Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857-1957

The period between 1857 and 1957 saw a transformation in Anglican sexual understanding, in which sub- and superordination declined as the structuring principle of sexual relations. In this period the established church negotiated substantial new normative interpretations of marriage, sexuality, citizenship, and priesthood. The book reveals the importance of the gendering of ecclesiastical political spaces to Anglican sexual policy, how the introduction of female voices into the previously exclusively male spheres of power transformed understandings of gender. It also delineates the impact of the Anglo-Catholic revival on Anglican sexual culture, in particular, the significance of catholic sacramentality on understandings of the relationship between the sexual and the spiritual. Finally, it exposes a surprisingly dynamic and dialogical relationship between theology, feminism, and the new sexual sciences that resists the teleologies of secularization that dominate the histories of sexuality and Christianity in Britain. The story of Anglican sexual politics told in this book firmly rebuts contemporary notions of the Church as an inevitably reactionary institution. In contrast, it reveals the Church’s historic capacity to renegotiate gender and sexual ideologies, and shows how it was often at the forefront of sexual change in British society.