Week 13 - 19th Quaker Women v WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON Women’s History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998 struggled with the relation between higher education and feminism. As Joyce Antler has concluded, the great virtue of many of the studies is the continuing joining of women’s educational experience to an analysis of women’s roles in larger society.[4] But one aspect remains strangely Educated Doubt: neglected; few have considered the way in which highly-educated women women, religion and the challenge integrated, ignored or resisted religion in the renegotiation of their subjectivities as highly educated women. of higher education, c. 1870-1920 [1] Higher education, with its emphasis on rationality and the secular, presented a major challenge to religious belief. Through several women’s responses to higher education we can reflect on the interplay between the ALISON MACKINNON secular, the activist and the mystical in their spiritual lives. Responses might University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia take the form of rejection of traditional beliefs, of transformation of active witnessing into social action, and conversion of the spiritual or passionate into the aesthetic. Others might find in higher education a new field for the growth of the soul, new possibilities for moral transformation. While some ABSTRACT The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on drifted away from orthodox religion, others tended towards more embracing reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, forms of the ethereal such as spiritualism, Christian Science [5] and constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ theosophy. Overall, we can detect a common thread – the search for a new are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with voice, a new sense of public authority. challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of Education and the Victorian Crisis of Faith ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious The neglect of highly-educated women’s religious experience is curious, phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science given the centrality of religion to most nineteenth-century women’s lives and and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education the moral authority it conferred upon them.[6] And, in significant ways, the further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the admission of women to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge was a responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new direct consequence of the turmoil experienced by many younger male dons secular institutions of higher learning. whose questioning of received orthodoxy in a range of areas included a challenge to the hold of religion.[7] Divisions within the Victorian Church, such as the conflict between Victorian humanitarianism and harsh Calvinist doctrines, as well as the publication of German Biblical criticism, prepared [The Society was] losing grasp of the highly educated and intelligent the way for the crisis of conscience which struck many thoughtful young young men and women belonging to our best old Quaker families who Victorians.[8] In the decades following the publication of John Stuart Mills’s were receiving first class curriculum at College and then drifting A System of Logic (1843), which challenged intuition and faith as legitimate theologically.[2] sources of information about the world and proposed a proper methodology How worldly! how shocking! how unchristian! [Anna Lloyd’s sisters’ for the social sciences, and Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1858) and The reaction to her intention to study at Cambridge c. 1869] [3] Descent of Man ( 1871), which more than any other texts challenged literal Christian beliefs, the attempt to reconcile the conflict between science and The history of women’s higher education has covered considerable ground. religion occupied many searching minds, both male and female.[9] For many Many historians have mapped the struggles of women to enter higher no reconciliation was possible: faith vanished entirely. By 1877 education, noting that their entry was achieved in the Western world in a W. H. Mallock could comment, “One may almost say that with us one can remarkably short stretch of time in spite of, in most countries, a fairly high hear faith decaying”.[10] It is the men, however, particularly those of the level of opposition. Others have charted women’s efforts to create their own intellectual élite, whose loss of faith we most frequently encounter. Such a institutions; have engaged with the multiple dimensions of the college loss for women might well be seen as even more catastrophic. experience; have traced the effects of college on postgraduate lives; and have 241 242 WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON The stories of the male doubters are legion. Henry Sidgwick, for output of writing and investigation while also performing the duties of example, was a brilliant young Cambridge Fellow who resigned his Trinity Principal of the newly-established Newnham College, Cambridge. At College Fellowship as he could not with clear conscience assent to the 39 Newnham young women were grudgingly accepted into University articles of Christian faith. Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney, Sidgwick’s examinations and the life of the mind whilst being carefully excluded from Trinity colleagues and co-founders of the Society of Pyschical Research, also any of the privileges of the university.[17] found themselves unable to accept the comforting doctrines of the In her role as psychical researcher par excellence, coolly amassing vast omnipresence of God and the life after death – doctrines espoused in the numbers of facts from well-corroborated sources and sifting them minutely Evangelical homes in which they had been raised. Poet Arthur Clough, in search of emerging theoretical formulations, Eleanor Sidgwick embodied whose agonies of religious doubt were witnessed with alarm by his sister the faith in inductive empiricism of her intellectual milieu. She also provided Ann Jemima, founding Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, elicited one of the few models available for the educated woman. Her response to many a sympathetic response to his Easter Day: the Victorian crisis of doubt, a crisis, incidentally which she did not appear Ah well-a-day, for we are souls bereaved! to share to the same extent as her husband Henry, not only offered women a Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope language of progressive social reform vested in the new science rather than We are most hopeless who had once most hope, moral imperatives, but sought to bolster women’s right to higher education And most beliefless who had once believed. in statistically-supported ways.[18] Sidgwick was an excellent mathematician, serene in the “cool retreats of scientific speculation”, “a watcher of persons The response to this pervasive religious doubt took several forms. One was and things” [19], ideally suited to rational debate. She claimed the authority the attempt to prove the supernatural by scientific means.[11] Beatrice of the new faith in science to insert women’s voice into the public domain. Webb identified two other marked tendencies of British intellectual life in What was to replace the pre-eminence of religion in the the 1880s: a preoccupation with science and a transferral of the ideal of religion-saturated nineteenth century for the “numerous positivists, service from God to man.[12] In her biography of Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf agnostics and atheists” which commentators identify? Sidgwick provides one alluded to a variant of the latter. Fry, she explained, “tried to make art the example, but there were multiple pathways. In what follows, I look at several servant of society”.[13] Woolf attributed the ardour with which Roger Fry, a different approaches highly-educated Quaker women took to reconciling former Quaker, threw himself into a range of enterprises as due to his religion and science. I refer to science not in its modern, more specific, ‘Quaker blood’. Karl Pearson directed his energies after his loss of faith to sense but in the notion accepted by the Victorians of a more inclusive understanding scientifically the ‘laws’ underlying relations between the science, of the social sciences, of moral science even, and the notion of the sexes, the agenda of the Men and Women’s Club. Pearson was a rationalist, world made amenable to empirical observation and analysis. Quaker women who “turned to free thought for spiritual enlightenment”.[14] The provide a fascinating example, committed as they were to ‘the inner light’, to deliberations of the newly-formed Men and Women’s Club were to be a degree of equality between men and women and to a well-documented conducted “from the historical and scientific as distinguished from the association with social reform. How would they deal with the challenges of theological standpoint”. They were to include an “exact and impartial higher education to their beliefs? Some abandoned their religious faith analysis of facts”.[15] Other putative rationalists hoped to find evidence for completely, turning to aestheticism to meet their needs for the beauty and the existence of the disputed spiritual phenomena precisely through that passion their mothers had found in evangelical religion. Some turned from scientific method, using the sceptical spirit of inquiry. Reluctant to abandon the notion of service of God to service to man (sic), as Beatrice Webb so completely the spiritual values of their youth they established the Society for neatly put it, finding in a series of social causes an outlet for their Psychical Research as an essential part of an attempt to exist “Between missionary endeavour.