Evangelical Religion and Victorian Women: The Belfast Female Mission, 1859–1903

Abstract

In 1859, following the evangelical revival in Ulster, a Female Mission was founded in Belfast as an evangelistic agency and philanthropic enterprise. It was one of many voluntary societies. Upper-class evangelical women employed the services of lower-class women of similar religious energy to work among the poor of the city. This article explores the surviving documentation of the mission to assess its work, and, more important, to ascertain if involvement in this limited public sphere was a catalyst in the broader liberation of evangelical women. The issues go beyond the relationship of inner faith and public expression in popular religion to the notion that evangelicalism, as a heightened form of Christian belief and action, was a trajectory as well as a boundary in nineteenth-century society.