ABSTRACT
Church and chapel were central to the articulation and diffusion of new beliefs and practices related to manliness and femininity. But late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century society was peopled by many other ideologues, who sought to map out new forms of social and familial order. Public attitudes to private morality shifted markedly, as is demonstrated by the case of Queen Caroline and the resolute attack on the double standard for men and women associated with it. Such changes in the terms of public debate on the family and sexuality were connected with new ideas about the place of men and women in the pamphlets, manuals, novels and magazines so avidly read by the middle class. Two eighteenth-century Evangelical writers, William Cowper and Hannah More, were influential in setting the terms for the characterization of domesticity and sexual difference. They were followed by a host of minor writers, pre-eminently women, who explored the ways in which such values could be translated into the daily practice of the home, whether in nursery or kitchen. Their writing, in their different ways, was concerned with and explored the contradictions between the claims for women's superiority and their social subordination, a tension which could not be resolved within early Victorian society. Writing on sexual difference was by no means confined to the protagonists of separate spheres but increasingly the language of woman's place and woman's mission dominated debates over womanhood itself. Womanhood was a contested site, not only intellectually but in practice. By the 1830s and 1840s the language used was increasingly secular and the belief in the natural differences and complementary roles of men and women which had originally been particularly linked to Evangelicalism, had become the common sense of the English middle class.
