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influenced this attraction.97 A moral and devotional culture fired up by Christian evangelism flourished in nineteenth-century England. Women were an integral part of this culture and an important part of this renewed growth of institutional churches. Their evangelicalism was tangible and extended outside the home. Benevolence became more than just a moral obligation. For many women, it was a mission to spread their own middleclass ideological values of moral fervour, social piety and other virtues associated with womanhood and family life. These women came in many forms
she influenced the boundaries of female religious life in British congregations and orders from the 1940s to the 1960s. It identifies the predominant themes developed by the cultural trope of the Modern Girl, which reflected certain orthodoxies regarding perceived social and moral swings and then demonstrates how these were incorporated within the Catholic discourse of youth culture in general, but more particularly the Catholic Modern Girl. It interrogates how the institutional church along with female religious congregations and orders reacted to this discourse
acknowledge the social movements within denominational Christianity, reflecting the tensions between those who favoured holding on to the traditions of their Church and others who were anxious to make ‘progressive’ changes. 6 Historian Hugh McLeod has outlined the complexities of the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s within the secularisation debates that have garnered more historical attention than the changes in the practices of institutional church life. 7 The post-secular view of Catholic Nuns and Sisters in a Secular Age acknowledges secularisation, but examines the