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Sex and Common-Sense: Maude Royden, Religion, and Modern Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2013

Sue Morgan
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Abstract

This article explores the relationship between religion, sexuality, and modernity through a study of the important yet neglected text Sex and Common-Sense (1921) by the celebrated Anglican feminist preacher, pacifist, and campaigner for women's ordination, Maude Royden (1876–1956). It argues for the ongoing vitality of religious constructions of sexual identity in interwar Britain and the deeply symbiotic rather than oppositional relationship between Christian and secular (scientific) discourses during this period. Royden's engagement with the new sexological and psychological approaches to the self and sexuality is examined, as are her efforts to modernize religious understandings of sexuality through a more compassionate, progressive reading of women's capacity for sexual pleasure, marriage reform, divorce, birth control, and homosexuality. The centrality of her High Church incarnational theology to an understanding of sex as sacramental is also assessed. The article proposes that histories of sexuality and histories of religion have hitherto worked with differing chronologies of secularization that have had interesting implications not only for the recognition of religion's continued influence in shaping mainstream British sexual morality but also for the uneven and multifarious readings of modernity itself.

Keywords

Maude RoydenReligionSexualityModernitySecularizationIncarnational theologyFeminismLesbianismSexologyPsychologyChurch of EnglandAnglicanismSacramentalismMarriageDivorceHomosexuality
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 153 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013

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References

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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).

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88 Ibid., 191.

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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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97 Ibid., 145.

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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101 Ibid., 141.

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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.

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114 Ibid., 29.

115 Ibid., 31.

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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.

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