Faith, sex and purity: the religio-feminist theory of Ellice Hopkins

This article argues for the greater exploration of religion as a category of analysis in the writing of women's history. Taking as its focus the late nineteenth-century movement for social purity, and leading purity protagonist, Ellice Hopkins, it looks at the way in which careful consideration of the interaction between religious belief and women's activism may significantly revise existing interpretations of the campaigns surrounding sexual morality. The article argues that churchwomen were prominent contributors in the articulation of prescriptive moral norms of sexual identities and that it is possible to rehabilitate these seemingly conservative reactionary Christian women to reveal a series of surprisingly radical, unorthodox constructions of gender and sexual morality.