Labour, Love, and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850-1914.

Johnson, Dale A.

Labour, Love, and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850-1914. By Andrea Ebel Brozyna. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion 2. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. xvi + 291 pp. $65.00 cloth.

The study of women or of gender issues in Irish history has been relatively limited when compared to work done on the subject in English or U.S. history, and most of that dealing with religious topics has been focused on Catholicism and, more particularly, on women's religious orders. In her research on religious literature in Ulster (the six counties in the north of Ireland that remained part of the United Kingdom after Irish independence in the early twentieth century), Brozyna helps to redress the balance by attending to Protestants (understood as evangelicals throughout the book) as well as Catholics and to the impact of this literature chiefly on middle-class lay-women. The argument that emerges in her narrative has two parts especially worth noting: that Protestants and Catholics each constructed virtually identical notions of Christian womanhood and female piety (albeit with slightly varying use of role models and religious resources) and that each community did so with almost no recognition of this similarity and as part of its own construction of community identity and the denigration and stereotyping of the other.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century Ulster was a very religious region of a very religious Ireland, in contrast to the general waning of religious adhesion and practice in Western European countries. For Catholics, this was due in part to the significance of religious identity over against Britain; for Protestants, conversely, religious identity was part of the connection to British culture. Brozyna introduces her subject with a discussion of social and demographic changes in Ulster in the period under consideration. Census reports indicate that the province was almost equally divided between Catholics and Protestants in 1861, with Catholics in the majority; from that date the percentage of Catholics steadily declined to under 45 percent by 1911. The construction of Christian womanhood was, for each community, part of their larger identity and part of the antagonism against the other; the tragedy, as the author tells it, is that neither side could see how similar their views were.

For one only somewhat acquainted with the American story, the language and the constructions from Ulster are rather familiar. "The cult of domesticity," rhetoric of female moral superiority and women's sphere, and gender essentialisms abound; the virtues of purity, holiness, service, and self-sacrifice are reinforced in the role models provided by biblical and early-church women. Brozyna knows the work of Barbara Welter, Ann Douglas, and others, but argues for Ulster's distinctiveness because the social context gives the same words different connotations. The import of this point is not entirely clear since it is not really elaborated. Brozyna would have profited from consulting Colleen McDannell's comparative Protestant-Catholic study, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), where topics such as architecture and ritual are pursued along with literature. After exploring ways that the ideals were inculcated in the education of Ulster girls in convent schools, children's magazines, and Sunday schools, Brozyna uses the final three chapters of the book to examine Protestant literature on roles for women and on temperance and missionary work. In the literature on temperance she shows well how the model became paradoxical, with women being both the greatest victims of drink and the champions of temperance (though not challenging male authority and going into the streets, as their American counterparts were doing). In missions work only can one see glimpses of how the model of Christian womanhood could provide resources for the expansion of horizons, through organization of societies, fundraising, and the like, instead of for their limitation, but even here, the literature placed considerable emphasis on what a woman could do at home.

If the model continued in substantially the same form to 1914, as Brozyna maintains, it hung on longer in Ulster than it did in England or the United States. Questions of how, why, or when it was seriously challenged are not explored here, though they could have been relevant for a conclusion. Did the mutual concern for identity by Protestants and Catholics in a religiously charged environment make the construction of womanhood captive to a larger ideological contest? If some such reflections had been incorporated into the narrative and some of the repetitive material pared, this carefully researched work would have been that much more suggestive.

Dale A. Johnson Vanderbilt University