The Hungry Soul: George Cheyne and the Construction of Femininity

Abstract

Before 1700, the active participation of women in organized religion in Britain was generally looked upon with suspicion and scorn. Sectarians such as the Quakers allowed women have greater roles, but this had little impact on the Church of England. Over the course of the eighteenth century, women's roles in religion changed, and they assumed responsibility as the moral and spiritual caretakers of the family. One may argue that as religion became less central culture, it was left to women uphold. Yet even among the sects, which in the seventeenth century had dissociated women's religious experience from their social roles, religious authority came be tied women's domestic roles.' In this essay, I contend that this changed role is part of a wider redefining of women's place which centered on a new definition of female physiology. Over the course of the century, the medical definition of the female changed from being primarily physical being primarily emotional: from body spirit. The works of the eighteenth-century Bath physician George Cheyne (1671-1743) display the process of this redefinition and its interrelatedness both medicine and religion. Exemplifying women's redefined role were Cheyne's patients Lady Elizabeth Hastings and the Countess of Huntingdon, as well as Hester Gibbon and Elizabeth Hutcheson, followers of his close friend William Law.