Anglican sisterhoods have only recently come under historical scrutiny. These religious communities for women, with their roots in the Oxford Movement, emerged into public prominence in the 1840s, but the first scholar to pay serious attention to them was Peter Anson in Call of the cloister, in 1956. Anson relied in large part on material sent to him by the communities themselves, and produced essentially uncritical accounts of their histories.Footnote ¹ Arthur Allchin's study The silent rebellion: Anglican religious communities, 1845–1900 (London 1958) remained for several decades the standard history of the subject, and was the only attempt to provide an integrated history of the movement, more than a century after its inception. There was a sociological study in the 1970s, and in the following decades the topic became of interest to women's historians. Martha Vicinus devoted a chapter to Anglican sisterhoods in Independent women: work and community for single women, 1850–1920 (London 1985), and a recent social history of sisterhoods was Susan Mumm, Stolen daughters, virgin mothers: Anglican sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (Leicester 1999).Footnote ²

The relative slowness with which historians began to engage with the sisterhoods is in strong contrast with the outpouring of public comment and debate during the first few decades of their existence, described in 1850 as a ‘rage’ and a ‘monomania’.Footnote ³ The Church of England, in particular, struggled to respond to the unwanted gift of community life given to it by the women's religious orders. The emergence of Anglican sisterhoods, and the episcopal response to them, provides ample opportunities to reflect upon the uncomfortable relationship between gender, religion, authority and influence in the Victorian Church of England. The issues underlying the narrative of the struggle between sisterhoods and the episcopate expose the social and cultural assumptions in which the conflict between sisterhoods and the bishops were enmeshed.

Anglican sisterhoods occupied equivocal and disputed space within the Victorian Church of England, proclaiming their loyalty to the Church but unfettered by any ecclesiastical legislation or tradition that would have compelled them to obey the bishops. In a society that assumed that obedience to lawful authority was a natural attribute of godly women, their ambiguous and improvised relationship with the church hierarchy created enormous tension as well as considerable hostility.

It had always been assumed that the destiny of any individual within the Church of England was determined – indeed, overdetermined – by sex: men with a religious vocation could aspire to positions of authority and power by following a career path through the priesthood. Women, strictly speaking, could not realise a religious vocation, but could instead aspire to religious influence within the privacy of the family. Women's influence was a favourite theme of both religious and secular writers of Victorian advice and conduct manuals. Advice literature, although it must be handled with caution, is a suggestive source when researching the emotional lives of Victorian women: it was, in many respects, the self-help literature of the age. Like contemporary self-help books, the chief consumers of the genre were women, and while it may not be a reliable guide to what women actually did, it provides valuable evidence as to their aspirations. To take one celebrated example: Sarah Stickney Ellis's populist bestseller, The women of England, first published in 1839, and which had reached its tenth edition by 1850, was a work saturated in devotional language and religious teaching adapted for the home. One striking element is the proportion of the book devoted to the differing duties of women: six pages discussing women's duties to themselves (the development of intellect and strengthening of moral courage), are overwhelmed by almost 180 pages admonishing women on their duty to their families. No duties external to the home are acknowledged. Ultimately, Ellis argues, the impact of positive moral and religious influence within a context of familial duty will influence the national destiny, making domestic religiosity (and its encouragement through such books) of enormous importance:

Ellis is not unusual in the heavy stress she lays upon female influence over ‘minor morals’, and in the religious significance she lays upon them. By mid-century, such pronouncements were so widely accepted as to be little more than truisms, but they still indicate the weight of cultural expectation placed on women in their narrow sphere. Attitudes toward women who ventured beyond their roles as wives, mothers and daughters in wider Victorian society veered between disdain and contempt. It required nothing more to thoroughly damn Anglo-Catholicism than the simple observation that their churches were full of women: a criticism frequently made by its opponents.Footnote ⁵ That this situation had become intolerable to many Christian women who felt no vocation for marriage is clear from Florence Nightingale's famous plea of 1860: ‘The Church of England has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics, and a little work. She has for women – what? They would give her their heads, their hearts, their hands. She will not have them. She does not know what to do with them.’Footnote ⁶

This was the cultural atmosphere – influence for women, authority for men – in which sisterhoods emerged. The first Anglican sisterhood was founded in 1845, and by the end of the century more than 100 distinct communities had come into existence, some with numerous daughter houses across the United Kingdom.Footnote ⁷ There had also been significant expansion abroad, with houses established across the British empire and into the United States.Footnote ⁸ By 1900 Anglican sisters had become a familiar sight in hundreds of parishes and it would have been an unusually neglectful Anglican who had not heard of them, and who did not hold strong views regarding them, whether positive or negative.

But all this growth and expansion was carried out without the approval of the Anglican episcopate, a situation very unlike the similar growth in Roman Catholic orders in the same period. Paradoxically, the movement grew in the face of strong disapproval from most bishops, most clergy and the archbishops of both Canterbury and York. However, like the Anglo-Catholicism from which sisterhoods sprang, toleration varied from diocese to diocese and the bishops were unable or unprepared to offer a completely united front in opposition. The early outburst of hostility against the Devonport sisterhood in the late 1840s meant that the generality of bishops was ‘paralyzed and frightened into antagonism, or at least into withdrawal of support’.Footnote ⁹ This community, styled the Society of the Most Holy Trinity, but usually called Ascot Priory, was founded by Priscilla Lydia Sellon, and devoted itself to work with the poor in Plymouth and London; it was under attack from very early on. It attracted great swells of public hostility, largely due to accusations of ritualistic practices, as well as anger expressed toward the autocratic behaviour of the foundress, who was certainly not known for her willingness to conciliate public opinion by espousing conventional feminine behaviour. The only two Victorian bishops prepared to defend women's communities were Archibald Campbell TaitFootnote ¹⁰ (London 1856–69; Canterbury 1868–82) and Samuel Wilberforce (Oxford 1845–69; Winchester 1869–73), whose toleration of these institutions was confined within such narrow limits that all sisterhoods associated with them were forced to disobey their bishop in order to continue their existence as vow-taking religious communities. It is debatable whether such half-hearted support was worth the trouble of courting it, and many sisterhoods concluded that it was not.

In 1866 Archbishop Charles Thomas Longley (Canterbury 1862–8) consulted the bishops on the question of re-establishing religious orders; he discovered that all of them, with only one or two exceptions, were adamantly opposed. By the time that the bishops came to this conclusion, approximately thirty sisterhoods describing themselves as Anglican had been founded, and the oldest of them had been functioning successfully, and extremely publicly, within the Church of England for more than twenty years. In the course of a Convocation debate on sisterhoods in 1862, a member of the Lower House had advised the bishops to ‘confine’ and ‘protect’ sisterhoods. He added ‘they have been left to themselves … they have been under no direct sanction … they have been unable to look up to the Church to father their institutions and give them certain regulations under which to act’.Footnote ¹¹ Rejected by the episcopate, sisterhoods were then condemned for their isolation from the Church, as in this Convocation report of 1885: ‘These Communities are practically isolated and independent of external control. Their present isolated position is full of danger alike to the communities and to the English Church … . They need to be brought under Ecclesiastical control.’Footnote ¹²

Views had not moderated by the end of the century. In a private bishops' meeting at Lambeth Palace in 1897, one bishop gave voice to worries about competition, declaring that there was a real danger that women's communities would in time overshadow the Church: he warned in astonished indignation: ‘already they are more popular than the bishops!’ Such alarmist rhetoric was not unusual. Sisterhoods were described by members of the episcopate as ‘a peril to the bench of bishops’, as an ‘unexploded mine under the Church’ and as ‘the greatest danger the Church faces’. In 1890 Archbishop Benson described Anglican sisterhoods as a ‘presbyterian system [which] has started up in the heart of episcopacy’.Footnote ¹³ The prevailing sentiment was that communities were a threat for two reasons: because they were not controlled by episcopal authority, and because they were composed entirely of women. As Benson's remark about Presbyterianism implies, some did not consider them as even truly belonging to the Anglican communion.

Given the vehemence of episcopal and priestly opposition to communities, and to the Anglo-Catholic theology of which they were perhaps the most visible manifestation, it is worth considering how this situation of spectacular growth in the face of determined and vocal opposition developed. Sisterhoods are a Victorian phenomenon, with more than 100 established between 1840 and 1900, and commentators have understood them variously as a safe haven for unmarried ‘superfluous’ women, as an attractive alternative to marriage for women who were repulsed by the emotional demands of Victorian family life, or as transitional institutions in a period when women's roles were undergoing rapid change.Footnote ¹⁴ Regardless of motivation, sisterhoods were founded by women who felt a vocation to the religious life, and who wanted to carry it out within the Anglican tradition. Typically, a woman would leave her home, and start living a life of full-time charity, often with a friend or two as companions. They attended the services at a local church sympathetic to Anglo-Catholicism, usually supplementing them with private worship based around the offices. Many attempts must have failed while still at this impromptu and casual level, and we can discover little or nothing about them. But some of these Anglican foundresses were women of considerable character, charisma and financial resources, and enjoyed impeccable personal connexions. For the 100 or so sisterhoods founded in the nineteenth century that developed a significant presence, these tiny nuclei soon attracted other women and a regular religious life was commenced in the English Church, for the first time since the Reformation. ‘This bold taking on of a new beginning; the strong sense that things not only ought to be, but could be changed, and that the time had come to do so; the belief that courage and daring were major female virtues’Footnote ¹⁵ are all characteristics of first-generation sisters: attractive to us, perhaps, but repellent to the bishops – and to the society in general – of their own time, when displayed by women. All except one of the nineteenth-century foundations lived the active life, which meant that they were clearly visible, and indeed, often prominent, given the notoriety their dress and communal life attracted in the communities and parishes in which they worked. So prominent did they become that one bishop went so far as to worry that the entire nation would ‘suffer much, both socially, morally, and spiritually’ if women entered religious communities instead of marrying clergymen.Footnote ¹⁶

It would be ahistorical to condemn the episcopal response for its conservatism. The bishops were men of their time, and were certainly not in advance of it. Given their backgrounds, education and careers, it is indisputable that in general they tended to be more socially conservative than most men of their generation. With a wide variety of political and theological perspectives, they shared to the full the reflexively contemptuous and dismissive attitude of their society toward the independent efforts of women.Footnote ¹⁷ All of them, without exception, were only willing to accept women's work when guided and controlled by themselves or their clerical brethren. One ‘defender’ of sisterhoods explained, ‘any extravagencies into which they have fallen are owing to the fact that they have been left to themselves; that they have been under no direct sanction, and that they have been unable to look up to the Church to father their institutions, and give them certain regulations under which to act’.Footnote ¹⁸ This situation meant that Anglican sisters (who claimed that they were ‘reviving’ a pre-Reformation tradition of religious life for women) were opposed by two of the most powerful forces in their society: the Established Church, and the popular understanding of appropriate female religiosity as expressed through domestic influence rather than public action. The episcopate (and sometimes the lower clergy) assumed that they should be given authority over the inner life of sisterhoods, an assumption at the root of much conflict. Sisterhoods, of course, were not keen on being governed by outsiders, and most managed to avoid it. As Emily Ayckbowm, the Mother Foundress of the Sisters of the Church, wrote in her diary in 1883, ‘Having read yesterday in the Guardian that the St. John's sisters are in real trouble with their extraordinary Council, I remembered I had long promised the Superior a visit to explain how we manage to govern the Community without aid from men.’Footnote ¹⁹

In addition, the lack of precedent for the movement alarmed the bishops. Having no tradition of such groups in the post-Reformation Church of England, the bishops had no history of contact with the religious life, nor did they have any sympathy with it, especially with the elements which demanded vows of chastity and of life-long perseverance.Footnote ²⁰ They held to the view that monasticism was deservedly eliminated from the English tradition at the Reformation, although this conviction could not be applied directly to their Victorian coreligionists. No bishop, however disapproving he might be, was willing publicly to suggest that Anglican sisterhoods were dens of luxury, selfishness and vice (although Evangelical extremists such as those who wrote for the Rock or the Armoury and the fanatics who fulminated against the confessional were quick to do so). The closest they could come to suggesting that community life inevitably led to moral corruption was in the frequently repeated warning of unspecified ‘dangers’, as expressed by Bishop Thirwall (St David's 1840–75):

Anglican sisterhoods emerged at a point in the nineteenth century when changing social conditions and the self-evident failure of amateur philanthropy to provide an adequate welfare network, meant that the desperate need for organised charity work was becoming generally acknowledged. At the same time, received views of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour were beginning to be challenged, and religion was increasingly being used as the rationale for arguing for new roles for women. In this fiercely anti-Catholic culture, sisterhoods used their social utility to justify their existence, and this earned them grudging acceptance at the parish level, particularly in the swollen parishes of London and the south-east. While hostility to the religious life within the hierarchy of the Church was slow to abate, the work the women did was desperately needed, and was often, if resentfully, welcomed by overburdened parish clergy. Their work, while frequently criticised, was the only part of women's religious life that the episcopate was willing to tolerate. However, the bishops made it clear that they wanted the work without the communal religious life, a situation which would have quickly destroyed the sisterhoods, and with them, their work with the poor.

Another paradox lay around the problem of these sisters, as women, having power, and acting in the public eye. To Victorian bishops, a powerful public role for women was as great a paradox as the idea of the Protestant nun. The role of Mother Superior, in particular, was problematic. The combination of women and authority was viewed as a combination which inverted the basic principles of the natural world as well as violating religious teaching. Bishop Allan Becher Webb (Bloemfontein 1870–83) published a book which advocated that sisterhoods, in order to be acceptable to the Church, should have a male head: ‘All sisterhood work, to be perfect, ought … to be carried on with its real central power vested in the Bishop … the work must be under his personal control and rule; not under the irresponsible rule of any woman.’Footnote ²² Emily Ayckbowm commented acidly on his suggestion of male headship for sisterhoods in her diary:

It was unclear whether the common life as lived by sisters was based on the model of the family, as was often claimed, or on a formal structure of obedience and command, as in the army. Sisterhoods liked to portray themselves as families, and used this metaphor to excuse their lack of deference to the episcopate. The foundress of the Sisters of the Church wrote in 1887 that the community was ‘an enlarged Christian family’, reasoning that no family would ask permission from a bishop before moving into his diocese.Footnote ²⁴

This could be seen as disingenuous. No community with over 100 members, like the Sisters of the Church by this time, could operate efficiently on a family structure. All sisterhoods were governed by their rule and statutes, and obedience to authority in the form of the elected mother superior was a central principle in all rules. Given the often-complex hierarchy of assistant superiors, novice mistresses, bursars and sister superiors, communities resembled thriving non-profit businesses more than they did families, given that the possibility of promotion was open to all with the necessary skills and experience. They were essentially dissimilar to the military in structure, because the expectation of obedience was less unquestioning and there was considerably more liberty of thought and action than in an army. Sisters were not drilled into obedience, and communities were usually governed by a consultative council, elected by all members.

The bishops wondered uneasily whether the model of internal community governance was based on the structure of the family or on that of the army. Were all Sisters equal in status, or did the community consist of rulers and ruled? Could a woman govern other women without cruelty? The bishops thought not, and in this they concurred with the general view: ‘A woman is scarcely ever fitted to rule, so that there are ten chances to one in favour of a Mother Superior, who is caged for life with her own sex, of becoming a capricious, little-minded tyrant.’Footnote ²⁵ They expressed anxiety about ‘the autocratic rule of the Superior’, and about the potential for sisters being ‘unjustly or harshly treated’ by the Mother. The vow of obedience (made in fact to the Rule, not the Mother Superior, but most bishops seem not to have made this distinction) created great concern. In addition, there was marked spatial discomfort. Women belonged in the home; men belonged in public spaces. But was a convent private or public space? This remained a vexed question long after Charles Newdigate Newdegate's attempts to legislate for the government inspection of convents (both Anglican and Roman) were defeated in the 1870s.Footnote ²⁶ It could be easily linked with the unspoken anxieties about women living without male headship:

This situation of outright opposition as opposed to even grudging acceptance meant that sisterhoods were saturated with the challenges which we associate with liminality, both from the episcopate as well as from society at large. A key issue was one of ambiguity. When the bishops looked at sisterhoods, they asked themselves whether these groups were a genuine part of the Church of England's structures. It was not clear whether religious communities were part of the Anglican Church at all, and many felt that their assumption of the label of ‘Anglican sister’ was presumptuous and unwarranted, if not misleading. Part of the difficulty was the communities' association with the highest kind of Anglo-Catholicism, which most Victorian bishops viewed with emotions ranging from incomprehension to loathing. As Anthony Trollope wrote in 1866, ‘The chances are now that in meeting a bishop one meets an enemy of the Oxford movement.’Footnote ²⁸ Members of sisterhoods, like other Anglo-Catholics, were routinely accused of disloyalty to the Church of England. While some lay and clerical opponents went to the extreme of accusing them of being ‘Jesuits in disguise’, no Victorian bishop made such a statement, at least in public.Footnote ²⁹ However, Archbishop Benson thought that ‘if the Bishops pressed them hard there would not be much hesitation in adhering to the Church of Rome’.Footnote ³⁰ In this he was mistaken. No Anglican women's community converted to Roman Catholicism over the course of the nineteenth century, despite regular aspersions on their loyalty from the press and the professional clergy.

The lack of precedent created another problem. When the bishops looked at sisterhood practice, it appeared to be Roman Catholic in many respects, rather than Anglican. The bishops, naturally enough, suspected that this external conformity to Roman custom reflected an ulterior, ‘Romanising’ motive. However, the reality was more complex, and much less conspiratorial than the bishops feared. When the first sisterhoods were founded, the early members looked to continental Roman Catholic communities for examples of living sisterhoods. (Some did attempt to visit the Lutheran deaconesses at Kaiserwerth, but they were sent away because their Anglo-Catholic sympathies were distrusted by the deaconesses.) A number of foundresses had relatives who had entered continental convents after converting to Catholicism, and visiting their relatives' communities was a natural step to take. When on such visits, Anglican sisters, who were viewed as heretics by the host community, were allowed to observe the externals of community life, but their entrée to the inner life (such as access to a copy of the rule) was strictly limited. This meant that Anglican foundations tended to copy their Roman contemporaries in externals such as the design of the habit, the names given to community members and offices, and in external observable customs (such as not eating in restaurants). So it is certainly true that Anglican sisterhoods could look very much like Roman Catholic ones to outside observers, and the bishops were not in a position to observe the rather different nature and tone of the inner life in the two communions. As Bishop Wilberforce warned T. T. Carter in 1854, ‘If Sisterhoods cannot be maintained except upon a semi-Romanist scheme … with … its un-English tone; I am perfectly convinced that we had better have no Sisterhoods.’Footnote ³¹

The bishops and the Church at large could be excused for their assumption that sisterhoods leaned Rome-ward. There was a seeming paradox in the very existence of the conventual life within the Church of England. Religious communities were strongly associated with Roman Catholicism in this anti-Catholic culture, yet these women who called themselves nuns,Footnote ³² and dressed in habits, claimed to be loyal members of the Church of England. The popular response to their distinctly un-Protestant appearance varied from stone-throwing to small-scale riots, accompanied by a complete denial that Anglicans could be nuns, and many members of the episcopate shared this view, while deploring the attacks.

Linked to the suspicion of Romishness was the issue of authenticity. Were Anglican sisterhoods invented by their founder members, or were they, as they claimed, reviving a style of English monasticism which had died out in the reign of Henry viii? Or were they little more than a blind copy of contemporary Roman Catholic practice? While the bishops were uncertain of the Anglicanism of sisterhoods, sisters certainly saw themselves as Anglican, although they were decidedly Anglo-Catholic in their views. While in theory this theological orientation should have made them extremely deferential to episcopal authority, in fact they often seem to have shared the somewhat dismissive attitude of Anglo-Catholic priests toward bishops: ‘when one met an Anglo-Catholic, chances were that one met someone who held most English bishops in contempt’.Footnote ³³ While the bishops viewed women's work with contempt because it was conducted by women, members of sisterhoods sometimes expressed disdain for the bishops' ‘low’ view of the Church and for their incomprehension of the nature of religious vocation. This meant that their readiness to obey episcopal orders was always in question. Indeed, most communities acquired a reputation for disobedience which lasted well into the twentieth century. In 1903 the archbishop of Canterbury (Randall Thomas Davidson, 1903–28) wrote to the bishop of London (Arthur Winnington-Ingram, 1901–39) in rueful terms of his experience with the mother superior of the Community of the Sisters of the Church, telling ‘the story of her triumphant progress trampling upon every authority in days gone by’.Footnote ³⁴

Part of the difficulty was structural. While women's communities were certainly associated with the Establishment in the mind of the public as well as in their own self-perception, the problem was rooted in the fact that there was no provision in the tradition of the Church of England for such groups, and no Protestant precedent for them to follow. When the monasteries were dissolved by Henry viii between 1536 and 1540, religious lassitude, corruption and even immorality were some of the charges employed against religious houses. While even the boldest bishop was afraid to accuse these socially well-connected Victorian foundresses of such serious failings, laymen were not so measured, and the anti-sisterhood agitation of the period abounds in such accusations. But because no part of Anglican ecclesiastical law could be found which could be used to govern the establishment and conduct of sisterhoods, they existed in a legal limbo. For example, in the 1890s the archbishop of Canterbury (Edward White Benson, 1883–96) had lengthy discussions with the archbishop of York (William Dalrymple Maclagan, 1891–1908) and the bishops of London and Salisbury (Frederick Temple, 1885–96; John Wordworth, 1885–1911) over the unwillingness of the Sisters of the Church to alter their rule to conform to his beliefs. Their very refusal to obey was seen by Benson as positive proof of their non-Anglicanism: ‘The fact is the Kilburn Sisterhood is a dissenting community owning no Bishop or authority of any kind. And there are no worse mines under the Church than such bodies.’Footnote ³⁵ Given that canon law was silent on the subject, no one was sure what relationship should exist between the episcopate and communities and whether the bishops had any jurisdiction over them.Footnote ³⁶ When Benson came into conflict with the community's refusal to obey him, the bishops, in one of their private meetings, expressed regret that the members of this community could not simply be excommunicated.Footnote ³⁷ Since excommunication was not a practical possibility, Benson did the nearest Anglican equivalent: he took out an advertisement in the The Times. This announced that he had no official relationship with the sisterhood. As Charles Grafton, an American Episcopalian bishop with transatlantic experience of sisterhoods, complained: ‘orders have grown up without proper supervision. No law being established by the Church, many evils have arisen’.Footnote ³⁸

This brought another question to the fore: were sisterhoods governed by church authority or not? And to what extent, if at all? This was a genuine dilemma for the church hierarchy, and one with which the episcopate struggled throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. With no provision in canon law for such organisations, it was unclear whether the bishops had any jurisdiction over them, and whether they had any right to supervise their activities. In a world which assumed that the activities of women always and inevitably required male oversight, the idea of self-governing women's communities was unsettling. This issue of episcopal authority over sisterhoods reached its apex in a series of struggles over the issue of the taking of vows at profession.

Vows were the central issue because they set sisters aside from the common run of philanthropic women. The life-long promises of chastity, poverty and obedience, taken after a two- to three-year probationary period, were challenged by all Victorian bishops. Most thought that no vows of any kind should be taken by women, while those most sympathetic to sisterhoods insisted that no vow should be considered as binding for life. Thus, both the admissibility and the permanence of vows when taken by women were central to the bishops' discomfort with the sisterhood movement. It was unclear in the minds of many members of the episcopate whether unmarried women were capable of making vows (other than marriage vows) of any kind, following the Old Testament teaching of Numbers xxx. If it was admitted that a woman could take vows which were binding in a spiritual if not legal sense, the bishops were united in their insistence that they should not be allowed to do so. All women's communities, without exception, struggled to establish their right to take life vows. The experience of the Society of All Saints Sisters of the Poor was typical in this respect. In 1878 Archbishop Tait communicated with the sisterhood, saying that he had been informed that their profession ceremony involved the taking of life vows. He was informed that they renewed their ‘promises’ every year, and that the 1859 service (approved by himself when bishop of London) was still used. However, it is clear from the community's archive that the sisters understood their vows taken at profession to be both life-long and binding, whatever might have been said to the archbishop, whom the foundress of the society described as being ‘utterly ignorant of anything to do with the religious life’.Footnote ³⁹ What follows are extracts from two letters on the question, both written in 1895. Sister Etheldreda, professed in 1863, wrote:Footnote ⁴⁰

And Sister Sophia, professed five years later, concurred:Footnote ⁴³

The vows were also widely misunderstood. Most bishops appear to have thought that they were made to the Mother Superior, involving a vow of obedience to her, instead of to the rule of the community. Bishop Benson thought that the vow of obedience, if admissible at all, should be a vow of obedience to the bishop, declaring, ‘I have long considered that the attitude of certain Sisterhoods to their Diocesans is quite unwarrantable; they adopt a position of independence which is absolutely inconsistent with their profession.’Footnote ⁴⁶ This view of the independence of Anglican sisters was shared by their Catholic cousins: one woman who left an Anglican community to found a Roman one, and who found the firm episcopal oversight exerted over it frustrating, wrote wistfully that in the Church of England, sisters could ‘laugh at all restraints of ecclesiastical authority … a bishop was nothing to a lady’.Footnote ⁴⁷

There was tension in the relationship between community and episcopacy. This was often expressed by the bishops as anxiety over the internal practices of Anglican convents: there was concern whether the foundress's role was that of a Mother or of a Superior.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the eyes of all concerned this was not a simple semantic question, but a central issue linked to the question of whether women could legitimately exercise authority. They wondered if a Mother Superior was equivalent in authority, within her community, to a bishop in his diocese. In some communities, authority was rumoured to extend still further, perhaps even to the hearing of confession. The issue of women having power was capable of provoking considerable anxiety in both the lay and clerical communities, as demonstrated early on in the public enquiry by Bishop Henry Phillpots (Exeter 1830–69) into the practices of one community in 1849.Footnote ⁴⁹ Could a woman govern other women without cruelty? – the bishops, typical of their society, thought not. The anti-sisterhood literature of the time is saturated with a misogyny in this respect that the modern reader finds discomfiting. Virtually all opponents of sisterhoods – clerical as well as lay – agreed that male control of the internal affairs of sisterhoods was necessary in order to prevent female tyranny over her own sex. As the Pall Mall Gazette expressed it in 1869, women ruling women would only result in ‘making each other wretched, and living in a systematic defiance of all the strongest and healthiest instincts and principles of human nature’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Illegality as well as potential abuse of power worried the bishops. There was great concern that members of communities might be receiving the sacrament illegally in their convents, or that reservation of the sacrament was taking place. Community chapels were private, and priests at variance with their bishops – including some under inhibition – were known to celebrate in them. At least one community, St Mary the Virgin, Wantage, was reserving the sacrament more than half a century before the Anglican episcopate began to sanction reservation in cases of illness.

The Victorian Church of England had no doubt that women could and should be religious, but it was the verb rather than the noun which was considered proper. The Church accepted the assumption of natural religiosity with considerable complacency, as long as it was confined to the home. (Although Benson asserted that in his view, ‘few women are truly religious’, due to their excessive emotionalism.)Footnote ⁵¹ When it came to be a question whether women could be religious professionals rather than devout mothers and obedient handmaids to the parish clergy, the bishops of the Church of England did everything in their power to stop them. As Catherine Prelinger aptly points out in her discussion of Anglican deaconesses, the clerical debate remained static while women's roles changed:

The time warp was still evident in the early twentieth century. The Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908 wrestled with the question of women's ministry in a number of sessions. Attitudes varied widely. While Louise Creighton (1850–1936), the wife of Bishop Mandell Creighton, was observing that ‘the clergy prefer a subservient spirit in women … They wish it to be work under the direction of the clergy. They do not, as a rule, make it easy for women of independent views and exceptional gifts to work with them’, the bishop of Worcester (Huyshe Wolcott Yeatman-Briggs) was displaying the very attitudes she deplored, declaring that women church-workers were ‘very willing horses to the collar; they desire the rein, and indeed may not be altogether unforgiving to the whip’.Footnote ⁵³

By this date, however, the reconciliation of sisterhoods to church order was beginning, although not all elements of the Church had yet realised how much movement had taken place since the 1890s in the acceptance of the principle of women's communities. As John Shelton Reed has convincingly argued, the Church's acceptance of its Anglo-Catholic wing progressed rapidly after the passage of the Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874.Footnote ⁵⁴ While the sisterhoods made absolutely no compromises in the direction of increasing Protestantism, the Church itself was changing in ways that allowed them to be tolerated and, eventually, welcomed, although their independence was still a worry. Some in 1908 called for an increased sensitivity to women's potential as religious professionals in a way which even implied a call to repentance for past denigration:

In conclusion, it was not merely theological differences in the Church of England that made the episcopate so hostile to women's religious communities. Rather, resistance was largely based part on cultural attitudes about women's roles and capabilities that ensured that Victorian sisterhoods were never going to receive episcopal backing in the century and country of their origin. It was the passage of time and the increased religious tolerance of English society as a whole, not episcopal action, which eventually reconciled them to the Church of their birth.