Historians of the Church of England have paid little attention to the women's movement. There have been several serious studies of religious communities for women, and there is increasing interest in churchwomen's part in Victorian philanthropy and moral reform. Studies of Victorian marriage and family life have an important religious dimension. Alan Wilkinson's recent book on The Church of England and the First World War makes a number of references to women's work and aspirations, subjects virtually excluded from Roger Lloyd's standard history of the twentieth-century church. The history of women's place in the management and recognised ministry of the Church of England, in its institutional life at local, regional and national levels, has not been touched.