The British ethical societies, forerunners of Humanists UK, emerged in the 1880s. As the London Ethical Society put it in its first report in 1887, they offered a basis for “well-doing and well-being” cut loose from supernatural beliefs. In a century which witnessed the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the societies responded to the “breaking up of older modes of thought and feeling” with a lived philosophy based in rationality, goodness and reform.
Victorian women were prized as stewards of family and faith; portrayed as selfless, pious and divinely wrought for the role of wife and mother. Yet despite these supposedly God-given traits, they could occupy only marginal roles within organised religious bodies. This was, as Barbara Taylor has written, an “ideal of femininity which combined holy love with social subordination”. It was emphasised with special force in the early 19th century, in the wake of revolution overseas, and fears of radicalism at home.
With women’s vital “mission” rooted in the upholding and passing on of society’s social and moral values, their position in relation to religious faith and morality was particularly vulnerable to examination and criticism, not least in the case of the unbeliever. As the Manchester Evening News wrote in 1892, ethical societies offered a space for “those who [had] no longer a place in established religious organisations”, providing not only an alternative Sunday activity, but a network in support of humane and reasoned reform across all areas of society.
The men of the movement have been remembered as its driving forces, but this neglects the numerous women who populated and propelled it. Many of these were active in efforts towards social change, often with a focus on those areas in which Christian concepts of morality had undue sway. Among these were May Seaton-Tiedeman, described in a 1960s House of Lords debate as “a woman of tremendous dynamism and drive”, who championed divorce law reform tirelessly for decades; Dr Alice Vickery, a lifelong campaigner for reproductive rights; and socialist feminist Zona Vallance, whose early death in 1904 cut short a life devoted to women’s legal and financial equality.
These were women who dispensed with ideas of God-given morality and instead used reason and compassion as a basis for living, and for seeking social change. The ethical societies were full of women who worked in areas of social reform, medicine, education and the arts, and derived their sense of duty from the “purely human”.
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The first English ethical society was formed in 1886 in London, intending to establish “a rational conception of human good”, by way of education, discussion and fellowship. This, and the many others that followed, acknowledged that an increase in scientific understanding had helped to convince many of the inadequacy of religious ideas: “their reverence” for which, wrote the London Ethical Society, “has been undermined by the necessary progress of thought”.
The ethical societies set morality apart from theology, and required no avowal (or disavowal) of traditional religious belief. In taking ethics as their basis, their very name preempted accusations of moral waste in the unbeliever. While some societies actively sought to redefine the concepts of “God” and “religion” to mean aspiring towards the good, many simply set aside those terms altogether. In either case, the ethical societies provided a more socially acceptable means of expressing unbelief, for middle-class women in particular, than a public disavowal of Christianity and churchgoing.
The first half of the century had seen outspoken, irreligious women harshly castigated. Susannah Wright was described in the press as the “She-Champion of Impiety”, secularist Eliza Sharples as a “pythoness”. The sex of the female infidel made her a particular target of ire, and criticisms were frequently girded by the acute horror of femininity betrayed. In the same century’s final decades, the notion of morality and respectability apart from Christianity remained controversial. Six years before the emergence of the ethical societies in Britain, Julia Stephen – whose husband Leslie Stephen was president of the West London Ethical Society – was prompted to write an (unpublished) defence of the agnostic woman, in answer to an article by Bertha Lathbury which had appeared in April 1880.
Lathbury’s essay gave new expression to long-held fears about the non-religious woman: that the abandonment of Christianity meant a betrayal of womanhood itself, and a breakdown in the social order. She warned of the impact of agnosticism on the heart of women (their most defining element), which would leave them broken and less likely to perform their primary duties in society. Lathbury argued that women, in abandoning their belief in a higher power and an afterlife, would see the education of the poor as futile (awareness of one’s poverty only brings misery without the promise of a better hereafter), and would no longer see the virtue of caring for the elderly or impaired.
Clearly affronted, Stephen stated firmly that “purity of life, sincerity of action, obedience to law, [and] love of our fellow creatures” were all quite possible without religious belief or adherence to doctrine. She took aim, too, at the distinction between the sexes in matters of reason and religion. In “the acceptance or rejection of a creed,” Stephen wrote, “let the woman be judged as the man.”
Examples abound of members of the ethical societies who lent their weight to Stephen’s argument, and many leading figures wrote and spoke on the need for a new conception of the moral impulse. Zona Vallance, the first secretary of the Union of Ethical Societies (the inaugural Chief Executive of Humanists UK), stated this clearly in her article “The Ethical Movement and Women”:
Our ideal of human goodness cannot remain the same as when we believed a Supernatural Father played providence over the race, and allotted, with divine fore-knowledge, a station and duties to each and all… Individual goodness is no longer obedience to ten Commandments or two, but a condition of relatedness which has variations.
This “condition of relatedness”, freed from any notion of “supernatural rewards and punishments”, animated numerous women in their membership of the ethical societies, and in a host of progressive, reformist efforts, both outside and as part of the movement. So too did the feminist call that it contained for equality between the sexes and increased opportunities for women.
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A concern for children and their education was a key aspect of the societies’ aims, with “moral” instruction forefronted from the earliest days. Alice Woods, an active member and pioneer of co-education, argued that the job of education was to teach the next generation to improve on the world of their parents, and to live better together, learning from history and adapting to a changing society – with a focus on working for this world, not the next.
The ethical societies offered a means not merely of expressing a lack of belief in traditional theological ideas, but of making a positive assertion of belief in humanity. This remains central to the appeal of humanism today, and for the emergent ethical societies of the late Victorian period and early 20th century it provided a significant defence against the derisive charge of “agnosticism”, so often synonymous with amorality.
The arguments against the non-religious woman popular in the 19th century seem grossly outdated now. But in significant ways they are not unfamiliar to those who have been met with incredulity, or a questioning of their moral compass, in expressing unbelief. For late Victorian women, and well into the 20th century, the ethical societies enabled a focus on moral action rather than theological abstraction, championing progressive social reform and helping lend respectability to atheism.
This article draws on research carried out for the Humanist Heritage project, celebrating 125 years of Humanists UK
This article is from the New Humanist spring 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
