Women of Christianity

In early 1852, Irish novelist and women of letters Julia Kavanagh (1824-1877) produced her Women of Christianity, Exemplary for Acts of Piety and Charity. It was the first volume of its kind attempting to tell the story of women remarkable for character, intellect, and excellence, who had flourished under the fostering influence of the Christian faith from New Testament to her own.

Though subsequent developments in critical historography and feminist theory have transformed the disciplines of women's studies and Church history in recent generations, Kavanagh's pioneer work deserves long overdue attention in both fields. With skill and conviction offering a narrative of women's lives across the ages, she finds her own rightful place within that Christian Tradition.

Some of the lives featured in Women of Christianity:

- Vibia Peupeta, early North African Christian Martyr
- Macrina the Elder, brider of family and monastic community
- Teresa of Avila, Carmelite nun and author of The Interior Castle
- Elizabeth Fry, English Quaker and pioneer of prison reform

Julia Kavanagh has much in common with many women writers today. Although not considered a 'political writer' she was astutely aware of the double standards of her time. Her work bears testimony to the many anomalies and contradictions concerning women's subjectivity and as such she draws on the very core of sexual politics . . . she is concerned with women's experience and works they produced in a world which, for the most part, saw women as adjunctival to male experience. I would argue, nevertheless, that because she is writing about women who previously had each been seen only in relation to more 'historically illustrious men' Kavanagh offers a significant contribution to women's history.
- Eileen Fauset, from the Irish Journal of Feminist Studies

We can commend Miss Kavanagh for the general ease, propriety and care with which her task has been executed . . . The amount of generous and wholesome effort thus disclosed is sufficient, in variety of scope and in success, to silence the most cynical of misogynists -- unless he be henceforward
prepared to accept the imputation of being unjust as well as cynical.

Henry Fothergill Chorley, The Athenaeum No. 1265 (January 24, 1852), 104-105.


James D. Smith III is Associate Professor of Church History of Bethel Seminary, San Diego, California; a lecturer in Theology & Religious Studies at the University of San Diego; and serves on the pastoral staff of College Avenue Baptist Church. He is on the editorial board of Christian History & Biography magazine.