‘We do not wish to be sofa cushions, or even props to men, but we wish to work by their side’: celebrating women as popular educators at the Anglican Church congresses 1881–1913

ABSTRACT

The Anglican Church congresses sought to foster relations between clergy and lay people. They promoted the Church as part of the social fabric of the nation with parades, civic receptions, services and public talks. Women were a presence at the congresses as platform speakers, organisers, hostesses and members of the audience. Congresses provided opportunities for informal collaborations and networking between organisations including the National Union of Women Workers, Mothers’ Union and Girls’ Friendly Society.  Dedicated women’s sections from 1881 provided a space that was exploited by women activists seeking a voice in the public sphere. The congresses reflected a context of increasing professionalisation amongst women. This article celebrates the contribution made by women in the role of popular educators via congress platforms between 1882 and 1913. In addition, the article seeks to commemorate the unvoiced presence of working class women who engaged with the congresses as members of the audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• popular education
• church congresses
• Anglican

Notes

¹ Louise Creighton, ‘What Women can do to Raise the Standard of Moral Life’, in Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Exeter, on October 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th, 1894 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1894), 245.

² See Simon Morgan, A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007).

³ Alejandro Tiana Ferrer, ‘The Concept of Popular Education Revisited – or What Do We Talk About When We Speak of Popular Education’, Paedagogica Historica 47, nos. 1–2 (2011): 27.

⁴ Sjaak Braster, ‘The People, the Poor, and the Oppressed: The Concept of Popular Education through Time’, Paedagogica Historica 47, nos. 1–2 (2011): 1–14.

⁵ David Wardle, English Popular Education, 1780–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). However, the role of women as educators through philanthropy is not given attention.

⁶ John Hurt, Education in Evolution Church, State, Society and Popular Education 1800–1870 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971).

⁷ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Shrewsbury, on October 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th, 1896 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1896).

⁸ George Henry Sumner, Address at the Church Congress in Hull 1890, Mothers’ Union, Lambeth Palace Library MU/MSS.2/1/3.

⁹ Susan Mumm, ‘Women and Philanthropic Cultures’, in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800–1940, ed. Sue Morgan and Jacqueline de Vries (London: Routledge, 2010), 54–71; Harold Silver, ‘Knowing and Not Knowing in the History of Education’, History of Education 21, no. 1 (1992): 97–108.

¹⁰ Sara Delamont, ‘The Contradictions in Ladies’ Education’, in The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World, ed. Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 134–63. ‘The Domestic Ideology and Women’s Education’, in The Nineteenth-Century Woman, 164–87.

¹¹ Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness; the Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 35; Frank Turner, ‘The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith that was Lost’, in Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 9–38. For extensive treatment of this see also Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church Part 2 1860–1901, 2nd ed. (London: A. & C. Black, 1972).

¹² Frances Knight, The Nineteenth Century Church and English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Michael Chandler, An Introduction to the Oxford Movement (New York: Church Publishing, 2003).

¹³ Mumm, ‘Women and Philanthropic Cultures’.

¹⁴ Frank Prochaska, The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Amanda Vickery, ‘“Golden Age to Separate Spheres”: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, in Gender and History in Western Europe, ed. Robert Shoemaker and Mary Vincent (London: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1998), 197–225.

¹⁵ Dale Spender, The Education Papers: Women’s Quest for Equality in Britain 1850–1912 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

¹⁶ See Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Joyce Goodman and Sylvia A. Harrop, Women, Educational Policy-Making and Administration in England: Authoritative Women since 1800 (London: Routledge, 2000). In 1870, the First Married Women’s Property Act permited a married woman to retain £200 of her earnings. The Elementary School Act the same year permited women ratepayers to vote for and serve on elected school boards. In 1875 women were permitted to serve as poor law guardians. In 1882 the Second Married Women’s Property Act allowed a married women to own all forms of property and her earnings. In 1884 women acquired independent legal status.

¹⁷ Joyce F. Goodman, ‘Girls’ Public Day School Company (Act. 1872–1905)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), http://www.oxforddnd.com/view/theme/94164, (accessed August 28, 2017).

¹⁸ ‘The Church Congress’ Carlisle Patriot, February 4, 1887.

¹⁹ Louise Creighton, Memoir of a Victorian Woman: Reflections of Louise Creighton 1850–1936 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 112. Louise was married to Mandell (1843–1901), Bishop of Peterborough 1891 and London 1897.

²⁰ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Hull on September 30th, and October 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 1890 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1890), vi.

²¹ The adoption of the MU as a diocesan organisation following Mary Sumner’s platform speech at the Portsmouth congress was instigated at a social gathering. Mary Porter, Mary Woodward and Horatia Erskine, Mary Sumner: Her Life and Work and a Short History of the Mothers’ Union (Winchester: Warren & Sons, 1921), 21.

²² Lady Laura Ridding, ‘Diaries’, in Selborne Papers (Hampshire Record Office). September 25, 1897, 28.

²³ See for example: ‘Scenes at the Church Congress at Barrow’, Penny Illustrated (London), October 13, 1906, 229: ‘The Jubilee Church Congress at Ely’, The Graphic (London), October 1, 1910, 510.

²⁴ Morning Post (London), October 2, 1885.

²⁵ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Birmingham on October 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th, 1893 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1893), xxii. At Weymouth weekly tickets were seven shillings and sixpence; a family ticket for three, one guinea; day tickets were two shillings and sixpence; tickets for a women’s meeting were two shillings. At Newcastle-upon-Tyne working men were offered free entry to meetings.

²⁶ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Weymouth October 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th 1905 (London: Bemrose, 1905).

²⁷ London Evening Standard, October 8, 1881.

²⁸ Creighton, Memoir of a Victorian Woman, 122; Dunkley, Church Congress Exeter, vi.

²⁹ Charles Dunkley and Arthur Cayley Headlam, The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Nottingham on September 28th, 29th, 30th, & 1 October 1897 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1897), 489.

³⁰ Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, October 14, 1887.

³¹ ‘The Church Congress’, The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer (October 6, 1884).

³² Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Portsmouth: On October 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th, 1885 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1885), 448.

³³ The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, on September 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th, 1900 (London: Bemrose, 1900), 338; London Daily News, September 28, 1900, 6.

³⁴ ‘The Church Congress’, York Herald, October 9, 1886; ‘The Church Congress’, Western Times, October 12, 1886; The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Wakefield: On October 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th, 1886 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1886), 446; Ridding, ‘Diaries’, September 25, 1897.

³⁵ Morning Post, October 10, 1899.

³⁶ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Cardiff: On October 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, 1889 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1889), 235. Mrs Leith Adams was the pen name of Mrs R. F. De Courcy Laffan: see John Sutherton, Longman Companion to Victorian Literature (London: Routledge, 2009).

³⁷ Morgan, A Victorian Woman’s Place; ‘The Church Congress’, Birmingham Daily Post, October 9, 1893: ‘A large number of ladies on the platform’.

³⁸ Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1994), 15, 25, 125; Brian Heeney, The Women’s Movement in the Church of England, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 7–9.

³⁹ ‘I have no hesitation in declaring my full belief in the inferiority of woman nor that she brought it on herself.’ Charlotte M. Yonge, Womankind, 2nd ed. (London: Walter Smith & Innes, 1898), 1. Here Yonge is referring to ‘Adam was not deceived but the woman being deceived was in transgression’ (1 Timothy 2.14).

⁴⁰ The notion of capital deployed in this paper draws on Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). References to pedagogic authority are informed by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, rev. ed./preface to the 1990 edition by Pierre Bourdieu (London: Sage, 1990).

⁴¹ Jenny Daggers, ‘The Victorian Female Civilising Mission and Women’s Aspirations towards Priesthood in the Church of England’, Women’s History Review 10, no. 4 (2001): 651–70. Daggers uses the term ‘spiritual womanhood’ to encapsulate these qualities: chastity, piety, modesty, charity and attention to ‘home duties’.

⁴² See Susan Thorne, ‘Religion and Empire at Home’, in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonia O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 145. Thorne considers missionary intelligence a distinguishing feature of Victorian culture: ‘Victorians learned much of what they knew about empire in church’.

⁴³ Dunkley, Church Congress Hull, 261–6.

⁴⁴ Amongst her works were Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains with Illustrations (London: John Murray, 1879); Among the Tibetans ([s.l.]: Religious Tract Society, 1894) and Korea and Her Neighbours. A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country with Maps and Illustrations (London: John Murray, 1898).

⁴⁵ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at London on October 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th, 1899 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1899), 138.

⁴⁶ Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, September 28, 1900. The London Daily News, September 28, 1900 also describes Mrs Bishop’s speech and her demeanour.

⁴⁷ Dunkley, Church Congress Newcastle, 266.

⁴⁸ The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Derby: On October 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th, 1882 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1882), 569–73; Sue Morgan, A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the Politics of Gender in the Late-Victorian Church (Bristol: Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender, University of Bristol, 1999).

⁴⁹ Susan Mumm, All Saints Sisters of the Poor: An Anglican Sisterhood in the Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Church of England Record Society/Boydell Press, 2001). The first community, the Park Village Sisterhood, was founded in 1845. See also Susan Mumm, Making Space, Taking Space: Spatial Discomfort, Gender, and Victorian Religion, http://anglicanhistory.org/academic/mumm_space 2006.pdf Project Canterbury (accessed October 16, 2017).

⁵⁰ See Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church Part I 1827–1859 (London: A. & C. Black, 1966). For controversy over doctrinal interpretation accruing around the ‘High Church’ Tractarian movement and ‘Low Church’ interpretation and the consequent defections of high-profile Anglican clergy to Roman Catholicism, see Chadwick, The Victorian Church Part 2 1860–1901; and D. Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry Manning (London: Murray, 1966).

⁵¹ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Reading: On October 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th, 1883 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1883), 185, 313–23. p. 122.

⁵² Lambeth Conference 1897 resolution 11, http://www.anglicancommuniion.org/media/127725/1897.pdf (accessed March 3, 2018).

⁵³ Dunkley, Church Congress London, 137.

⁵⁴ Brian Heeney, ‘Women’s Struggle for Professional Work and Status in the Church of England 1900–1930’, Historical Journal 26, no. 2 (1983): 329–47; Knight, The Nineteenth Century Church, 197. Knight notes Harold Browne’s appointment of full-time stipendiary deaconess Fanny Elizabeth Eagles: ‘to seek out poor and impotent folk and intimate their names to the curate, instruct the young in school or otherwise, minister to those in hospitals and setting aside all unwomanly usurpation of authority in the church, should seek to edify the souls of Christ’s people in the faith’. E. H. Browne, Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Ely (London, 1869).

⁵⁵ Dunkley, Church Congress Reading, 156.

⁵⁶ The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Folkestone, on October 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th, 1892 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1892), 237. See also Memories of Deaconess Gilmore Collected By Deaconess Elizabeth Robinson (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1924); Project Canterbury http://anglicanhistory.org/women/gilmore1924/ (accessed September 28, 2017).

⁵⁷ Church Congress Exeter, 248–56.

⁵⁸ Record of Events at the Church Congress at Hull, English Woman’s Review, October 15, 1890.

⁵⁹ Church Congress London, 137, 138.

⁶⁰ George Sumner, ‘Speech to the Annual G.F.S. Diocesan Conference at the George Hotel Winchester’, Girls’ Friendly Society Associates Journal, January 1885. George was the husband of Mary Sumner, GFS activist and founder of the Mothers’ Union.

⁶¹ English Woman’s Review, ‘Record of Events Report of the Church Congress at Hull’, English Woman’s Review, October 15, 1890.

⁶² Gill, Women and the Church of England, 131–45.

⁶³ Porter, Woodward and Erskine, Mary Sumner: Her Life, 22; Dunkley, Church Congress Portsmouth, 448–9.

⁶⁴ Wardle, English Popular Education, 1780–1970, 81.

⁶⁵ Eileen Janes Yeo, ‘Some Paradoxes of Empowerment’, in Radical Femininity; Women’s Self Representation in the Public Sphere, ed. Eileen Janes Yeo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 9–17. See Sue Anderson-Faithful, ‘Aspects of Agency: Change and Constraint in the Activism of Mary Sumner, Founder of the Anglican Mothers’ Union’, Women’s History Review (July, 2017), doi: 10.1080/09612025.2017.1346865; For a history of the MU see Cordelia Moyse, A History of the Mothers’ Union: Women Anglicanism and Globalisation, 1876–2008 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009).

⁶⁶ Dunkley, Church Congress Hull, 256–260.

⁶⁷ Agnes Louisa Money, History of the Girls’ Friendly Society (London: Wells Gardner, Darton, 1902); Mary Heath-Stubbs, Friendships Highway: Being the History of the Girls’ Friendly Society (London: Girls’ Friendly Society, 1926); Dunkley, Church Congress Portsmouth, 156–9. Mr Townsend read a paper on the GFS written by his wife, the founder of the society.

⁶⁸ Congress speakers Mary Sumner, Augusta Maclagan, Louise Creighton and Emeline Francis Stendhal, as well as having MU and GFS affiliation, were also associated with Charlotte Mason’s Parents National Education Union. See Sue Anderson-Faithful, Mary Sumner, Mission, Education and Motherhood, Thinking a Life with Bourdieu (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2018).

⁶⁹ Dunkley, Church Congress Hull, 271–4, 276.

⁷⁰ The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Rhyl, October 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th, 1891 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1891), 389.

⁷¹ Church Congress Derby, 569–73. Hopkins repeated her talk, ‘The Legal and Social Position of Our Girls’, to an audience of women in a separate meeting; Morgan, A Passion for Purity.

⁷² Another speaker from the 1894 Church Congress, gynaecologist Mary Scharlieb, was also a commissioner. Mary Scharlieb, Reminiscences With Portrait, Etc. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1924). Scharlieb was the first woman to graduate as an MD from London University. She was a lunacy commissioner and also served as a magistrate from 1920.

⁷³ Creighton, Memoir of a Victorian Woman, 115.

⁷⁴ Dunkley, Church Congress Rhyl, 386.

⁷⁵ James Thane Covert, A Victorian Marriage: Mandell and Louise Creighton (London: Hambledon Press, 2000). Louise Von Glenn married Mandell Creighton in 1872 and at the time of her debut speech at the Exeter Congress in 1894 Mandell was Bishop of Peterborough. He became Bishop of London in 1897. In 1901 Creighton initiated the Girls’ Diocesan Association. Her daughter Beatrice served as its first president. Creighton chaired the women’s meeting at the Pan-Anglican Conference in 1908, participated in the World Missionary Conference in 1910 and was involved in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. She edited her husband’s letters and published on women and their role in the Church. In later years she supported Maude Royden’s aspiration towards women entering the priesthood.

⁷⁶ Laura Palmer married Revd Dr George Ridding in 1876. George had previously been the headmaster of Winchester College and had been ordained Bishop of Southwell (Derby and Nottingham) in 1884.

⁷⁷ David Steele, ‘Palmer, Roundell, First Earl of Selborne (1812–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21210, (accessed October 2, 2017).

⁷⁸ Lord Frederick Cavendish was Financial Secretary to the Treasury in Gladstone’s government. His brother Lord Spencer Compton Cavendish was a Liberal politician. Arthur Lyttelton’s brother Alfred was later a Liberal Unionist MP.

⁷⁹ Ridding, ‘Diaries’, April 18, 1890.

⁸⁰ Ibid., October 5, 1896.

⁸¹ Laura Ridding was NUWW President in 1901; see ‘The Early Days of the National Union of Women Workers’, in Selborne Papers (Hampshire Record Office, n.d.).

⁸² Wardle, English Popular Education, 1780–1970.

⁸³ Dunkley, Church Congress Cardiff, 352.

⁸⁴ Church Congress Rhyl, 387–8.

⁸⁵ Soulsby was a Mothers’ Union Associate and amongst her publications were Lucy Soulsby, Stray Thoughts for Mothers and Teachers (London: Longmans, 1897) and Lucy H. M. Soulsby, Two Aspects of Education (London: Longmans, Green, 1899). Elizabeth Wordsworth, a lifelong friend of novelist Charlotte Yonge, had also published novels under the pseudonym Grant Loyd. She also wrote devotional works and in 1888 co-authored a biography of her father Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, the former headmaster of Harrow School.

⁸⁶ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Bradford, on September 27th, 28th, 29th, & 30th, 1898 (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1898), 347, 355; Catherine Beatrice Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College ([s.l.]: Allen & Unwin, 1949).

⁸⁷ Charles Dunkley, The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Manchester October 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th 1908 (London: Bemrose, 1908), 650, 658, 663. Burstall was a founder member of the British Federation of University Women in 1907: Sara A. Burstall and T. F. Tout, The Story of the Manchester High School for Girls, 1871–1911 (Manchester: University of Manchester, 1911).

⁸⁸ ‘What Women Can Do to Raise the Standard of Moral Life’, Dunkley, Church Congress Exeter, 241.

⁸⁹ The Derby Mercury, October 17, 1894.

⁹⁰ Dunkley, Church Congress Shrewsbury, 495.

⁹¹ Church Congress London, 383.

⁹² Church Congress Folkstone, 251.

⁹³ The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Northampton 1902 (London: Bemrose, 1902), 151; The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Barrow-in-Furness October 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th 1906 (London: Bemrose, 1906), 205; The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Stoke on Trent October 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th 1911 (London: Bemrose, 1911), 71; Church Congress Manchester, 199; See Cathy Hunt, ‘Gertrude Tuckwell and the British Labour Movement, 1891–1921: A Study in Motives and Influences’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 3 (2013): 478–96.

⁹⁴ Black was editor of the journal Women’s Industrial News from 1895 and author of Sweated Industry and the Minimum Wage (London: Duckworth, 1907), Married Women’s Work (London: Garland, 1915) and A New Way of Housekeeping (London: W. Collins, 1918).

⁹⁵ ‘The Church Congress’, London Daily News, October 7, 1885, 3. Agnes was the author of My Life Among the Blue Jackets (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1909). See Royal Navy Information sheet no.043, http://www.nmrn.portsmouth.org.uk and http://www.aggies.org.uk for her legacy.

⁹⁶ Dunkley, Church Congress Portsmouth, 80–3; W. R. Nightingale, The Official Report of the Church Congress Held at Brighton on October 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th 1901 (London: Bemrose, 1901), 329.

⁹⁷ Dunkley, Church Congress Folkstone, 261.

⁹⁸ Church Congress Bradford, 316; Church Congress Barrow, 259; Dunkley, Church Congress Weymouth, 97, 247; Ravenhill published on health – her work included Alice Ravenhill, Lessons in Practical Hygiene for Use in Schools (Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son, 1907).

⁹⁹ See Almeric W. Fitzroy, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Vol. 1: Report and Appendix ([s.l.]: Printed for HMSO, 1904). Scharlieb was the author of The Mother’s Guide to the Health and Care of her Children (London: Routledge, 1905), A Woman’s Words to Women on the Care of the Health in England and in India (London: Routledge, 1895), and Womanhood and Race-Regeneration (London: Cassell and Co., 1912).

¹⁰⁰ Dunkley, Church Congress Rhyl, 399.

¹⁰¹ Church Congress Exeter, 245.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sue Anderson-Faithful

Sue Anderson-Faithful is a member of the Centre for History of Women’s Education at the University of Winchester. A Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Education Heath and Social Care at the University of Winchester, she teaches history and the pedagogy of history. Her research interests are in the history of women’s education, women’s activism realised through networks, organisations and philanthropy notably the Mothers’ Union and Girls’ Friendly Society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is a joint editor of the History of Education Researcher and author of Mary Sumner, Mission, Education and Motherhood: Thinking a Life with Bourdieu.

Catherine Holloway

Catherine Holloway is a PhD student at the University of Winchester. Her current research is an interdisciplinary study which examines the girls’ technical schools in England in the twentieth century. She recently completed her MA in History and her dissertation focused on the girls’ technical schools in Kent in the post-war period. Her research interests include women in education, the history of technical and vocational education, and women as educators in the Anglican Church. She is a postgraduate representative for the History of Education Society (UK).