Brief observation on an elephant: Victorian feminism and religion

I'm not "in" Women's Studies per se, although I spent a couple of years on my college's Women's Studies Board, so I cannot speak to what's going on in the average WS classroom.  These two posts at Feministe, however, gave me some pause: would it even be possible to think about the history of feminist activism without integrating it with religious belief? Both Fatemeh and Natalia Antonova are writing about contemporary feminist experience, which is fine, but certainly within my limited frame of scholarly reference (the UK), feminism cannot be conceptualized apart from religion.  And these religious beliefs operated in completely unpredictable ways.  One might predict that  Mary Wollstonecraft would be a feminist, but what about a very orthodox Anglican like Mary Astell--whose feminism was thoroughly grounded in spiritual as well as philosophical convictions?   On my home turf, the feminists associated with the Langham Place Group are a remarkably mixed theological bag, ranging from Catholic converts like Adelaide Anne Procter to ex-evangelical (but still devout) Christians like Emily Davies to outright freethinkers like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.  (Procter and Bessie Rayner Parkes show just how unpredictably faith commitments acted on feminist beliefs: Catholicism did not slow Procter's activism, but it appears to have entirely short-circuited Bessie Rayner Parkes'.)  Outside of the LPG, there are evangelical feminists like Josephine Butler, existing alongside the atheists like Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy.  Similarly, as I noted a couple of posts ago, religious radicalism didn't necessarily translate into feminism, as the varyingly problematic instances of George Eliot (whose feminism is the subject of never-ending debate...), Eliza Lynn Linton (very not feminist), and Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward (anti-suffrage campaigner) indicate.  Specialists in medieval and early modern history could no doubt go on at greater length.  The point being that all and no religious belief systems provided both feminists and anti-feminists with the intellectual resources to theorize women's social position; from a historical POV, talking about an infinitely complicated subject like religion in terms of praise or blame doesn't yield especially useful results. 

Comments

[Scott]

Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 did a show about feminism a few weeks ago that touched on your points (especially on Linton and Ward). You can still grab a streaming version of it off the site. Interesting show.

[servetus]

Even people who are supposed to know about this historic connection are ignorant, cf. nancy Fraser's recent essay in _The Future of Gender_, where she writes, "feminists have not succeeded in understanding what it is [religion's attraction for women] and how it works. Nor have we figured out how to talk to them or what feminism can offer them in its place" (29), as if no feminists were ever religious. It's so annoying to anyone who knows anything about anything that happened before 1975...

[Brandon Watson]

Very true (and Astell's a great example for your point, because Astell is well-and-away more religiously conservative than most people would expect). Even Wollstonecraft's feminism gives religion an essential, if very much secondary, place; for all her distaste for fanaticism, she argues in a number of places that religion, consisting of at least belief in God and hope in eternal happiness, is essential to healthy society, and shows herself in a number of others to be suspicious of certain kinds of deists and freethinkers, whom she sees as dangerous to society and especially to the position and happiness of women in society. I doubt that most people today, going simply on Wollstonecraft's religious views, which are liberal in the sense of being 'broad' but very conservative in a number of other ways, would be able to predict the character of her feminism.