Challenging Traditions

The impact of World War I on the progress of women's emancipation in Great Britain has been the subject of much scholarly attention. ¹ The standard interpretation has emphasized that the war, while the occasion of women's achievement of the vote, ushered in a period of quiescence in feminist organizing. Susan Kingsley Kent, for example, has argued that within the postwar climate, suffragettes demobilized their “sex war,” succumbed to public anxiety about women's political and economic emancipation, and ceased to challenge the dominant gender ideology of separate spheres. ² Other scholars have argued that the postwar emphasis on maternalist values was neither necessarily a concession to the ideology of separate spheres nor inherently antifeminist. ³ These interpretations, however, tend to focus on feminist attitudes toward such issues as politics, employment, and the family, and include little analysis of postwar (or, for that matter, prewar) feminist attitudes toward religion. Yet, as Sheila Fletcher's biography of the prominent Anglican suffragist A. Maude Royden suggests, the postwar period was characterized by unprecedented progress for women within religious contexts and witnessed the rise of the movement for women's ordination to the Anglican Church. ⁴ When the category of religion is included in the analysis of the British women's movement, postwar feminism begins to look less quiescent.