immediate task, here we unravel an explanation for the appearance of Eve in her respective Owenite and Miltonic forms, and for her subsequent vanishing, only to reappear in the post-1960 (Christian) women’s movement. As will become clear, while (post-1960) reinvigorated strands are marked by the absence of Eve, decisive challenge to older strands is marked by her reappearance.

There are six distinct aspects to our investigation. We find a significant antecedent for the post-1960s rehabilitation of Eve in the secularising feminist Eve of Owenism. Then we turn to a second antecedent, the Miltonic Eve of Paradise Lost. The crucial part played by the Miltonic Eve in Victorian constructions of femininity – epitomised by the ‘Angel in the house’ – becomes clear. The Miltonic Eve thus contradicted – even erased – the effect of the Owenite rehabilitation of Eve.

During the Victorian and early twentieth century hegemony of spiritual womanhood, Eve vanishes from our sight. The reason for her disappearance is that spiritual womanhood effects a rehabilitation of Eve by her restoration to good repute, in which the connection is severed between morally superior woman, and morally inferior Eve. Through the Victorian female civilising mission, spiritual womanhood exceeded its prior domestic confinement. Significantly, in the consequent expanded scope of women’s lives, the boundaries between spiritual womanhood and ‘first-wave’ feminism became blurred.

In consequence, we discover spiritual womanhood as the chosen vehicle of British ‘first-wave’ feminism after the 1840s, including early twentieth century ‘Church feminism’. Thus spiritual womanhood, rather than any attempted ‘vindication of the woman Eve’, became the watchword of British ‘first-wave’ feminism.

Next, we see that spiritual womanhood – with its associated construction of women as asexual – continued to act as vehicle for the sexuality debates which began in the 1860s, so perpetuating assumptions of a restricted, maternal and ‘spiritualised’ women’s sexuality within these debates. Eve’s absence endures, though she is implied in the figuration of ‘fallen women’ – prostitutes – as Magdalenes.

Finally, it is instructive to perceive post-1920 constructions of women’s sexuality within marriage as a form of ‘modified spiritual womanhood’, perpetuating notions of ‘spiritualised sexuality’, which emerged from the post-18608 sexuality debates, up until the cultural shift of the 1960s. Eve, as vanished and absent, is sustained in this conceptualisation.

Our task here is clearly focused on preparing the way for understanding the Christian women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Our chosen concerns are highlighted without attempting to do justice to the complexities of the historical span, 1800-1960. We begin with the pre-Victorian feminist Eve of Owenism, where we discover a significant antecedent of the post-1960s, Christian women’s rehabilitation of Eve.

The Owenite Feminist Eve

The ‘Rational Religion’ of Owenite socialism (Taylor, 1983:160) promoted the principle of co-operative relations in workplace and home during the 1830s and 1840s. In her study of the movement, Barbara Taylor’s choice of title, Eve and the New Jerusalem, bears testimony to the significance she attaches to the figure of Eve, for women caught up as leaders and followers within the loosely-organised movement of Owenism. When Taylor states that ‘Eve must organise to make the New Jerusalem’ (1983:182), she casts Eve as Everywoman within the Owenite movement.

Early nineteenth century Britain was marked by radical political activity, particularly in the cities. Within this ferment, Owenite socialism grew to prominence during the 1820s, becoming a working class movement from the late 1820s until its collapse in 1845 (Taylor, 1983:83).¹ Contemporary observers – both supporters and opponents of Owenism – reported the large numbers of women attending Owenite meetings (Taylor, 1983:57).² Taylor analyses the developments of the women’s rights tradition – given distinctive voice in 1792 in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women – within Owenism.³

Women preachers on socialist platforms, such as Eliza Sharpies, Margaret Chappellsmith, Eliza Macauley and Emma Martin, were schooled in the evangelical tradition but forsook Christianity for Owenism (Taylor, 1983:64, 129, 130-3). As Taylor states, ‘Revisions of the story of the Fall were popular’ in the secularising discourse of socialist freethought, where the Christian doctrine of original sin was rejected in favour of the dogma of human perfectability (1983:146).⁴ A feminist version of this widespread scriptural re-interpretation occurs in Eliza Sharpies’ address to a Rotunda⁵ audience in 1832, which exemplifies Eve as Everywoman within the socialist movement:

The tyrant God, Necessity, said to subject man: ‘Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat’. Sweet and fair liberty stepped in…spurned the order…of the tyrant, ‘she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat.’ Do you not, with one voice exclaim, well done woman! LIBERTY FOR EVER! If that was a fall, sirs it was a glorious fall, and such a fall as is now wanted…I will be such an Eve, so bright a picture of Liberty! (Quoted in Taylor, 1983:146).

In Sharpies’ feminist Eve, an alternative interpretation of the Genesis myth is put to the service of women’s emancipation. Sharpies’ words signify a British nineteenth century ‘vindication of the woman Eve’. Sharpies’ identification of herself with Eve joins the vindication of the rights of women with her vindication of the woman Eve. However, after the decline of Owenism, British ‘first-wave’ feminism was not primarily concerned with such a vindication of Eve – though this task was to be resumed in the Christian women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

There are two further aspects of Owenite socialism, which are relevant to the return of Eve in the 1970s Christian women’s movement. First, Owenism challenged the Pauline linkage between feminine virtue and women’s social dependency. This challenge was of central importance in the rejection of original sin in favour of the socialist New Jerusalem (Taylor, 1983:148). When Eliza Sharpies told her Rotunda audience that ‘St Paul forbade women to speak in churches, and they have held their tongues…[but] suppressed speech gathers into a storm’ (quoted in Taylor, 1983:128), her words have a resonance beyond her own secularising project. Both Taylor’s observation and Sharpies’ words make visible the parallel between this early nineteenth century British expression of feminist secularising freethought and the culmination of the American nineteenth century ‘vindication of the woman Eve’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Women’s Bible (1985 [1895]).

Second, in the envisaged New Jerusalem, which ‘Eve’ set out to construct, women and men were to live together in co-operation and equality, enjoying free (hetero)sexual relations outside the bonds of marriage (Taylor, 1983:37-48).⁶ From the 1830s, the churches mounted a counteroffensive against the secularising Rational Religion, which led to Owenite women preachers facing clergymen and ministers on public platforms. Emma Martin drew crowds of between two and three thousand to such debates, often gaining the better of her clerical opponents (Taylor, 1983:140). However, as Owenism declined, the clerical opposition effectively won the contest Owenite women preachers were successfully discredited on grounds of sexual impropriety: the crowds, which had once applauded Emma now subjected her, and Margaret Chappellsmith, to clerically-induced attack and verbal abuse as witch, she-devil and whore (Taylor, 1983:152-3). As Taylor observes, Martin’s tracts were ‘far from being libertine’ but her advocacy of ‘Nature’s chastity’⁷ against the ‘slave market’ of conventional Christian marriage (1983:148), ‘automatically placed [her] outside the pale of respectable womanhood’ (1983:153).

Thus Eve as ‘bright picture of Liberty’ was eclipsed in the demise of Owenism in the 1840s. Early in the twentieth century, in her socialist feminist text, Women and Labour, Olive Schreiner refigures the Genesis myth, her words resonating with those spoken by Sharpies, nearly eighty years before:

We also have our dream of a Garden: but it lies in the distant future. We dream that women shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with men, and that …they shall together raise about them …an Eden created by their own labour and made beautiful by their own fellowship (Schreiner, 1911:282).

Though Schreiner reiterates Sharpies’ constructive Eve, Eden replaces the Owenite New Jerusalem, and Eve no longer appears by name. Schreiner represents a development within the socialist feminist tradition that stretches forward from Owenism, but which exceeds the limits of our current concern in this book. With this fleeting reference to the secularising socialist project, we return to the 1840s, and to the reassertion of conventional forms of eighteenth century femininity. Here, a contrasting influence comes into play, as the stage is (re)assumed by our second antecedent to the Eve of the Christian women’s movement – the Miltonic Eve of Paradise Lost.

‘Milton’s Bogey’: the Legacy of Paradise Lost

Writing in 1929, Virginia Woolf declared, in A Room of One’s Own, that literate women must ‘look past Milton’s bogey’ (quoted in Gilbert and Gubar, 1979:187-8). Eve features large in Gilbert and Gubar’s explication of Woolf’s allusion to Milton. Thus they perceive that for Woolf, as for other women writers, Milton’s ‘inferior and Satanically inspired Eve’ – together with the author himself and his ‘favored creature’ Adam – ‘constitute the misogynistic essence of … patriarchal poetry’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979:188). Woolf’s cryptic reference demonstrates that – three decades into the twentieth century – the legacy of Paradise Lost bore upon her identity as a woman writer. Here, I examine the effects of Milton’s powerful restatement of the traditional interpretation of the Genesis myth upon nineteenth century women.

My own interest is less in the particular predicament of the nineteenth century woman writer than in the more general effects of ‘Milton’s bogey’. In his Letters to a Young Lady, published in 1789, the Reverend John Bennett recommended Paradise Lost to his addressees as valuable reading, as the poem ‘places before them a picture of Eve who reveres her husband before whom she feels herself annihilated and absorbed’ (quoted in Gill, 1994:17). Whether or not the young ladies concerned heeded his advice, his recommendation encapsulates the effect of Milton’s legacy, which I wish to investigate here.

Nineteenth century women’s literature holds some clues. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley depicts, in Shirley’s imagination, a titanic Eve who ‘kneeling face to face … speaks with God. That Eve is Jehovah’s daughter, as Adam was his son’ (Brontë, 1974 [1849]:316). Thus Brontë, in literary form, creates an alternative for contemporary women, to Bennett’s (desired) annihilating effect of the Milton’s Genesis myth. In this respect, Brontë’s titanic Eve is closer to the Owenite Eve than to the strategies of many other nineteenth century women writers, in their dealings with the Miltonic Eve.

As one example, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, through the character of Dorothea Brooke, makes a more typical réprochement with Milton. The epigraph to chapter three, taken from Paradise Lost (Eliot, 1962 [1871]:34), gives the clue to Dorothea’s implied identification with Eve in her seeking counsel from the archangel, or Casaubon, who may be seen as Milton personified. Dorothea is then placed in similar relation to Casaubon as Milton’s three wives and daughters to Milton. By taking on the role of dutiful wife, daughter and pupil – ‘an admiring Eve waiting to be instructed’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979:217) – Dorothea seeks the core of truth in terms of Casaubon’s [and Milton’s] mastery of classics and theology – as epitomised in Paradise Lost. Even Dorothea’s passionate philanthropic zeal over new housing for the poor might be called into question, as it does not originate from such classical learning. In short, Eliot portrays in Dorothea the predicament of nineteenth century women, which I seek to highlight.

My concern is with Paradise Lost as a powerful expression of post-Reformation Protestant consciousness, in its attempted compensation for the effects of the new absence of Catholic mariology from the cultural construction of femininity. Once again, Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis is instructive, in their attention to the disassociation of woman into the figures of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’, in Milton’s myth of origins. Thus as Milton’s Satan dwindles from angel to serpent, so too his Eve ‘is gradually reduced from an angelic being to a monstrous and serpentine creature’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979:196). Crucially for my argument, Gilbert and Gubar observe that this male-generated, Miltonic Eve is both the primary monster – assertive and aggressive as befits a male life of ‘significant action’ – and the rationale for the angel in her ‘contemplative purity’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979:28).

The angel/monster dichotomy evidently mirrors its Catholic theological equivalent, the Mary/Eve pair. Where in Catholic theology, Mary plays the ‘angel’ to Eve’s ‘monster’, in the Protestant Miltonic Eve these contradictory qualities are combined within the annihilated Protestant wife, absorbed in adoring and reverent domestic subservience. Given Eve’s monstrosity, any self-initiated projects – even philanthropic new housing for the poor – must be treated with suspicion. Woman’s angelic potential can be realised in domestic subservience alone.

But Milton’s contradictory Eve is too difficult. When Coventry Patmore coined the phrase ‘The Angel in the House’ for his reflections upon ideal Victorian femininity (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979:22-3, 28-9), he reserved the term, ‘Daughter of Eve’ for the failing angel alone: woman’s serpentine cunning is constructively integrated within angelic fulfilment of the needs of husband and children. As long as women look for the rehabilitation of Eve’s monstrosity through restoration to angelic good repute, the connection between Eve and woman becomes severed and Eve consequently fades from view. By the time of the social purity debates in the 1860s, the severance between Eve and woman was so strong that even prostitutes – those archetypical fallen angels – were referred to, in New Testament terms, as Magdalenes rather than, in terms of the Genesis myth, as daughters of Eve.

Gilbert and Gubar comment that, as a consequence of women’s definition within patriarchal mythology ‘as created by, from and for men’ (1979:12), women writers who journey towards literary autonomy ‘must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of “angel” and “monster” which male authors have generated for her’ (1979:17). Their imperative is instructive concerning the project of the Christian women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s: the post-1970 rehabilitation of Eve can be understood as just such an attempt to transcend the angel/monster extremes.

For this claim to be comprehensible, we need to explain how the monstrous Eve is absorbed within the ‘Angel in the House’ and thus disappears from view by the middle of the nineteenth century. The key lies in the reassertion of eighteenth century constructions of femininity in terms of spiritual womanhood, following the radical ferment in the early decades of the century. We next turn to this Victorian undertaking, proceeding in three steps. First, we analyse the Victorian reassertion of eighteenth century notions of spiritual womanhood – with the associated eclipse of Eve – and the related expansion of women’s spiritual influence beyond the home, arguing that spiritual womanhood provided a vehicle for the interrelated means of this expansion: evangelicalism,⁸ philanthropy and feminism.

Second, we establish that spiritual womanhood was therefore the vehicle for early twentieth century ‘Church feminism’, as well as for antecedent nineteenth century developments in women’s position within the churches. Third, we analyse the effects of women’s assumed asexuality in the sexuality debates – along with those of the continuing vehicle of spiritual womanhood – culminating in notions of a ‘sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Glossary of Abbreviations (including CWIRES Serials)
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Eve and Spiritual Womanhood, 1800-1960
• 2 An Overview of the Christian Women’s Movement
• 3 Eve and Christian Women’s Consciousness
• 4 Eve and Christian Women’s Activity
• 5 Eve and Christian Women’s Theology
• 6 The Rehabilitation of Eve on a Wider Stage: Eve and Feminist Theology
• Conclusion
• Appendices:
• Bibliography
• Bibliography (CWIRES)
• Index