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Mother Mary and Victorian Protestants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
One of the defining characteristics of Victorian culture was its insistence that women were naturally maternal. Marriage and motherhood were assumed to be the twin goals of every young woman. Those who did not bear children were termed ‘redundant’ (perhaps most famously in W.R. Greg’s 1862 article, ‘Why are women redundant?’), yet were still assumed to have maternal instincts. Equally significant to Victorian culture was its Christianity. Notwithstanding the fact that only about half of the English and Welsh actually attended religious services, the presence of an established Church, the frequency with which political and religious questions coincided, and the certainty that England was (as one clergyman confidently expressed it) illuminated by the ‘very sun-shine of Protestantism’, combined to make Victorian culture Christian, and moreover, Protestant.
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