Abstract
The religious revivalism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had profound implications for the position of women, most evidently in Protestant countries. Evangelicalism was to infuse the prescriptive works, the models for conduct, even transform the popular novel with a dynamic Christianity, a theology no longer arid or rational, but relevant to the emotional life of home and family. Leaders of the movement, from William Wilberforce in England to Charles Grandison Finney in the United States, preached a religion of the heart: and the qualities of the reborn Christian, as opposed to the merely nominal Christian, were qualities that have been described as quintessentially female. Such a Christian was humble and submissive, self-denying, obedient and passive, for evangelical discipline and upbringing was based on the breaking of the will and the denial of self. That profound sense of human depravity which was a part of the evangelical code meant repression, denial of the flesh and the unceasing quest after purity. Only when the self had been destroyed could the crusade to regenerate a sinful world have meaning. So, whether as a part of the established church or nonconformist sect, or in the popular revivalist meeting, the dynamic evangelistic Christianity of the nineteenth century was to have a complex and ambiguous effect on the position of women: exalting what were seen as their essential qualities, defining their own sphere more clearly, offering a limited but positive role within the movement itself.
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© 1985 Jane Rendall
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Rendall, J. (1985). Evangelicalism and the Power of Women. In: The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17733-2_4
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