Social Motherhood and Spiritual Authority in a Secularizing Age: Moral Welfare Work in the Church of England, 1883–1961

Abstract

The article considers how the field of moral welfare and social work empowered religious women, and how these women met the challenge posed by Yeo (1998: 45), ‘to find ways of breaking the material, representational and psychic chains of subordination without reassembling them at the same time in a different form’. Based on an examination of the archival records and reports of these moral welfare organizations the article argues that the spiritual dimension of moral welfare work provided particular resources that empowered women and mitigated the subordinating operation of power in client relationships. These resources were, however, dependent on mutual subscription of religious doctrines, a condition that did not remain stable into the 1960s.