Mary Sumner: Religion, Mission, Education and Womanhood 1876-1921

Mary Sumner (1828-1921) founded the Anglican Mothers’ Union, which originated as a parish mothers’ meeting in 1876, and followed the Girls’ Friendly Society as the second women’s organisation to be sanctioned by the Church of England. By 1921, the Mothers’ Union had a membership extending across the British Empire and transnationally. Mary Sumner sought to educate mothers in Christian values and pedagogy so that they might educate their children to be future citizens of empire. Her life trajectory occurred against a context of evangelical religious revival, contest over matters of doctrinal authority, the proliferation of women’s philanthropy, the growth of the British Empire and changes in education characterised by state intervention in working-class elementary schooling and the negotiation of educational provision for middle- class girls. This thesis uses primary source material to build on institutional histories of the Mothers’ Union to situate Mary Sumner in networks, emphasise gender and class as mediating of opportunity, and envisage her religious ‘mission’ as educational.\ud \ud The thesis draws on the thinking tools of Pierre Bourdieu, habitus, field and capital, to analyse Mary Sumner’s negotiation of constraint and agency in relation to the fields of religion, mission (understood as religious and philanthropic activism ‘at home’ and overseas) and education through which womanhood runs as a connecting theme. Bourdieu’s concept of reproduction is used to position Mary Sumner in relation to the operation of power across domestic, local and global spaces. The thesis concludes that using Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ highlights how Mary Sumner used opportunities for women within her temporal and socio-cultural context in ways that were complicit with notions of womanhood reflective of patriarchal domination and accepting of hierarchies of class and ‘race’, yet were innovative in her achievement of access for an organisation of women within Anglicanism that was recognised for its educational work

A Mission to Civilise: The Popular Educational Vision of The Mothers' Union and Girls' Friendly Society 1876-1926

Abstract The Mothers’ Union (1886) and the Girls Friendly Society (1874) were official Anglican Church of England organisations. They drew on a religiously informed ideal of womanhood, and asserted the significance of women as exemplars of Christian citizenship with a mission to improve society. They asserted mothering as a significant educational project. This article identifies three main ways in which this popular educational mission was accomplished: first, through the example of the mother in the home; second, through the informal education inherent in organisational practices; and third, through overt educational practices. Despite conservative social values, the extensive membership of the organisations is indicative that their mission to promote women as religious educators had widespread appeal

Rooms of Our Own: The Spatial Turn in Histories of Women's Education

Virginia Woolf’s «A Room of One’s Own» (Woolf, 1929) provides a resonant spatial metaphor for envisaging the negotiation of factors that mediate/facilitate women’s «horizons of possibility» which accrue around the ideas encapsulated in another spatial metaphor «women’s place». Space is an expansive concept and offers possibilities for investigation both materially and metaphorically, and at different scales from the intimate to global. This article takes three historical case studies; on the Mothers’ Union, a girls’ junior technical school and women’s presence at the Anglican Church congress to reflect on the embedded nature of space and place in research into women’s activism in philanthropy, education and the work place. This article draws on the spatial turn in scholarship underpinned by Henri Lefebvre’s landmark Production of Space and the work of feminist geographers Linda McDowell, who focuses on the gendered nature of space and identity, and Doreen Massey who conceives spaces as arenas of conflict (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1994; McDowell, 1999).To conceptualise the validation of women occupying space whether in ‘rooms of their own’ or as agents in a wider public sphere we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and pedagogic authority