ABSTRACT
The Victorian middle-class ideal of womanhood is one that is well documented – the ‘angel in the house’, the ‘relative creature’ who maintained the home as a haven, is familiar from novels, manuals and even government reports. The Sect's second campaign—the attempt to transform national morality – had less clear legislative goals than the anti-slavery movement. In the 1780s the Evangelicals were convinced of the necessity for a national reform of manners. They wanted to attack the aristocracy's laxness and impose a new rule of life. Central to the Evangelicals’ attempt to reconstruct daily life and create a new morality with liberal and humanist parameters on the one hand, yet buttressed by social conservatism on the other, was the redefinition of the position of the woman in the family. The Evangelical movement was both intensely public and intensely private. The emphasis on the individual religious life came from a view of the world as immoral and distracting.
