Timothy Willem Jones

Sexual politics in the Church of England, 1857-1957

Introduction: Anglican Gender Trouble 1. Marriage and Equality 2. Women Religious 3. Sex and Suffrage 4. Subordination and Priesthood 5. Contraception, Sex, and Pleasure 6. Celibacy and Homosexuality Conclusion: Anglican Sexual Politics Bibliography Index

‘Unduly conscious of her sex’: priesthood, female bodies, and sacred space in the Church of England

Between 1910 and 1935 there was a vibrant and active campaign for the ordination of women as priests in the Church of England. Despite convening major historical and theological commissions into the ministry of women, the Church of England struggled to arrive at any coherent theological objections to the ordination of women. Nonetheless, the Church refused to countenance women priests. This paper argues that a gendered spatial analysis of the debates about women performing priestly roles in the pulpit and chancel can reveal the underlying assumptions about gender, power, theology, and sexuality that informed the debates about womens ordination in the 1920s and 1930s.

Religion, gender and sexuality in everyday life

attractive equation, within which women seek a healthy male partner to father their children and men search for a female partner who functions as a trophy. When discussing porn, Regenerus and Uecker state: ‘What does not bother young women – because they do not realize it – is the effect of online and video pornography on their collective ability to begin and sustain romantic and sexual relationships’ (98, emphasis). The reader is left wondering how Regenerus and Uecker feel able to speak so authoritatively (and dismissively) about all young women. Throughout the book, women are presented as emotional, weak, prone to depression and fragile in terms of sex and sexual relationships. For example, in Chapter 5 the authors clearly state that ‘ . . . women who report the greatest number of partners display the clearest symptoms of depression’ (139), before admitting that ‘ . . . some women seem fine with this relationship style [having more than one sexual partner]; after all, 70% of young women who report more than 10 recent partners are not on antidepressants’ (139). Why, one asks, did the authors choose to foreground a statement about women with higher numbers of sexual partners displaying symptoms of depression when, by their own admission, the inference drawn from the data cited is questionable at best? This begs the question: why choose to foreground data that offers questionable inference? Further, why choose to ask men interview questions about whether or not they have hurt someone emotionally, then ask women if they have been hurt (150), other than to unthinkingly replicate an active/passive gender binary? In Chapter 6, Marriage in the Minds of Emerging Adults, Regnerus and Uecker inform us that, drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 wave, women who have serially cohabited with men have twice the chance of divorce compared to women that have only cohabited with their actual husbands. Again, we are left without any similar statistics for men. The book concludes with chapter 8, in which the authors discuss what they call myths, or ideas that are ‘not true most of the time’ (242, emphasis in original). Myth number nine, ‘marriage can always wait’, is dismissed through recourse to sexual economic theory, with women treated as an object that only loses value with age (whereas men increase in value). Anyone with an interest in gender, sexuality and feminism will be frustrated by this book. However, it does contain interesting data in relation to emerging adults in the USA. I also appreciated the regression models and the research interview methods appendices – they are useful tools for the reader to aid in-depth comprehension of some of the data.

Sin, Silence and States of Denial: Canon Law and the ‘Discovery’ of Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract In discussions of the sexual assault of minors, feminists, historians of sexuality and religious authorities are in uncommon agreement. They concur that, although minors have been subject to sexual assault throughout the modern era, the late 1970s and 1980s saw a new ‘discovery’ of the phenomenon. This discovery initially was located in feminist critiques of male violence within the family, but quickly spread to other sites: homosexuals, paedophile rings, satanic ritual abuse and most recently clerical sexual abuse. Recent inquiries into sexual abuse in Christian Churches have collated data of abuse on a scale hitherto unimagined. The data suggests that abuse was most prevalent between 1945 and 1980, the period prior to the articulation of feminist critiques of sexual violence. Many have sought to explain this historic ‘black spot’ as the product of a failure of comprehension. Feminists have claimed that their articulation of sexual politics was required before child sexual victimhood could be recognised. Church authorities, on the other hand, have repeatedly stated that their failure to respond appropriately to allegations of abuse was because such abuse was ‘unthinkable’. This paper seeks to complicate these explanations of historic blindness to child sexual abuse by examining the capacity of church law to comprehend and articulate the harms of child sexual abuse prior to the feminist critiques of the 1970s.

The spoken and unspoken nature of child abuse in the miniseries Devil’s Playground: The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Catholic Church and television drama in Australia

In a departure from Fred Schepisi’s film The Devil’s Playground, the television sequel Devil’s Playground focuses on the cultural impact of priest child abuse. It will be argued that the prolific mainstream media coverage of these crimes before the series was made, and anticipated during its screening, lent a form of permission to green light the production. In focusing on Case 28 of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, this article will draw attention to the problematic nature of dramatising priest abuse in mainstream Australian television. While victims have willingly voiced graphic details of the sexual violence they experienced as children, after decades of silence, it is as if networks and producers are only now awkwardly grappling with these uncomfortable realities. In the process of sanitising such abusive behaviour, they reduce the degree of cruelty that survivors are intent on communicating.

Feminist contributions to justice for survivors of clerical child sexual abuse

The scandal of systemic institutionalised child abuse by clergy and other church personnel continues to unfold across the globe with unremitting effect. Northern Ireland is the latest among a number of countries to establish a National Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse, in 2014. That Inquiry has found that the region’s most notorious ‘paedophile priest’, Father Brendan Smyth, was ‘known to’ police and treated by psychiatrists from the 1970s, before finally being convicted in 1994 of over 100 assaults on children in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland over 40 years. As nation after nation grapples with the magnitude of historical abuse in institutions including churches, questions continue to be asked about why it is that perpetrators were able to offend repeatedly and with impunity; what is it about institutions that facilitates or fosters abuse; and perhaps most chillingly: why have survivors of abuse often been treated inadequately and with disdain by diverse national and international justice and political systems throughout the last century? The sexual exploitation of children has been a concern of feminists at least since the time of the suffragettes, but the political acknowledgement of abuse endemic in institutions is a defining theme of the twenty-first century. The belated and piecemeal justice beginning to be delivered to survivors through national commissions and other public inquiries has been made possible only by the relentless work of feminists, activist and academic, in framing the issue as one of public, not private, concern. As Shurlee Swain documents in this volume, ‘child sexual abuse’ was (re)discovered in the West in the 1970s, a discovery made possible by feminist critiques of patriarchy and gender, domestic violence and sexual assault. Named and diagnosed by doctors in 1969 as a condition to be treated medically and individually, child sexual abuse

Introduction: Materiality and Religious History

On September 9, 1872, retired soldier George Yeofield cut out a small disc of paper to wrap around a gold sovereign. On the outside of the disc he wrote out the Lord’s Prayer, his handwriting cramped and snaking around the paper. On the underside he wrote his name, age, the place, and his occupation, before signing off with an “Amen.” We do not know why Yeofield did this, or why this coin was later worn by another soldier during the First World War. The wrapped coin ended up in the collection of Edward Lovett, a City of London banker and an amateur collector of charms and amulets. Lovett was fascinated by working-class superstition and roamed the streets of London in search of trinkets invested with religious or folkloric meaning. Lovett’s collection, now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, is a treasure trove for scholars interested in popular belief.1 Yet all too often scholars of religion have overlooked or devalued material objects such as Yeofield’s coin. In this case, an object with specific economic meaning was transformed into a sacred object for everyday reverence. We can only imagine that it was intended to connect its holder to the spiritual world beyond. In their general reluctance to move beyond traditional written sources, scholars of religion run the risk of missing the insights that a study of such objects might offer. This book seeks to redress the balance by asking two interrelated questions about material religion. Firstly, why should scholars of religion and spirituality study objects? And, secondly, how can a study of objects inform our understanding of Britain’s religious and spiritual landscape in historical and contemporary contexts?

Love, Honour and Obey? Romance, Subordination and Marital Subjectivity in Interwar Britain

In 1925 the Church of England introduced into the prayer book an alternative marriage service in which husbands and wives swore the same vows to each other. No longer did a woman have to swear to obey her husband. This paradigmatic change in one of the most fundamental gendering institutions in British society has gone almost entirely unremarked. In ecclesiastical history, it was a minor episode in the much larger controversy over the revision of the Book of Common Prayer.1 And in women’s history and the history of sexuality, the alteration of the marriage service might seem to pale in significance next to the sexual revolution being fomented by publications such as Marie Stopes’s Married Love (1918) and the staggered achievement of women’s suffrage. Nonetheless, as will be explored, contemporary newspapers reported that the alternative service was widely welcomed, and doubted that many couples would continue to use the old service.

Introduction: Historicizing ‘Modern’ Love and Romance

In 1918 Marie Stopes, then a pioneering female palaeobotanist, published a book that would transform her life and many others’ lives too. The book, Married Love, was a popular marriage guide and sex manual.1 In plain language, Married Love advocated for marriages grounded in mutual affection and expressed in mutual sexual pleasure; it aimed to combat sexual ignorance in marrying couples. In particular, it propounded theories about female sexual desire — women’s ‘primitive sex tides’ — which Stopes argued couples needed to understand in order to achieve ‘union with another soul, and the perfecting of oneself which such union brings’.2 The book was a runaway success, being continually reprinted, and launched Stopes’ new career as a sexologist and birth control advocate. Thousands of women and men wrote to Stopes after its publication asking for advice.3 As Hera Cook observes, it is difficult to overestimate the innovativeness and the importance of Stopes’ work in initiating and shaping a discourse on heterosexual marriage, sex and love in 1920s Britain.4 It was (for its time) explicit, popular and spoke to ordinary people’s anxieties about love, sex and marriage. It was also intensely romantic. For Stopes: in love it is not only that the yearning of the bonds of affinity to be satisfied is met by the linking with another, but that out of this union there grows a new and unprecedented creation... the super-physical entity created by the perfect union in love of man and woman. Together, united by the love bonds which hold them, they are a new and wondrous thing surpassing, and different from, the arithmetical sum of them both when separate.5

Social Motherhood and Spiritual Authority in a Secularizing Age: Moral Welfare Work in the Church of England, 1883–1961:

The article considers how the field of moral welfare and social work empowered religious women, and how these women met the challenge posed by Yeo (1998: 45), ‘to find ways of breaking the material, representational and psychic chains of subordination without reassembling them at the same time in a different form’. Based on an examination of the archival records and reports of these moral welfare organizations the article argues that the spiritual dimension of moral welfare work provided particular resources that empowered women and mitigated the subordinating operation of power in client relationships. These resources were, however, dependent on mutual subscription of religious doctrines, a condition that did not remain stable into the 1960s.