'A high and holier state': Challenges to female power in early Anglican sisterhoods, 1845-1870

The first Anglican sisterhood was established in the Church of England in 1845. By 1870 there were thirty-eight such communities in existence with several hundred members. Sisterhoods provided opportunities for single women who sought alternatives to domestic life and challenged popular conceptions of women's accepted roles. In doing so, these communities posed a threat to various aspects of middle-class culture and provoked widespread hostility from English society. One particular element of sisterhoods which critics attacked was the profession of religious vows by the sisters. This thesis examines how the vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty provided women in sisterhoods with significant freedoms and allowed them to assert a variety of forms of female power. Opponents of these communities challenged the power displayed by sisters by concentrating specifically on what they believed the vows represented. The vow of obedience enabled sisters to devote themselves to God under the direction of a Mother Superior. Their freedom from male control within marriage was perceived as a challenge to Victorian patriarchal authority. Sisters' freely-chosen celibacy liberated them from male sexual control and threatened middle-class masculinity. In addition, celibacy challenged Victorian beliefs that women's special position in society derived from their role as wives and mothers. The vow of poverty gave sisters the right to control their own property and served as a tacit reproach of material culture. By enabling their members to live relatively free of male authority, and to control their bodies and their property, sisterhoods contributed to the movement for women's emancipation and changed popular attitudes regarding women's rights to work outside the home.