ABSTRACT
Religion may have been the 'one thing needful' for men and women of the middle class but it was not experienced by them in the same way. Indeed, discussions on the proper place of men and women in the public and private sphere were a central part of religious practice at this time. Seventeenthcentury Puritanism, with its emphasis on the individual believer and the importance of the religious family and household, had inaugurated a debate on the relative places of men and women in the church. The more radical - Familists, Ranters and Diggers - were soon silenced, but there remained a belief in individual freedom of conscience and a commitment to spiritual equality, that men and women were 'all one in Christ Jesus'. This formed a base line for discussions on the religious natures of men and women, their relative rights in church or chapel and their appropriate practice in the world. Many voices were heard, ranging from those of the Evangelical Anglicans to the Primitive Methodists and even Owenite feminists, but it is noticeable that the more radical tended to become muted as nineteenthcentury orthodoxies about woman's place became established. Among the millenarian movements of nineteenth-century England, for example, the importance of women as preachers and teachers had been recognized but, where such movements outgrew their enthusiastic origins and became more bureaucratic, the women were usually pushed to the margins.1
