12 - Women writers and religion

Summary

But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster … There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3.281

St Paul's teaching promised an end to slavery and gender inequity, but the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed heated religious debate over the ushering in of Christ's kingdom on earth, some seeing the abolition of slavery and the growth of missionary and philanthropic societies as signs that the millennial period of Christ's second coming had already begun, but others, wanting evidence of more catastrophic intervention, postponed the realization of Paul's vision to heaven, or an earth that could only be transformed by Christ's arrival in person. Meanwhile the religious dispensation of a beneficent Providence, represented on earth by an educative paternal authority, was subject to successive attacks from Deists, geologists and those who found it hard to see the purposive love of God in the industrial and domestic slavery they saw around them.

Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South (1855), depicts a world where ‘Masters and Men’ between them have signally failed to bring about the lineaments of a Christian state. Gaskell juxtaposes two nineteen-year-old girls, Bessy and Margaret, to suggest a spectrum of the latest generation of women's responses to this failure. Bessy, the dying factory girl, passively accepts ‘pain and sorrow’ as women's prophetic lot.