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² The original hyphenated title Sex and Common-Sense became Sex and CommonSense in the 1947 edition. Unless referring specifically to the 1947 edition, therefore, this article uses the original version of the title throughout.

³ Keyes, Frances Parkinson, “Torch-Bearers to Humanity,” Good Housekeeping 86, no. 1 (January 1928): 31Google Scholar.

⁴ Fletcher, Sheila, Maude Royden: A Life (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar. See also Heeney, Brian, The Women's Movement in the Church of England, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Delap, Lucy, “Conservative Values, Anglicans, and the Gender Order in Interwar Britain,” in Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation Building in Britain between the Wars, ed. Beers, Laura and Thomas, Geraint (London, 2012)Google Scholar; Alberti, Joanna, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (New York, 1989), 174–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ceadel, Martin, Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar.

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⁶ Brown defines “discursive Christianity” as “people's subscription to protocols of personal identity which they derive from Christian expectations, or discourses,” Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2001), 12–15Google Scholar.

⁷ Erdozain, Dominic, “The Secularisation of Sin in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62, no. 1 (January 2011): 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁰ Cocks, H. G., “Modernity and the Self in the History of Sexuality,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 1212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; See also Cocks and Houlbrook, The Modern History of Sexuality, introduction.

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¹² Nash, David, “Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History: Secularization's Failure as a Master Narrative,” Cultural and Social History 1, no. 3 (September, 2004): 306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, discussed in Morris, Jeremy, “The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another Look at the Secularization Debate,” Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (2003): 963–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁵ Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 169.

¹⁶ Cocks, “Religion and Spirituality,” 175.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Hilliard, David, “Un-English and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 181–210Google Scholar; Vicinus, Martha, “‘The Gift of Love’: Nineteenth-Century Religion and Lesbian Passion,” in Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900, ed. Morgan, Sue (Basingstoke, 2002)Google Scholar; Roden, Frederick, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Jones, Timothy, “The Stained Glass Closet: Celibacy and Homosexuality in the Church of England to 1955,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no.1 (January 2011): 134Google ScholarPubMed.

²⁰ Dixon, Joy, “Modernity, Heterodoxy and the Transformation of Religious Cultures,” in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, ed. Morgan, Sue and Vries, Jacqueline de, 212Google Scholar.

²¹ Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London, 2000), 7Google Scholar; See also Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar, which argues for the persistence of traditional ideals of religion and duty beyond the Great War and thus the incompleteness of modern sensibilities.

²² Nead, Victorian Babylon, 5.

²³ Chris Waters, “Sexology,” in Cocks and Houlbrook, The Modern History of Sexuality, 46.

²⁴ For a fuller discussion of a Christian female tradition of writings on sexuality, see Morgan, “‘The Word Made flesh.’”

²⁵ Maude Royden to Kathleen Courtney (henceforth MR to KC) from the Victoria Women's Settlement, 18 October 1901, Lady Margaret Hall Archives, Oxford (henceforth LMH), deposit 3.

²⁶ Royden wrote regularly to Courtney and debated numerous spiritual and doctrinal issues. For the ritualist controversies and the obedience of the Cowley Fathers on “incense and lights,” see MR to KC from her family home in Frankby Hall, 17 October 1899, LMH, deposit 3; for her thoughts on Comte and positivism, see MR to KC, 8 March 1901, LMH, deposit 3; for discussions of fasting, see MR to KC, 30 March 1901, LMH, deposit 3; for the issue of apostolic succession, see MR to KC, 3 September 1901, LMH, deposit 3, and MR to KC from the Rectory in South Luffenham, 31 October 1902, LMH, deposit 3.

²⁷ MR to KC, from Llanwrst, 1 October 1901, LMH, deposit 3.

²⁸ MR to KC, 31 October 1902, LMH, deposit 3.

²⁹ Royden's intense three-way friendship with the Hudson Shaws was recorded in her autobiographical memoir, A Threefold Cord (London, 1947)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Fletcher, Maude Royden, 1.

³¹ deVries, Jacqueline R., “Challenging Traditions: Denominational Feminism in Britain, 1910–1920,” in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, ed. Melman, Billie (London, 1998), 266–83Google Scholar; deVries, “More Than Paradoxes to Offer: Feminism, History and Religious Cultures,” in Morgan and deVries, Women, Gender and Religious Cultures, 188–210Google Scholar.

³² Maude Royden, “Extracts from May Mission Speeches delivered in London,” 11 May 1910, 7/AMR/1/81, FL379, 3–5, The Women's Library (henceforth TWL).

³³ Royden, Maude, “The Ethical Aspect of the Women's Movement,” in The Religious Aspect of the Women's Movement, cited in Fletcher, Maude Royden, 101–02Google Scholar.

³⁴ Heeney, The Women's Movement in the Church of England, 91. According to Heeney, Royden was one of a small group of Anglican feminists including Edith Picton-Turberville prepared to work outside the religious establishment during the early 1900s. Royden entered debates over women's voting and election rights onto parochial and national church councils as well as women's right to preach.

³⁵ MR to KC, 16 January 1918, KDC/HI/1-8, FL456, 3, TWL.

³⁶ Daily Chronicle, 19 March 1917, TWL, 7AMR/1/86, FL379. See also the Midland Tribune's comment that “[t]he size of the congregation suggested that the general admission of women to the ministry might be one means of solving the problem ‘How to fill the churches,’” Midland Tribune, 19 March 1917, 7AMR/1/86, FL379, TWL.

³⁷ Xanthippe, “Women of To-day and To-morrow. No 10—Maude Royden,” The Times, 4 March 1921.

³⁸ Royden, Maude, Sex and Common-Sense (London, 1921), 157Google Scholar. In a later publication Royden devoted an entire chapter to the “Influence of Tabu” and the damaging concept of women's ritual uncleanness. See Royden, The Church and Woman (London, 1924)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Royden, The Church and Woman, 208.

⁴⁰ See statement from Guildhouse programme and listed course of lecture series, 7AMR/1/32, FL223, TWL.

⁴¹ Royden, Maude, I Believe in God (London, 1927), 240Google Scholar.

⁴² Xanthippe, “Women of To-day and to-morrow.”

⁴³ Stopes's, MarieMarried Love (New York, 1918)Google Scholar sold 2000 copies in the first two weeks and 400,000 by 1923. Theo Van de Velde'sIdeal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (London, 1926)Google Scholar went through 43 printings. See Hall, Lesley, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (Basingstoke, 2000)Google Scholar, for a helpful overview of these developments.

⁴⁴ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 17Google Scholar. For Royden's critique of Bertrand Russell's Principles of Social Regulation, see her essay “Modern Love,” in The Making of Women: Oxford Essays in Feminism, ed. Gollancz, Victor (London, 1917), 36–63Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Editor's note, Journal of Social Hygiene 9, no. 6 (June 1923): 321Google Scholar

⁴⁶ The revised 1922 edition of Sex and Common-Sense written for an American audience, for example, added a section on divorce law reform and allowed Royden to clarify a number of readers' misunderstandings of the 1921 version.

⁴⁷ Catherine King to Maude Royden, 14 June 1948, 7AMR/1/03, FL119, TWL. Hurst and Blackett (now part of Random House) published the 1921 and 1947 editions of Sex and Common-Sense with G. P. Putnam publishing the 1922 US edition. The Guildhouse Fellowship stocked all of Royden's publications, including Sex and Common-Sense, and advertised them in its monthly newsletter. Requests were made by the head of the Mexican Young Women's Christian Association for its translation into Spanish, and correspondence from publishers and the press in the United States and Australia suggests that the book's sales were greatly improved by Royden's international preaching and lecturing tours.

⁴⁸ Hetty Wyon to Maude Royden, 28 February 1922, 7AMR/1/26, FL 222, TWL.

⁴⁹ Mrs Piper to Maude Royden, 6 December 1936, 7AMR/1/02, FL219, TWL.

⁵⁰ Falby, “Maude Royden's Sacramental Theology of Sex and Love,” 129.

⁵¹ Dunkley, Reverend C., ed., Offical Report of the Church Congress held at Southampton, September 28, 29 and 30, October 1–3 1913 (London, 1913), 306Google Scholar.

⁵² Royden, A. Maude, “Can we Believe in the Virgin Birth?” City Temple Pulpit no. 12 (22 June 1919), 89–96Google Scholar.

⁵³ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 31Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ See Pickering, W. S. F., Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1989, 2008)Google Scholar, for a helpful discussion of these concepts.

⁵⁵ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 16Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Royden, “Modern Love,” 38.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 43.

⁵⁸ See the discussion in Fletcher, Maude Royden, 238. Although initially rejected in 1923, the House of Bishops passed the amendment in 1925. The revised prayer book of 1927/28 included the option of equal vows and, although never adopted canonically, was approved for use in churches.

⁵⁹ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 117Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Royden, A Threefold Cord (London, 1947), 123Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 117Google Scholar.

⁶² Royden, A Threefold Cord, 28.

⁶³ Ibid., 104.

⁶⁴ Collins, Marcus, Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2003), 39–56Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 37Google Scholar. See Oram, Alison, “Repressed and Thwarted, or Bearer of the New World? The Spinster in Inter-War Feminist Discourses,” Women's History Review 1, no. 3 (1992): 414–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an early recognition of Royden's important construction of celibacy motivated by her religious faith. See also Holden, Katherine, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914–1960 (Manchester, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 39. In the 1922 edition Royden was concerned to correct a misunderstanding by her readers that Christ had actually succumbed to temptation and the “agony of longing” for intimate love: “In the first editions of this book a certain passage on our Lord's humanity (see p. 40) has, I find, been misunderstood by some. They have supposed it to imply a suggestion that our Lord was not only “tempted in all things like as we are”—which I firmly believe—but that He fell—which is to me unthinkable. I hope I have made this perfectly clear in the present edition.” Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1922), 57Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 61Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Lucy Delap, “Conservative Values, Anglicans, and the Gender Order in Interwar Britain,” 26. See also Delap, “Feminist and Anti-Feminist Encounters in Edwardian Britain,” Historical Research 78, no. 201 (August, 2005): 377–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷⁰ Dora Russell, “Marriage,” lecture delivered at the Guildhouse, 30 October 1927, and reprinted in Guildhouse Monthly 2, no. 13 (February 1928), 7AMR/2/15, FL380, 53, TWL. Although a detailed comparison of these two women's writings is beyond the remit of this article, some fascinating theoretical overlaps existed between Sex and Common-Sense and Russell's, DoraHypatia or Woman and Knowledge (London, 1924)Google Scholar in relation to religious attitudes toward the female body and the elimination of the mind/matter dualism.

⁷¹ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 91Google Scholar.

⁷² Royden, Maude, “A Note on Mrs Bertrand Russell's Address,” Guildhouse Monthly 13, no. 2 (February, 1928)Google Scholar, 7AMR/2/15, FL380, 54, TWL.

⁷³ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 56Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ See Jones, Timothy Willem, “The Missionaries' Position: Polygamy and Divorce in the Anglican Communion, 1888–1988,” Journal of Religious History 35, no. 3 (September 2011): 393–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an explanation of the verses in Matthew's gospel that facilitated the exception of remarriage after divorce on the grounds of fornication.

⁷⁵ Caitriona Beaumont has shown how, in the instance of the 1923 Matrimonial Causes Act, which equalized the gendered grounds for divorce, the Mothers' Union was more actively militant than the Anglican episcopacy itself, which did not intervene to try and prevent the passage of the act. In that sense the 1923 act provides an interesting and significant exception to the church's otherwise uncompromising attitude toward divorce between the wars. Thanks to one of my anonymous reviewers for this useful insight. See Beaumont, Caitriona, “Moral Dilemmas and Women's Rights: The Attitude of the Mothers' Union and Catholic Women's League to Divorce, Birth control and Abortion in England, 1928–1939,” Women's History Review 16, no. 4 (September, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moyse, Cordelia, “Freemasonry of Motherhood: Inventing the Mothers Union, 1876–1909,” Humanitas 3, no. 1 (2001)Google Scholar.

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⁷⁷ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1922), 206Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 209.

⁷⁹ Maude Royden, Statement made at the Guildhouse, 6 December 1936, and reported in the News Chronicle, 7 December 1936, 7AMR/1/02, FL219, TWL.

⁸⁰ The Daily Express also reported her statement in full and noted that the “sixty year old woman pastor” addressed over a thousand people, “mainly women.” Daily Express, 7 December 1936, 7AMR/1/02, FL219, TWL.

⁸¹ J. Septimus Powell to Maude Royden, 5 December 1936, 7AMR/1/02, FL219, TWL.

⁸² T. A. Caudwell to Maude Royden, 7 December 1936, 7AMR/1/02, FL 219, TWL.

⁸³ J. P. Brindley to Maude Royden, 5 December 1936, 7AMR/1/02, FL 219, TWL.

⁸⁴ Resolution 15, Voting: For 193; Against 67. Lambeth Conference Archives 1930. www.lambethconference.org/resolutions/1930/1930-15 (accessed 26 June 2011).

⁸⁵ See Jones, Tim, “The Disappearing Empire: Anglican Conversion to Contraception, 1905–1930,” in Exploring the British World, ed. Darian-Smith, Kate (Melbourne, 2004), 3–17Google Scholar; Falby, “Maude Royden's Sacramental Theology of Sex and Love,” 131.

⁸⁶ Scharlieb, Mary, “Social and Religious Aspects,” in The Control of Parenthood, ed. Marchant, James (London, 1920), 109Google Scholar; see also Beaumont, “Moral Dilemmas and Women's Rights.”

⁸⁷ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 192Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 191.

⁸⁹ Royden, Sex and CommonSense (1947), 102Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ A. Maude Royden, introduction to Ferch, Johann, Birth Control (London, 1926), 9–24Google Scholar. In her introduction she also drew a direct link between contraception and the reduction of abortion, a crime of such horror to her that she and her coeditor, Christian Roland, refused to translate the particular section of Ferch's book that advocated the legalizing of abortion in the first three months of pregnancy into English.

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⁹³ Ibid. See also Waters, “Sexology,” for a useful discussion of these developments.

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⁹⁸ The actual titles of Carpenter's texts are only footnoted by Royden in the 1947 edition of Sex and CommonSense.

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¹⁰⁰ Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 140Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 141.

¹⁰² Souhami, Diana, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (1998), 215Google Scholar. In the event, the Bishops' testimony was never heard because the trial was over before it could be used. Thanks to Tim Jones for this additional information.

¹⁰³ Maude Royden, “The Well of Loneliness,” sermon preached on 17 February 1929, reprinted in the Guildhouse Monthly 3, no. 26 (April 1929), TWL, 7AMR/2/15, FL380, 99. Thanks to Naomi Lloyd for her pertinent critical reading of this section.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 94–95.

¹⁰⁵ Radclyffe Hall to Maude Royden, 3 January 1930, 7AMR/1/20, TWL.

¹⁰⁶ Royden, Sex and CommonSense (1947), 30–31.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁷ Cited in Frankenburg, Charis, Not Old, Madam, Vintage (Lavenham, 1975), 83Google Scholar.

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¹⁰⁹ Royden, “The Well of Loneliness,” 101.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 111.

¹¹¹ Thomson, “Psychology and the ‘Consciousness of Modernity,’” 99.

¹¹² Gray, A. Herbert, Men, Women and God (Glasgow, 1923)Google Scholar; Weatherhead, Leslie, The Mastery of Sex Through Psychology and Religion (London, 1931)Google Scholar; Weatherhead, Psychology and Life (London 1934)Google Scholar; Weatherhead, Psychology in the Service of the Soul (London, 1941)Google Scholar.

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¹¹⁴ Ibid., 29.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 31.

¹¹⁶ Dixon, “Modernity, Heterodoxy and the Transformation of Religious Cultures,” 223.

¹¹⁷ MR to KC, 6 April 1903, LMH, deposit 3.

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¹¹⁹ Ibid., 34.

¹²⁰ Ibid.

¹²¹ Ibid., 38.

¹²² Ibid., 87.

¹²³ Ibid., 106.

¹²⁴ Thomson, “Psychology and the ‘Consciousness of Modernity,’” 104.

¹²⁵ Bertrand Russell to Maude Royden, 5 October 1917, 7AMR/1/25, FL222, TWL.

¹²⁶ Cocks, “Modernity and the Self in the History of Sexuality,” 1213.

¹²⁷ Brown, Death of Christian Britain; See Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives, ed. Garnett, Jane, Grimley, Matthew, Harris, Alana, Whyte, William, and Williams, Sarah (London, 2006), 291Google Scholar, for the use of the term “liquid religion.”