ABSTRACT
The late 1940s and the 1950s were afterwards recalled byLorna Sage, a feminist academic, as the period of ‘postwar moral rearmament, with everyone conscripted to normality and standing to attention’.1 This was a widespread sentiment. These years constituted one of the high points of British Christian culture, surpassed only by that of the Edwardian period at the beginning of the century. But the 1950s were remarkable in one respect. Whilst the 1900s witnessed some liberalisation of Victorian religious puritanism, the 1950s experienced the intensification of moral conservatism over and above that of the 1930s and the war years. There was an increasing expectation that the citizen would act in Christian ways. Through looking at themes of moral austerity, evangelism, women and the emerging issues of class, race and youth, this chapter explores the perplexing period between the end of the war and the dawn of the revolutionary sixties.
