2880 Pages
    by Routledge

    Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse

    Over recent years, research into religious belief during the Victorian period and the early twentieth century has grown in diversity and importance. The centrality of faith-based discourses to women of the period has long been recognized by scholars in the field. But until now relatively little significance has been attached to the fundamental relationship between women’s faith and women’s rights. This new title in the History of Feminism series remedies that omission. Women and Belief, 1852–1928 is a six-volume collection of primary materials covering a wide range of opinions about women, their self-identity, and the combination of their spiritual and political beliefs.

    Addressing the most debated aspects of women’s religious, social, cultural, and political rights, the collection adopts an historical overview of the period and provides an authoritative representation of the wide body of literature written by and about women’s faith. Beginning with an example of how religious discourse provided a model for acceptable female behaviour and a satirical take on women’s rights and spiritualism and ending with an economist’s psychoanalytic study of female belief from 1928, Women and Belief, 1852–1928 provides a unique collection of different viewpoints. It brings together the work of women writers, theologians, philosophers, and economic and cultural historians to illustrate the multiplicity of voices and opinions on the issues of suffrage and religious faith. This diversity is equally reflected in the broad geographical coverage of the collection which draws on works not only from the United Kingdom and United States but also includes materials from Canada and India, and moves beyond the Christian into the spheres of theosophy, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. The gathered materials include works of non-fiction, poetry, analytical works, satires, pamphlets, sermons, spiritual (auto)biography, and periodical articles.

    Making readily available such materials—which are currently very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use—Women and Belief, 1852–1928 is a veritable treasure-trove. The gathered works are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. And with detailed and comprehensive introductory, biographical, and contextual material in each volume illustrating the ways in which the materials chart the gradual evolution of feminist thinking about belief, spirituality, and faith that directly fed into the emerging discourses of political and social rights for women, the collection is destined to be welcomed as a vital reference and research resource.

    PROVISIONAL CONTENTS

    VOLUME I

    1. Julia Kavanagh, Women of Christianity, Exemplary for Acts of Piety and Charity ... with Portraits (London, 1852) (474pp.)

    VOLUME II

    2. Luther Lee, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel (1853) (22pp.)

    3. Fred Folio, A Book for the Times: Lucy Boston, or, Woman’s Rights and Spiritualism: Illustrating the Follies and Delusions of the Nineteenth Century (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855) (406pp. including illustrations)

    VOLUME III

    4. William Landels, Woman’s Sphere and Work, Considered in the Light of Scripture: A Book for Young Women (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1859) (240pp.)

    5. William Kay, The Influence of Christianity on the Position and Character of Woman: A Sermon (Calcutta, 1859) (55pp.)

    6. Catherine Mumford Booth, Female Ministry: Or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel (London, 1859) (23pp.)

    7. Richard Seymour, Woman’s Work: A Speech Delivered in the Lower House of Convocation on Tuesday, July 19, 1861 (London, 1862) (24pp.)

    8. I. T. Armstrong, Plea for Modern Prophetesses (Glasgow, 1866) (66pp.)

    9. Anon, Female Franchise. Have Women Immortal Souls? The Popular Belief Disputed ... By a Clerk in Holy Orders (London, 1868) (19pp.)

    VOLUME IV

    10. Horace Bushnell, Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (1869) (184 pp.)

    11. Annie Rollo Stagg, The Importance of Religion to Woman (Stratford, Ontario, 1875) (69pp.)

    12. J. G. Mandley, Woman Outside Christendom: An Exposition of the Influence Exerted by Christianity on the Social Position and Happiness of Women (London, 1880) (159pp.)

    13. Elizabeth Machardie, What is Spiritualism? A Paper Read at the Annual Conference of the Christian Women’s Union, Held in Glasgow (London, 1884) (16pp.)

    14. Louisa Samson, Why Women Should be Secularists (London, 1891) (16pp.)

    VOLUME V

    15. Lucy Helen Soulsby, Religious Education of Women (1894) (28pp.)

    16. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Preface and Introduction to The Woman’s Bible (1895) (9pp.)

    17. Bhagwant Hari Khare, How is Woman Treated by Man and Religion? (Bombay, 1896) (12pp.)

    18. Eliza Burt Gamble, The God-Idea of the Ancients or Sex in Religion (1897) (extract) (20pp.)

    19. Lena Tyack, Joyce Maxwell’s Mistakes (1899) (63pp.)

    20. Ellen Battelle Dietrick, Women in the Early Christian Ministry (1897) (148pp.)

    21. Frederick James Gould, Will Women Help? An Appeal to Women to Assist in Liberating Modern Thought from Theological Bonds (London, 1900) (100pp.)

    22. Florence Caroline Dixie, ‘Towards Freedom: An Appeal to Thoughtful Men and Women’, The Agnostic Journal, 1904–5 (14pp.)

    23. Emily Hickey, Thoughts for Creedless Women (London, 1906) (32pp.)

    VOLUME VI

    24. Margaret Mordecai, Phases of Progress: A Study of the Evolution of Religion, Education and Woman (London: Sands & Co., 1910) (164pp.)

    25. Katharine Bushnell, God’s Word to Women (1910) (70pp.)

    26. Joseph Keating, S.J., Christianity and ‘Woman’s Rights’ (Catholic Social Guild Pamphlets No. 16) (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1912) (24pp.)

    27. The Religious Aspect of the Women’s Movement: Being a Series of Addresses Delivered at Meetings at the Queen’s Hall, London, on June 19, 1912 (London: Collegium, 1912) (67pp.)

    28. Syed Ameer Ali, The Legal Position of Women in Islam (1912) (47pp.)

    29. Charlotte Despard, Theosophy and the Woman’s Movement (Riddle of Life Series No. IV) (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1913) (59pp. including illustrations)

    30. Chapman Cohen, Woman and Christianity: The Subjection and Exploitation of a Sex (London: The Pioneer Press, 1919) (96pp.)

    31. George Whitehead, Religion and Woman (London: Secular Society, 1928) (extract) (13pp.)

    Biography

    Dr Mark Llewellyn is Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, UK. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, he has published articles in leading journals. Mark’s most recent editorial project (with Ann Heilmann) is the five-volume critical edition The Collected Short Stories of George Moore (Pickering & Chatto, 2007). A member of the Executive Committee of the British Association of Victorian Studies, Mark is also Director of Liverpool’s Centre for Victorian Studies and a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College (2007–10). He has recently been commissioned to co-author a 250,000 word encyclopaedia of Victorian writers and writing for Wiley-Blackwell (forthcoming, 2011).

    Dr Jessica Cox is Lecturer in English at the University of Wales Lampeter. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature, particularly Victorian sensation fiction, and has published articles in a number of journals and edited collections. She is the editor of the recent Penguin edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, and is currently editing two collections of essays on the sensation author Mary Elizabeth Braddon.