Prior to 1912 the MU’s spirituality was largely that of a movement rather than an institution. While a common prayer life and mission were articulated in publications, there was little evidence that the MU was a coherent group of devout Christian women.¹ It was only in the years after 1910 that the MU became a recognisable Anglican institution. Previously this was an implied identity but not one fully worked out or widely understood and accepted within the organisation. The intensity of the debates on the MU’s identity throughout the period and the resulting outcomes reveal that the MU was far...

In addition to spirituality another key to unlocking the evolving identity of the MU as a maturing organisation is to be found in its attempts to influence public policy. After the presidency of Mary Sumner in 1909, the MU established an increasingly high profile in political and social debates concerning marriage and family life. The vision as well as the machinery that underpinned it owed much to Sumner’s immediate successor as Central President, the Dowager Countess of Chichester. Sumner had shrunk ‘from touching on the sad side of life’.¹ Chichester by contrast, with her background as a clergy wife in...

Between 1910 and 1940 the MU experienced an eight-fold increase in the number of overseas members. Overseas membership stood at just under 80,000 in 1940 and represented around 12 per cent of the total membership. Formerly expansion overseas had been largely driven by the enthusiasm of expatriates in British colonies to secure the benefits of the MU for themselves while they were so far away from home. Now the combined drive of missionary-minded women and the imperial vision of the Central MU worked together to create and nurture an indigenous overseas membership. The shift is most clearly illustrated by the...

The MU entered the post-war world with a renewed sense of its mission to the nation. Wartime bombing, evacuation and conscription had disrupted the domestic and community lives of millions. At the same time traditional constraints around sexual activity and alcohol consumption, particularly among the young and women, had weakened. In 1944 the radical Bishop of Birmingham, Ernest Barnes, when surveying family life, claimed that many families had ‘disintegrated’ in the face of total warfare. His remedy for all its consequent social evils ‘was that national home life should be re-established as rapidly as possible’. This was a view shared...

From the vantage point of 1944 it was not unreasonable for the MU leadership to have some confidence that its views on women, the family and on Christian faith in daily life were still widely shared and would inform public policy. The longing for an end to war was often fed by a desire for home and hearth with family members resuming their traditional gender roles. It was possible to see Christianity as standing at the heart of the nation’s life. At an ideological level the Second World War had been seen as moral struggle between ‘Christian’ civilisation and the...

Adaptation, identity and loyalty were the key and increasingly interrelated issues the MU needed to address as a worldwide organisation in this period. Some form of adaptation was required for the post-war ecclesial and secular international environments in which the MU operated bore little resemblance to their pre-war counterparts. Ideas of independence and liberation took hold in non-Western countries which were once colonised or feudal societies with the result that as different peoples assumed new identities the political map of the world was redrawn. For the MU the single most dramatic event which affected its mission followed the establishment of...

The MU was virtually born again in 1974. Its new constitution gave it five new objects through which it was to express its mission to marriage and family life. For members in the British Isles 1974 marked the official end of the MU’s 80-year obsession with a ‘pure’ membership engaged in resisting all divorce. Instead the MU took on a new pastoral commitment to supporting people whatever their domestic situation rather than seeking to impose one model of the ideal relationship. For members across the world the MU created its own post-colonial era, with overseas MU councils having the opportunity...