A History of the Mothers' Union: Women, Anglicanism and Globalisation, 1876-2008

Abstract

Founded in 1876 by a Hampshire vicar's wife, Mary Sumner, and launched as a national organisation at the 1885 Church Congress, the Mothers’ Union (MU) had 500,000 members by 1939. By the time this book—the first serious history of the MU—went to press it had 3.6 million members in 78 countries. It is described here in a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Jane Williams as ‘the most influential and widespread lay movement in the churches of the [Anglican] Communion’. Historians have sometimes treated it as the antithesis of modern feminism, sometimes as an example of conservative feminism. But throughout the twentieth century its membership in the British Isles outnumbered those of the secular self-styled feminist organisations (though not the National Federation of Women's Institutes, which overtook it after the Second World War). In recent years the MU's appeal to women of the global South, and its relatively calm reaction to divisions among Anglicans regarding homosexuality, have raised its profile within the Church. Its archives are now in Lambeth Palace Library, and Cordelia Moyse—herself an active MU member, and a historian of marriage and divorce in the early twentieth century—has used them to research this wide-ranging and critical institutional biography.