PIETY AND SPIRITUALITY

Piety was the pivot of a woman's identity in nineteenth century Europe. ‘To be a good wife is a high attainment in female excellence', wrote the Bishop of Birmingham in the 1860s; ‘it is woman's brightest glory since the fall.'⁵⁷ Religious discourses on womanhood in the nineteenth century excel in their ability to idealise ‘true femininity'.

The place of religion, both the institutions of the churches and the role of religious discourses, in the lives of European women throughout the century must not be underestimated. It is easy from the perspective of the secular twenty-first century to either disregard the central importance of religion or to see it as a universal oppressor of women. The church was a patriarchal institution which not only excluded women from its structures of power, but also served to legitimise female oppression in society as a whole by means of ideological constraints such as the ‘cult of true womanhood' which purportedly confined women to domesticity and submissiveness.⁶⁰ In the words of Barbara Taylor: ‘once God had settled in the parlour, Mammon had free range in public life', an interpretation which sees the feminisation of religion as a legitimator of separate spheres.⁶¹ Historians have tended to interpret Christian principles acting as a constraint on more progressive feminist goals.

In the nineteenth century there was a discernible change in the ways in which woman's relationship with religion was constructed. Since women had always been marginalised within the institutions of the Christian church, their spirituality was inevitably a more private, personal affair, practised within the ‘holy household', informing women's everyday devotion to virtue. But piety in the early modern period was a male rather than a female virtue. When the sixteenth-century German poet Hans Sachs wrote of piety as ‘obedient and humble, subservient, fair, true and gracious', he was talking about a set of ideal characteristics to be displayed not by the pious woman, but by the man.⁶³ But around the beginning of the nineteenth century piety was feminised and religion became woman's sphere. Not only was church­going and observance of religious ritual in Catholic and Protestant churches dominated by women — this was in any case not such a startling change — but the religious construction of the good or godly woman ‘transcended the negative stereotypes of the weaker vessel'.⁶⁴ The privileging of women as the pious sex could be either confining or enabling for women; it could restrict opportunities but it could also give women the power to use their exalted role within the family and in the wider community. Piety was thus presented as a state of being for women, an attitude of mind which found expression in everyday matters.

Simultaneous with this more positive construction of female piety which gave women an elevated position in the hierarchy of spirituality, was the feminisation of church ritual and the rising popularity of religious orders and female activities organised around the church or informed by Christian principles. Women began to see the church and religion as a positive force in their lives. In turn, the church hierarchies were forced to negotiate with women to allow them greater power within the broader structures of the church. Feminine piety was enabling as well as constraining; it was an ideo­logy that women took ownership of and used for the good of themselves and of others.

There is no disputing the feminisation of popular religion in nineteenth­century Europe whichever measure one uses. In France, Belgium and Spain the number of nuns increased dramatically in the nineteenth century; indeed, in France the numbers increased from 12,000 at the start of the century to 135,000 in 1878.⁶⁵ By the end of the century women's attendance at mass and at Easter Communion across France outnumbered that of men, sometimes massively. In some urban dioceses it was rare to encounter a man taking Easter Communion at all.⁶⁶ Similarly, women formed around two-thirds of Protestant congregations in Berlin.⁶⁷ In west London in 1902—3 more than two-thirds of morning and evening worshippers at Church of England ser­vices were female.⁶⁸ Sunday was a special day for women when they proudly attended church wearing their ‘Sunday best', displaying their femininity and their piety in their clothing. Girls went to church looking their most feminine with the young ‘brides of Christ' at first Catholic communion exemplifying pious and virginal femininity in their white wedding dresses. Within the dis­senting churches in Britain women also took a prominent role: Unitarianism, Methodism, the Quakers and the Salvation Army provided women with a spiritual space where they could develop a practical piety as female pre­achers or as lay evangelists and charity workers.

After 1800 the churches became increasingly a women's domain. Further­more, women played the key role in determining the religious habits of the family as a whole. They were responsible for children's prayers, Sunday School attendance and informal moral education. It was women who main­tained the cycle of religious rituals in the family, observing the religious festivals and organising lifecycle events such as weddings, christenings, con­firmation and first Communion. For some women, sacred rituals defined the contours of their lives. Jewish immigrant women became ‘potent symbols of piety'; it was they who bore responsibility for the religious household through the ritual of festivals and preparation of kosher food. In London and Manchester, as the importance of the synagogue declined, especially for men, religious observance became the task of women in the home.⁷¹ Amongst the Catholic middle classes of northern France, women's frequent attend­ance at mass, the taking of Holy Communion, regular ceremonies, retreats, pilgrimages and services, as well as daily domestic rituals such as saying grace at meals, adorning the household with statues of the Virgin and the wearing of crosses, endowed their lives with a sacred significance.⁷² Religion became a female culture in the nineteenth century which, in many ways, increasingly excluded men.

In both Protestant and Catholic parts of Europe, women's historians have interpreted the feminisation of religion partly as an organic development whereby women increasingly stayed with the churches as men fell away or became passive believers, and partly as the result of the flourishing of dis­courses on morality, piety and femininity. Both involved women as active agents. In Catholic Europe, what is known as the Marian revival of the nineteenth century, contributed to an atmosphere in which women might lay claim to a certain degree of power within the church. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary seen by girls and women are a distinctive feature of the nine­teenth century with the most celebrated, Bernadette Soubirous' vision of the Immaculate Conception at Lourdes in 1858, merely the tip of an iceberg. Indeed, hundreds ofMarian apparitions were reported by women and children across Europe in this period, but the prominence of visions of the Virgin and the predominance of female visionaries contrasts the nineteenth century with earlier times. For these girls and women, most of whom were poor and often motherless, the Virgin offered ‘emotional balm' and consolation in their troubles. But she also bestowed power on the visionaries who became the centre of attention, messengers of the Divine and conduits of miracle cures. The status of visionary, writes David Blackbourn in respect of the apparitions at Marpingen in Germany, ‘was a resource of the weak, a means of escape'; but also ‘the drama of the apparition' offered a ‘veiled means of protest against real or imagined ill-treatment'.⁷⁴ Indeed, the ambivalent reac­tion of the local clergy to reports of apparitions in their diocese indicates their concern, not only to suppress ‘superstition' but to maintain clerical con­trol in the face of spontaneous mass devotion inspired by young women.

In her study of the industrial bourgeoisie of northern France, Bonnie Smith interprets women's wholehearted embrace of mystical religion as a rejection of science and progress: ‘The mathematical explanation of life pro­posed by modern science appeared as a patent fatuity to the visibly bleeding, swelling, pained women of the nineteenth century.'⁷⁷ For these women, as much as for the labouring women who reported Marian apparitions and the women who went on pilgrimages to shrines such as Lourdes to obtain cures, religion has been interpreted as a ‘corrective to the excessive rationalism and individualism of the new industrial era' represented by those men who embraced industrialism and with it secularism.⁷⁸ But this interpretation of female spirituality as backward, as a protest against the new order which consigned them to the margins, or as a superstitious practice in the face of rationalism, fails to recognise the centrality of religion to women's identities. Women who found solace in the spiritual were more a sign of the times than a remnant of the past. Female visionaries such as Joanna Southcott and others like her who claimed to be the ‘woman Clothed in the sun' spoken of in the Old Testament book of Revelations were millenarian prophets disillusioned with the prosaic religious practice of sermons and meetings and to some extent frustrated by the female domestic role. This was most clearly expressed in the case of British visionary Dorothy Gott who renounced housework for the work of the soul.⁷⁹ For industrial wives and for the poor visionaries, piety was not an old heirloom, it was a way of life. Religion provided the moral framework and the ritual for everyday occurrences. It remained vital precisely because it maintained and reinforced the virtues associated with femininity and it legitimised woman's domestic role.

In Protestant countries, then, as well as in Catholic and Orthodox ones, religion increasingly became something that women did and men often tried to avoid. Femininity and religiosity seemed, to some, to go hand in hand. The girls in one Berlin confirmation class were, according to their preacher, ‘more faithful, more eager and warmer in the love of the Lord. With feminine tenderness they have used their talents and multiplied them a hundredfold.' In contrast to the boys' class, the girls were like ‘a breath of fresh air', owing to the ‘faithful application and the undiminished tenderness and receptivity with which the girls of all social classes listened to the word of grace and truth.'⁸⁰ Evangelical religions also placed a great deal of emphasis on the home and the importance of the pious mother who was to be relied upon to inculcate the next generation with moral values.⁸¹ According to Jane Rendall, ‘the dynamic evangelistic Christianity of the nineteenth century... exalted what were seen as [women's] essential qualities, defining their own sphere more clearly [and] offering a limited but positive role in the move­ment itself.'⁸² Piety was a way of life which encompassed both personal devotion and public action. Indeed, the privileging of female piety meant that the latter was seen by women as a natural consequence of their individual spirituality. Increasingly, women who regarded their religious selves as their essential selves sought opportunities to demonstrate their piety outwith the home. Catholic women might enter a religious order as a means of combin­ing the two, although in France the more open congreganiste model of religious community which allowed religious women an active role in the community through teaching or nursing was more popular than the enclosed religieuse model.⁸³ The shift away from the contemplative orders clearly mirrors the trend within the church and society towards recognising women's superior role in imparting a moral message to others. Active Protestant women were always more likely to find a public outlet for their religious inspiration. Within the Protestant tradition, mythology was replaced by an idealised imaginary figure: she who established an intimate, personal relationship with God, a guardian of the faith, a moral influence on her family but by extension wider society also. ‘The Bible gives her her throne, for she is the queen of the domestic circle... it is the female supremacy in that interesting domain, where love and tenderness, and refinement, thought and feeling preside', wrote John Angell James in his ‘Female Piety' in 1852.8⁴ In Hamburg, Amalie Sieveking's establishment in 1832 of the Female Association for the Care of the Poor and the Sick was an attempt to combine spiritual and moral aid to the poor of that city.⁸⁵ Across Britain women found an outlet for their piety as teachers within the burgeoning Sunday School movement and women's temperance associations, devoted to the fight against alcohol and its pernicious consequences, can be seen as women exporting their Christian principles into the world. Only women could exemplify that combination of moral good and Christian endeavour. And women became prominent as home and overseas missionaries carrying Christian female virtue to the ‘heathens' of the cities and the empire.⁸⁶ These women became exemplars of pious womanhood rather than exceptional, independent women carving out a space within the public sphere.

Religion, then, was central to women's lives in nineteenth-century Europe in ways that differed from previous eras. Women were given an exalted role, not within institutional religion but as everyday bearers of the faith and as moral icons. It was a difficult role to play, conferring on women responsibil­ity for not just their own behaviour but also that of others. Undoubtedly there were many ways in which religious discourses on the pious woman or godly wife and mother constrained women's behaviour and opportunities. Nevertheless, what has been called the privileging of women's religiosity has been seen by some feminist historians as providing women with a sense of moral identity for themselves as well as a space and a language they could use to extend their moral influence beyond the personal, outside the home. Religion was not just a leisure activity for women, as some historians have suggested. Christian charitable endeavours were not just time-fillers for bored middle-class ladies. Religion was work requiring constant self-appraisal. In this sense the pious woman claimed for herself a privileged place in the family and in society. In the words of one German feminist and educator, Henriette Goldschmidt: ‘Just as the moral strength of women is essential to the development of family life, in the same way, women must make a wider commitment to fulfil their mission to the national family.'⁸⁷