Sex and Common-Sense: Maude Royden, Religion, and Modern Sexuality

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between religion, sexuality, and modernity through a study of the important yet neglected text Sex and Common-Sense (1921) by the celebrated Anglican feminist preacher, pacifist, and campaigner for women's ordination, Maude Royden (1876–1956). It argues for the ongoing vitality of religious constructions of sexual identity in interwar Britain and the deeply symbiotic rather than oppositional relationship between Christian and secular (scientific) discourses during this period. Royden's engagement with the new sexological and psychological approaches to the self and sexuality is examined, as are her efforts to modernize religious understandings of sexuality through a more compassionate, progressive reading of women's capacity for sexual pleasure, marriage reform, divorce, birth control, and homosexuality. The centrality of her High Church incarnational theology to an understanding of sex as sacramental is also assessed. The article proposes that histories of sexuality and histories of religion have hitherto worked with differing chronologies of secularization that have had interesting implications not only for the recognition of religion's continued influence in shaping mainstream British sexual morality but also for the uneven and multifarious readings of modernity itself.