ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rehabilitation of Eve in the British Christian women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s. It investigates Owenite and Miltonic antecedents to the Christian women's Eve, in relation to cultural conceptualisations of femininity during the period 1800-1960. The chapter analyses the Victorian reassertion of eighteenth century notions of spiritual womanhood and the related expansion of women's spiritual influence beyond the home, arguing that spiritual womanhood provided a vehicle for the interrelated means of this expansion: evangelicalism, philanthropy and feminism. It argues that – within 'first-wave' feminism as well as more broadly – the continued use of spiritual womanhood as vehicle for the interleaved elements at play, led to a heavy investment in woman maintaining her 'modesty'. Women, including feminists, also played a major part in building the inter-war international pacifist movement, thus expressing moral qualities which can be seen as continuous with those of the Victorian female civilising mission.
