ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Owenite and Miltonic antecedents to the Christian women's Eve, in relation to cultural conceptualisations of femininity during the period 1800–1960. Eve is present as a shadowy figure, in the designation, 'fallen women'. Through the Victorian female civilising mission, spiritual womanhood exceeded its prior domestic confinement. One discover spiritual womanhood as the chosen vehicle of British 'first-wave' feminism after the 1840s, including early twentieth century 'Church feminism'. Spiritual womanhood is evidently a construction of a subordinate and domestic femininity. There are two aspects of Owenite socialism, which are relevant to the return of Eve in the 1970s Christian women's movement. First, Owenism challenged the Pauline linkage between feminine virtue and women's social dependency. Second, in the envisaged New Jerusalem, which 'Eve' set out to construct, women and men were lives together in co-operation and equality, enjoying free heterosexual relations outside the bonds of marriage. Maude Royden's Church feminism was grounded within notions of spiritual womanhood.
