Preaching religion, family and memory in nineteenth-century England

This article explores the religious selfhood of an exemplary Bible Christian woman, Mary Thorne (1807–1883). Founded in 1815 as a splinter group of Wesleyan Methodism, the Bible Christian denomination invoked an epistemology which stressed the correlation between religious and familial obligations. A close study of Mary Thorne's private writings suggests the tensions which existed within this ideal at the level of everyday life. Her writings open a window on a religious woman's negotiation of her public identity alongside her experiences of marriage, sexuality and motherhood. They show the impact of age, life cycle and memory in the process of self-imagining and commemoration. Critically, they also show how dependent Thorne's self-realisation and presentation were on material signs of her identity. In understanding the varying constructions of Mary Thorne's religious selfhood, I argue we might more fully understand the material cultures that underpinned evangelical religion and domesticity in nineteenth-century Britain

Women, service and self-actualization in inter-war Britain

This article challenges historians’ concentration on the self in the interwar years with relation to elite women’s lives. It argues that the focus on the interior self has both diminished the importance of service in constructions of women’s identities between the wars, and overlooked how ideas of service were changing in this period to accommodate new thinking about women’s personal psychological development. The argument is developed in the context of four broader contemporary debates: the redrawing of late-Victorian ideas of goodness, social purpose and happiness by university-educated women in response to women’s professionalization; second-generation suffragists’ critiques of women’s family roles and sex; interwar debates about mass democracy and the ‘voluntary citizen’; and the purpose of women’s voluntary organizations. Readdressing writings by celebrated figures Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Macadam and Maude Royden alongside women who have received less attention — Violet Butler, Lettice Fisher, Grace Hadow, Emily Kinnaird and Christine Jope-Slade — the article examines how educated and elite women recalibrated service in the years after the First World War to emphasize the mutuality of self-fulfilment and community development, not self-sacrifice or the neglect of the self. My focus is on the intellectual, moral and psychological tensions women confronted in this process. The article’s contribution is in its retrieval of service as a vehicle for negotiating competing ideas of the interwar feminine self, in which feminist perspectives on self-reliance and personal initiative were tested by forms of women’s self-expression in conformity with social and spiritual models of companionship and inter-personal encounter

TCBH Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2010: The Week's Good Cause: Mass Culture and Cultures of Philanthropy at the Inter-war BBC

This article examines the intersections between philanthropy and mass culture at the inter-war BBC through an analysis of the Week's Good Cause charity appeals. Building on Dan LeMahieu's work on the media in the inter-war period, it explores how this new mode of cultural interventionism was used to disseminate and re-articulate older messages about charity and the new duties of citizens. The Good Cause appeals mapped an expansive notion of positive citizenship which encompassed both the private and social domains of listeners’ lives and bureaucratized and popular understandings of charity. Encoding a reworked idea of ‘deservingness’, the appeals were part of a wider BBC narrative about British civil society between the wars, which reanimated a vital and enduring Victorian heritage, even whilst at times presenting ‘progress’ upon it. Through drawing on new psychological thinking about the commercial subject, and on the popular appeal of a burgeoning celebrity culture, the article argues that the Good Cause appeals pioneered a form of philanthropic fundraising between the wars (taken up in other inter-war BBC output) based upon drama, human interest, and ‘listener identification’. It concludes by using the Good Cause appeals to critique any supposed opposition between civic and cultural paradigms, arguing that in the inter-war years the appeals projected an integrated message about charity and citizenship which crossed over cultural, commercial, and political boundaries