Any discussion of nineteenth-century religious Dissent must look carefully at gender. Although distinct from one another in important respects, Nonconformist congregations were patterned on the household as the first unit of God-given society, a model which fostered questions about the relationship between male and female. Ideas of gender coalesced with theology and praxis to shape expectations central to the cultural ethos of Nonconformity. Existing historiographical interpretations of gender and religion that use the separate spheres model have argued that evangelical piety was identified with women who were carefully separated from the world, while men needed to be reclaimed for religion. Despite their virtues, these interpretations suppose that evangelicalism was a hegemonic movement about which it is possible to generalize. Yet the unique history and structures of Nonconformity ensured a high degree of particularity. Gender styles were subtly interpreted and negotiated in Dissenting culture over and against the perceived practices and norms of the mainstream, creating what one Methodist called a ‘whole sub-society’ differentiated from worldly patterns in the culture at large. Dissenting men, for instance, deliberately sought to effect coherence between public and private arenas and took inspiration from the published lives of ‘businessmen “saints”’. Feminine piety in Dissent likewise rested on integration, not separation, with women credited with forming godly communities. The insistence on inherent spiritual equality was important to Dissenters and was imaged most clearly in marriage, which transcended the public/private divide and supplied a model for domestic and foreign mission. Missionary work also allowed for the valorization and mobilization of distinctive feminine and masculine types, such as the single woman missionary who bore ‘spiritual offspring’ and the manly adventurer. Over the century, religious revivals in Dissent might shift these patterns somewhat: female roles were notably renegotiated in the Salvation Army, while Holiness revivals stimulated demands for female preaching and women’s religious writing, making bestsellers of writers such as Hannah Whitall Smith. Thus Dissent was characterized throughout the Anglophone world by an emphasis on spiritual equality combined with a sharpened perception of sexual difference, albeit one which was subject to dynamic reformulation throughout the century.
