ABSTRACT
After the Restoration, religious enthusiasm was suspect. Increasingly, those who refused to conform to the Anglican church became more sober and respectable in their religious practices so that they could gain the right to worship in peace. After 1670, Quaker women who had been prominent in some of the wilder religious manifestations of the Interregnum found that a Quaker committee censored their writings for publication. At the upper social levels, increased emphasis on scientific explanations of the world and on reasoned belief enhanced the difference between the two sexes. As elite men turned away from revealed religion, and adopted deism, or worse, the cultural gap between elite men and women widened. Enthusiastic religion was no longer a common cultural ground between men and women, and elite men distanced themselves from lower-class men as well as from women. The notion of woman as a creature of emotion remained unaltered after 1660. Indeed, the idea of woman as weak, unstable, and easily led astray was confirmed by the experiences of the revolutionary years. Men said that piety was especially good for women as a means of keeping them virtuous. Religion, in so far as it involved belief rather than reason, seemed natural to the less reasonable sex. From here it was easy to argue that women were naturally religious. By the eighteenth century, therefore, the role of religion in supporting the ideology of the good woman was enhanced. This chapter discusses some of these changes.
