Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

It must always appear a curious and an unfortunate circumstance that at the time of the great industrial awakening in England in the last half of the eighteenth century, when men, women, and children were losing their individuality and becoming mere industrial units, representing so many pounds of human energy to be added to a machine, the women and children of the factories and of the hovels of the factory towns cried piteously to the Church for bread and received but a stone. And this was at a time when the social needs were so great and the sympathies of all other classes seemed to be alienated by diversity of interest from those who were called upon to toil for the making of England's wealth. Professor Thorold Rogers, the painstaking and acute investigator of England's industry, says with regard to the lethargy which constituted a veritable Dark Age for the English Church: "It is hard indeed to see what there is to relieve the darkness of the picture which the Anglican Church presents from the death of Queen Anne to the time of the Evangelical Revival. Over against the Anglican Church, formal, jealous of laymen, fearful of schism or irregularity, should be set the nonconformist churches." Although there was a great deal of religious enthusiasm in the religious communities of the Commonwealth, the principal branches of the Protestant nonconformists soon became wedded to their own systems, and, in a way, as narrow in their application of the principles of the New Testament as the church from which they had separated. It was not until the last quarter of the seventeenth century that a movement began which opened the way to lines of development which have been going on ever since. The vast number of present-day religious societies, whether in direct connection with the Church or outside of its pale, may be traced in some ways to the period just before and during the reign of William III.

Then arose societies for the reformation of manners in all parts of the kingdom. These societies represented the early stirring of the spirit of reform which found its expression in so many forms of activity in later times. They resembled somewhat the modern societies for the correction of social evils, such as societies for the prevention of vice, or societies for preventing the corrupting of the youth. It was all done under the impulse of religion, but was not initiated by the Church; it was a lay movement. The first distinctively women's movements in religious matters were outside of the Church. The great preacher Whitfield attracted the attention of the Countess of Huntingdon, whose drawing rooms were thrown open for his preaching and were filled by fashionable auditors. Other titled women joined the countess, and among them was the famous Duchess of Marlborough. The interest of noblewomen in a movement essentially plebeian has its parallel in the nineteenth century, when the Salvation Army enlisted the interest and support of women of rank and title.

The attitude of the countess in her loyal support of the new evangelical movement brought her under the criticism that is always encountered by a zeal which is not understood by people generally. The Duchess of Buckingham wrote to her: "I thank your Ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your Ladyship should relish any sentiments so at variance with high rank and good breeding." The Countess of Suffolk on one occasion was so incensed at a sermon of Whitfield in the Countess of Huntingdon's drawing room, that she rushed out of the house in a passion, under the impression that the discourse was a personal attack. The attitude of the clergy generally to the Methodist movement within the Church was one of indifference.

The suffering among the wives of the inferior clergy, who were impoverished and suffered under the defeat of the endeavor to make their scanty resources meet the demands of household expenses, the lack of opportunity for educating their children, and their own loss of self-respect, must have made their lives more miserable in some ways than those of the wives of the potters, whose sphere of existence and needs were much more limited. One of the clergymen of this order plaintively sets forth his pecuniary distress as follows: "Oh, my Lord, how prettily and temperately may a wife and half a dozen children be maintained with almost £30 per annum! What an handsome shift will an ingenious and frugal divine make, to take by turns and wear a cassock and a pair of breeches another! What a primitive sight it will be to see a man of God with his shoes out at the toes, and his stockings out at heels, wandering about in an old russet coat and tatter'd gown for apprentices to point at and wags to break jest on! And what a notable figure will he make in the pulpit on Sundays who has sent his Hooker and Stillingfleet, his Pearson and Saunderson, his Barrow and Tillotson, with many more fathers of the English Church, into limbo long since to keep his wife's pensive petticoat company, and her much lamented wedding ring!" Such a picture belongs rather to the latter part of the eighteenth century than to its beginning, for in its earlier days the Church was prolific of quiet scholars and antiquaries, in both parsonage and manse, living peaceful, comfortable, and cultured existences.

The attitude of the Church of the eighteenth century toward women is hardly one of record, as there was not enough animation or interest displayed in social conditions—or, indeed, during a part of the century, enough of intellectual comprehension—to serve the Church for any discrimination as to women's status. When the change of attitude of the Church in respect to its indifference toward that element of its body which before the Reformation, and continuously since then, has been so serviceably employed by the Roman Catholic Church did occur, it was the High Church party which brought it about, and so preserved for English Protestantism the work of women.

Although the Church was indifferent to the great mission that lay before it in the eighteenth century,—a mission that had to be met by the raising up from the laity of men and women who should stand for the spiritual rights of the lower orders of society especially,—there was a notable band of Christian philanthropic women who brightened the close of the century.

By harnessing human compassion to social needs, the distressed classes of society came to be lifted to that position of betterment which is theirs to-day, largely through agencies that owe their beginnings to the More sisters, Elizabeth Fry, and Harriet Martineau. It is always a pleasing task to turn to such women as these, exemplifying as they do the attainments of the sex in those peculiar and special ways which so well represent the adaptations of women. The greatest woman who graced the annals of helpfulness of the last half of the eighteenth century in England was Hannah More. The beautiful devotion of her long and honorable life to the cause of teaching, and the widespread interest which, by her writings, she attracted to the subject both in Europe and America, place her at the source of one of the mighty streams of pervasive influence that have ever permeated human society. So great was her appreciation of the character and the position of woman, that she was able to forecast well-nigh everything that has been enunciated in modern times with regard to the place of the sex in education and in society.

Hannah More was born in 1745, in a little village near Bristol. Her father, who was the village schoolmaster, gave his five daughters educations adapted as near as might be to the peculiar talents of each. Three of the girls opened a boarding school in Bristol, when the oldest was only twenty years of age. This school soon became fashionable and ultimately famous. It was to this institution that the early labors of Hannah More were given, and it was here that she attracted the attention of such men as Ferguson the astronomer, the elder Sheridan, Garrick the tragedian, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Burke, and indeed nearly all men of eminence in intellectual and state life. But her associations were not solely with the fashionable world, by which she was petted and flattered, for she turned her attention to labors for the poor and the ignorant. She sought to do for the children who lived amid the savage profligacy of the peasant class what Madame de Maintenon sought to do for girls of the aristocratic class in her country. Both alike aimed to offset the perversion of character which threatened the girls of their respective schools, from different sources, but to the same end,—their destruction. Madame de Maintenon worked to counteract the insidious infidelity that permeated the upper walks of life—Hannah More, to counteract the practical atheism of the lowest plane of life. The fundamental principle of her educational system was the necessity of Christian instruction. She recognized the close relationship of education and religion, and gauged well the significance of the historical fact of woman's debt to Christianity for her elevation. The question which she asked was not that of social utility, but that of personal character. She saw too much of the utilitarian principle in its actual workings, the reducing of human life to the plane of mechanism, to permit her to base her educational efforts upon a utilitarian foundation. She sought to cultivate that "sensibility which has its seat in the heart rather than in the nerves." Anything which detracted from modesty or delicacy, or tended to make a girl bold or forward, she severely rebuked. She taught the wastefulness of expending time upon the cultivation of a talent which one does not possess, and held that excessive cultivation of the æsthetic range of subjects contributes to a decline in those more stable factors upon which is based the security of states. Neither indelicate exposure of the person in style of dress nor extravagance in dancing found favor at her hands. Such were some of the views which were entertained and promulgated by the woman who created an epoch in the attitude of society toward her sex. She taught the dignity of womanhood, from which the duties of domesticity cannot detract, the performance of them as a function of womankind being of all things honorable. The pure common sense of Hannah More did for the women of her time the service which had failed of performance by the Church.

Passing from the theoretical to the practical part of Hannah More's work, it is interesting to see her putting into effect her philanthropic labors. The people among whom she labored were destitute of almost everything that makes life comfortable. Among the Mendip Hills, out from Bristol, lived a wild, barbarous, lawless population, compared with which the millers and the colliers of the mines were mild and tractable. Among these people Hannah More established her schools. Some of the children had already had the schooling of the prison, and all of them had been tutored in vice beyond comprehension for persons so young. Hannah More's schemes were regarded by many as visionary and impracticable, and received opposition from sources where sympathy and helpfulness were to be expected. Gradually, however, her school work was extended until it covered an area of twenty-eight miles.