This article was downloaded by: [Columbia University]On: 27 November 2014, At: 08:21Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Australian Feminist StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cafs20

Feminism, history and movements ofthe soul: Christian science in the lifeof Alice Clark (1874–1934)Sandra Stanley Holton aa ARC Senior Research Fellow in the History Department ,University of AdelaidePublished online: 16 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Sandra Stanley Holton (1998) Feminism, history and movements of thesoul: Christian science in the life of Alice Clark (1874–1934), Australian Feminist Studies, 13:28,281-294, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1998.9994915

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.1998.9994915

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms& Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 13, No. 28, 1998 281

Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul: ChristianScience in the Life of Alice Clark (1874-1934)

SANDRA STANLEY HOLTON

Introduction

In the spring of 1919, Alice Clark, the British shoemaker, industrialist, suffragist,historian and humanitarian aid worker, decided to spend the night outdoors.1 Shewalked the few miles from her family home to the densely wooded Dundon hill, part ofthe legend-filled Somerset landscape that continues to draw caravans of the neo-pagan'travellers' of Europe, together with New Age mystics from around the world. It was notuncommon for her to sleep in the open air, for she had already survived two episodesof the tuberculosis that eventually took her life, and this practice was thought a usefulprophylactic against its return. The year 1919 was a period of great uncertainty anddoubt for Alice Clark. She had by this time 'lost an effective belief in God', whileconfronting a world shattered by the recent world war, and the disease and famine thataccompanied a peace-making almost as savage as the war itself.2 The populations ofmiddle and eastern Europe were facing starvation, the chaos of revolution was threaten-ing to spread outward from Russia, and class relations in her own country wereincreasingly unsetded. More immediately, her own health was again giving cause forconcern.

Her sister, Margaret Clark Gillett, recalled this as a time of great spiritual trial forAlice Clark: 'the problem of evil, which the War had made more terrible than ever, waslying on her mind; and there was also her personal trouble of being several times disabledby illness'.3 She also recorded Alice Clark's growing interest at this time in the ideas ofMary Baker Eddy, a focus that eventually led her to the Church of Christ Scientist andaway from the Society of Friends. Yet Alice Clark's letters from this period none the lessexpressed an unfailing optimism, sometimes to the point of euphoria, even ecstasy. Thismood culminated during that night spent watching the stars in 'the great Experience'when she felt herself visited, comforted and strengthened by the presence of the divine.4

What is feminist history to make of this reported event in the life of one of its ownfounders? The links between the symbolic and ideological content of religions and thecreation and maintenance of gender norms and gender hierarchies are receivingincreasing acknowledgement.5 The relation between women's politics and women'sreligion is also now beginning to be explored, a relation that increasingly appears to beby no means straightforward.6 Equally, the frameworks that presently structure religioushistory are increasingly coming under question from the perspective of women's history.7

0816-4649/98/020281-14 © 1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

282 S. S. Holton

Yet, as Jill Roe notes, religion remains at 'a historiographical discount' in the practice offeminist history, despite the growing weight of evidence from feminist biography of itspossible importance. In consequence, the meaning of the spiritual dimensions of awoman's life may still go unexplored.8

Certainly, many of the new religions of the past century or so that validated or evenelevated feminine spirituality have attracted a more sustained interest from feministscholars.9 Mary Baker Eddy's Church of Christ Scientist has been among these, not leastbecause its founder was a woman, its theodicy reflects a concept of 'the Father—MotherGod', and because it espouses a radical ontology that entirely denies the materialworld. However, it is also the case that there has been 'a dizzying variety' in feministaccounts of this church and its leader, which at best have been ambivalent, and atworst dismissive. Most analyses of Christian Science have seen it as, at least in part, arebellion against the restrictions of nineteenth-century gender norms for women, and insome sense all offer a functionalist account of its appeal in terms of the religious,psychological, cultural or social aspirations of women in this period. There is generalagreement that Christian Science reflected at most 'an ambiguous feminism'.10 AnneBraude, for example, doubts the value of this religion for female empowerment on twoprincipal grounds: the ambivalent stance of Mary Baker Eddy on the women's rightsmovement; and the focus on individual religious searching over movements for socialchange."

Perhaps the most positive account is to be found in Mary Bednarowki's comparativestudy of four 'marginal' or unorthodox religious groups in which women have hadprominent roles. She finds in Christian Science a theology that rejects altogether anyanthropomorphic conception of God, insisting on the androgynous nature of the divine,and identifying its essential character, 'Love', with the feminine. This theology alsodenies the doctrine of the Fall, and its historically damaging significance for the positionof women in most Christian churches, while imbuing men and women equally with thepossibility of finding a knowledge of God from within themselves. There is no ChristianScience clergy, and each church is required to have both a female and a male 'Reader'.Both sexes may equally become 'practitioners' of the healing powers that supposedlyderive from recognising as merely 'errors' of 'mortal mind' the materiality of the worldand of the body, the existence of sin and disease. Nor is there any form of marriageceremony provided by the manual of the Christian Science church, for sexual relationsare regarded as a symptom of mortality that will disappear with the acceptance of itsradical-idealist ontology and denial of all materiality. So while Christian Science deniesto women (as to men) any claim of reality for their material bodies, it does offer 'aconnection with the numinous in the Father—Mother God', and it promises them 'powerover their own lives as well as equal participation' in their chosen religion.12

Such a positive evaluation of a particular religious belief system is as uncommon infeminist history, however, as it is in mainstream history. As Phyllis Mack argues, incurrent practice, mystical experiences such as those of Alice Clark are likely variously tobe interpreted as evidence of sexual frustration, of some will to power, or as 'some covertstrategy for self-expression in a patriarchal world'. She suggests that instead such religioussensibilities should be taken 'somewhat at face value', making 'the soul as it were acategory of our own analysis', and asking whether there is such a thing as a 'femininereligiosity'. Yet, a recent account of best practice in history by a group of leading feministscholars defends 'practical realism', whereby 'the preservation of evidence imposesdefinite limits to the factual assertions that can be made, it even sets up boundariesaround the range of interpretations that can be offered'.13 Personal spiritual experience

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul 283

(as opposed to belief about such experience) leaves no such evidence by its very nature.Divine intervention is not capable of being established as a historical 'fact'.

So, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently argued: 'investment in a certain kind ofrationality and a particular understanding of the "real" means that history's, thediscipline's, exclusions are ultimately epistemological', for they reflect a particular way ofcreating knowledge about the past. Such limitations emerge clearly with regard to thoseaspects of 'subaltern' pasts where 'the very archive ... develops a degree of intractabilitywith respect to the very aims of professional history. In other words, these are pasts thatresist historicization.' He takes as an example Ranajit Guha's account of the Santalrebellion in Bengal in 1855 where its leaders ascribed 'the agency for their rebellion tosome god'. Despite the best intentions of a leading practitioner of subaltern history,Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, this account cannot fully take on board such first-handtestimony because no such evidence of divine or supernatural intervention can provide'a narrative strategy that is rationally defensible in the modern understanding of whatconstitutes public life'.

There is a similar difficulty in relation to Alice Clark's spiritual life—the evidence willbe reported in what follows but any narrative I may construct as a historian willimplicitly deny the 'actuality' of divine intervention as she experienced it. The historianmay write about this insofar as 'gods and spirits are part of the ontological aspects ofbeing human ... there is something familiar about them even when we come across"strange" versions of them in unfamiliar histories'. None the less, aspects of Alice Clark'slife must remain 'unassimilable to the secular narratives of the historian', based on a verydifferent understanding of time from the one she was to derive from her ChristianScience beliefs. Similarly, the evidence as to the spiritual experiences that shaped her lastyears is not open to any rational evaluation. So Alice Clark will become, in what follows,'a signifier of other times and societies', and her story will serve to illustrate the limits ofhistory, whether feminist, subaltern or mainstream, when it encounters a movement ofthe soul.15

Religion in the Life of Alice Clark

Alice Clark's sense of self was formed from childhood by membership of the Society ofFriends of which she was a birthright member. Her family on both her mother's andfather's side had Quaker ancestors reaching back into the late seventeenth century. Thisinheritance provided a sense of the strength of her sex and its potential for religiousleadership. Several noted female preachers were numbered among her mother's fore-bears, while she grew up in the presence of another female preacher in her father'sfamily. Further, her family background formed in Alice Clark a sense of herself as apolitical being with the potential, even the obligation, to become an activist, if not aleader. The families of both her parents had taken a prominent part in the movementsagainst slavery, on behalf of temperance, and in pursuit of middle-class radical politics.Her grandfather, for example, was John Bright, the radical statesman.

Alice Clark was shaped by a strong consciousness among her female kin, and some ofher male relations, of the rights and wrongs of women. Her mother and her great-auntshad been among the founders of the women's movement in Britain. They had also beento the fore in pressing for women's formal equality within the governance of the Societyof Friends. From childhood Alice Clark expected to pursue her religious and social valuesthrough political activism. From early adolescence she was inducted by close familymembers into organisations committed to social reform, women's rights, and support of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

284 S. S. Holton

the Liberal Party. By the outbreak of war in 1914 she was a seasoned politicalcampaigner, and was among those I have termed elsewhere the 'democratic suffragists'who had recently negotiated political co-operation with the Labour Party.16 As a feministactivist, then, there merged both her religious identity as a Quaker and her politicalidentity as a radical.

Between 1912 and 1919, Alice Clark also extended her feminist endeavours bybecoming one of the earliest historians of women. Her family valued the life of theintellect, and she had received an advanced schooling for a woman of her time and class.She was also among the generation of her faith influenced by the hopes for a 'Quakerrenaissance' through more informed and extended debates on theological issues and thechallenging biblical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Though in 1893 she had putaside earlier plans to go to Newnham College in order to assist her father in themanagement of the family firm, she continued to read widely, especially in history. Atthe beginning of 1914, and after a year of private research into the history of women inthe Society of Friends, she was offered a fellowship at the London School of Economics.Here she began the investigations that she published in 1919 as Working Life of Women inthe Seventeenth Century.

By 1919 there was also an altogether different and less positive identity which AliceClark several times had to resist, that of the 'invalid'. Shadowed by the threat oftuberculosis from childhood, she survived a second and more dangerous episode in 1909that took more than two years out of a previously full and active life. From that time onher fragile health remained a continuing concern, and sometimes a limitation on hercapacity to pursue courses of action to which she felt called. In 1915, for example, shetrained as a midwife in order to be able to work in the field alongside her sister, Dr HildaClark, on behalf of the refugees fleeing from the war zone in France. This work seemsto have proved too taxing for her, however, and she had to content herself with helpingto organise and administer the relief effort at its London headquarters."

In all these various undertakings Alice Clark seemed to be searching for somecalling;—as a religious missioner, as a carer and healer, as a suffrage militant willing toface personal martyrdom for the cause, or as a historian of and for her sex. While onthe surface she might seem to have gone where the currents of family, religious,community and public life pushed her, it is also evident that the changes of course andunfinished business that pattern her life reflected a degree of deliberation as she questedafter some permanent calling. She found the leading that she sought, and that was todetermine the course of the rest of her life only in 1919, following her spiritual visitationon a Somerset hill.

Without the renewal in 1917 of her friendship with Field Marshall Jan Smuts,classicist, farmer, naturalist, philosopher, soldier, statesman, and sometime prime minis-ter of South Africa, we would not know of this event, and it would have been impossibleto say very much about her religiosity. For as this close and valued friend himselfremarked after her death: 'She was always somewhat secretive about her own innerlife.'18 Alice Clark had first come to know him through his friendship with her youngersister, Margaret Clark, who had gone to assist Emily Hobhouse in her efforts to relievethe suffering of Boer women and children after the South African war. All the Clarkfamily had actively opposed Britain's part in this war, sometimes to their own danger anddiscomfort, in the years around the turn of the century. In 1917, long reconciled withthe British, Jan Smuts was brought from his victories against the German forces in EastAfrica to oversee the defence of London from aerial bombardment. In these years he alsobecame a member of the war cabinet, and subsequently represented South Africa at the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul 285

peace conference in Paris. Homesick and war-weary, he turned to the Clark family foremotional, spiritual and intellectual sustenance. Whenever he was able, he retreatedeither to the Clark family home in Somerset, or the home of Alice Clark's now marriedsister, Margaret Clark Gillett, in Oxford.

Alice Clark was herself mostly resident in London at this time, and became hiscompanion during weekends spent there, and during his visits to Oxford and Somerset.Their shared love of walking and the metaphysical interests of each at this time deepenedtheir friendship, and gave Alice Clark an outlet for spiritual expression and explorationin the extensive correspondence that they maintained when they were apart, for he alsowas of a mystical predisposition, and a longtime student of philosophy. It is notsurprising, then, that it was to him that Alice Clark confided her religious visitation, in'a beautiful letter' that reached Jan Smuts at the Paris peace conference in April 1919.Regrettably, that letter has not survived among the Smuts papers, and so we have to relyon his second-hand reporting. Writing to her sister, he described how she had spent 'thenight in silence under many a star' (a quote from Walt Whitman). Then (in his ownwords), she received 'the Great Experience, when the Lover Divine and Perfect Comradestood by her side to comfort her. And in the dawn, the holy dawn, she marched backto the world.'Jan Smuts recorded that he himself had experienced many such visitations,'but nowadays I generally manage to sleep well and to escape these experiences, whichhowever thrilling are not physically restful'.19

Fortuitously, then, in their continuing correspondence we are allowed some access tothe inner world of Alice Clark, and to the links she saw between her spiritual life, herfeminism, and her continuing endeavours to change the world. It is not clear from theevidence that survives whether she had always been drawn to the mystical aspects ofreligion, though it seems likely. Certainly, she claimed to feel far more identification withthe founders of the Society of Friends than with her contemporaries, or with thedown-to-earth religion of her immediate family: 'In some ways I skip all the decorousintervening generations of Friends and my sympathies go direct to the contemporaries ofGeorge Fox, who protested in the steeple-houses against the false teaching of Priests andannoyed the magistrates by wearing their hats in court and using their plain language.'20

The renewal of her friendship withjan Smuts must have proved a balm to Alice Clarkin the last years of the war, by which time she had become troubled about her religiousfaith, and possibly also as to her longstanding belief in the forward march of progress andthe role of reformers like herself in advancing this march. Such doubts could only haveserved to undermine that strong sense of self with which she had previously movedthrough the world. Withjan Smuts she was able to explore the metaphysical position hehimself called 'holism', and which he subsequently wrote about in Holism and Evolution.Through holism Jan Smuts sought to combat the dualism between subject and objectthat had dominated philosophical and scientific work since the time of Descartes, and toreject the reductionism and externality of what he characterised as 'the mechanistic habitof thought'.21 Alice Clark and Margaret Clark Gillett took up holism with considerableenthusiasm, for it seems to have named a direction toward which their own thoughts hadbeen turning.

The correspondence between Jan Smuts, Alice Clark and Margaret Clark Gillett atthis time also indicates a shared enthusiasm for the ideas of Spinoza, and his view thatthere was only one substance, which he called 'God or Nature', of which both mind andmatter were each one aspect. Spinoza's was a pantheistic explanation of the universe,one that also denied free will, the notion of sin, and personal immortality—there wasonly a process of becoming more and more one with God. He also insisted that 'the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

286 S. S. Holton

human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God', aknowledge that only becomes obscured by the passions that arise from the pursuit of theself, or egoism. Freedom comes from self-determination, but self-determination is onlypossible by realising oneself as a part of the whole in the knowledge of God. In thismetaphysics time is unreal, for what will be is as determined as what has been. The wise,then, and 'as far as human finitude permits', try to see the world 'under the aspect ofeternity'. Spinoza's metaphysics aimed to release humanity from fear, and to deny theexistence of evil, except as 'an inadequate knowledge'. 22

In the last weeks of 1917 Alice Clark was working towards her own synthesis ofQuaker beliefs, holism and the ideas of Spinoza. More particularly she was movingtowards a new sense of her own nature and her place in the world, and of the natureof the soul and its relation to 'personality':

Through its outer shell of physical form and mental habit the soul is everpushing its sensitive feelers, touching the souls which are its neighbours,identifying itself with them with an inexhaustible passion for unity andwholeness. ... Our sins and our virtues are equally part of the whole andcannot separate us from it. But we have a choice in our relations to the otheroutward manifestations of the Whole. We can occupy ourselves with our owndevelopment, making use of God's other creatures for that end, or we canmerge our life in theirs.

The influence of Christian Science also first becomes evident at this time, both in herunderstanding of the nature of 'Love' as a religious category and in her use of thelanguage of 'error'. In the view of Alice Clark, the channel by which true unity wasattained was Love: 'Love creates an organic whole. Love breaks down the walls ofpartition between us', adding in a postscript: 'How gladly one thinks of Love in thesedark days. Hate destroys itself. Love is the Creator.' Her main criticism of Spinozaconcerned his attempt to 'to enthrone "reason" as the divine quality' which separatedhumankind from animals. She commented: 'If he had been born in these days he mighthave escaped this error. ... Reason is a good servant but a bad master ... it constantlyentices men away from the things of the senses to the realms of abstractions andnonsense.'23

In this account of her metaphysics, I would argue, Alice Clark was working towardsan understanding that served to encompass her deeply held Quaker belief in the 'Lightwithin', a gender identity that rejected the dominance in a male-governed world of thepower of reason, and a feminist consciousness of the suffering that arose, especially forwomen and children, from the dominance of the masculine. Through the ideas of MaryBaker Eddy and of Christian Science she found a way of completing that synthesis.Though her initial response to Christian Science was sceptical, there was much in itsview of the universe that meshed with the ideas she had been exploring through Smuts'holism and the work of Spinoza.

She first engaged more systematically with Christian Science early in 1918, afterencountering an old, unnamed friend from her youth. He had told her how ChristianScience healers had stopped his drift into alcoholism and financial disaster, and helpedhim resolve all subsequent health and business difficulties. Alice Clark explained to JanSmuts:

He is a man who isnt in the least intellectual but with a nature which is ratherinstinctive and simple, and so he has escaped all that superficial pseudophilosophy which the usual brand of Christian Scientiest flaunts. He talks just

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul 287

simple, primitive Christianity and therefore he refreshed me, recalling mywandering thoughts to Love the source of life and power; and I talked a littleholism to him, which though I think opposed to official Christian Science, wasaccepted by him.

By early 1919 she had begun systematically to read Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health,alongside William James' Principles of Psychology, the materialism of which was quite atodds with her own religious and metaphysical convictions. 'The physical, mechanicalexplanations for the processes of the mind are so ineffective', she wrote. She admitted,however, that William James was a much better writer than Mary Baker Eddy, and thatshe was making only slow progress with Science and Health. None the less, she recordedgradually 'disentangling something' from its teaching that she thought might be useful toher.24

As we have seen, Christian Science denies the reality of matter, which it recognisesonly as 'mortality'. This, in turn, in the words of Willa Cather in her scathinginvestigation of its thought and practice, 'assumes formidable proportion. It is error, evila belief, an illusion, discord, a false claim, darkness, devil, sin, sickness and death; andall these are non-existent.'25 In these respects Christian Science went far beyond theQuaker belief in the perfectability of humankind, insisting that as part of the ordercreated by a wholly good divinity it was already perfect and had only to escape thematerialist error to realise this perfection.

The growing sense of euphoria which Alice Clark expressed at the time she wasexploring the ideas of Christian Science reflected, I think, the promise it offered her ofonce more becoming capable of meaningful action, despite illness, despite religiousdoubt, despite political disillusion. Christian Science reignited the hope that in her wayof living and being she might produce an effect on the world. Thus she explained thatit was the 'practical turn' that she found in Christian Science, in the form of 'theharmony of mutual service', that distinguished it, in her view, from holism. She alsoargued that: 'All the other spiritual religions are fundamentally quietism, and that isdeath not life.'26

As news from both the home and the international arenas continued to be bleak, AliceClark sought to comfort Jan Smuts with the insights she was deriving from ChristianScience:

the Christian Scientists have a theory that evil becomes more active whenconfronted with good; the false is more assertive when the truth is firstaffirmed. They say this is a very usual experience in their treatment of disease.The renewal of life and energy as the false idea of disease is denied, does nottake place without a pang. Like the devil which rent the possessed man in thebible before it would leave him.

She acknowledged 'that antithesis of patience and energy is one of the mysteries whichI think we can only understand by Grace', and admitted: 'I haven't quite got there yet.'27

There is in her correspondence at this time a seemingly unshakeable conviction thateverything would come right, and this was against the background of the devastationfollowing the war, the dispiriting events then unfolding at the Paris peace conference, theanarchy of revolution in Russia and elsewhere, and the weariness and sadness of publicfigures whom she respected such as Jan Smuts. Responding to his fatigue and depressionshe wrote:

remember that our life is the divine life which is never weary or dimmed. Itis only our selfish busy minds which get tired. They are a sort of excrescence,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

288 S. S. Hollon

a scum given off by the fermentation of our energy and do not touch orinfluence the source of our real being. If we have them alone and act and thinkin perfect harmony with the divine life, our whole being is continuallytransformed and renewed according to the divine purpose. ... Activity is one ofthe most obvious characteristics of life; therefore why should it tire us.28

Early Quaker beliefs and practices such as prophesying might tend to the loosening, or,in Phyllis Mack's metaphor, the 'liquefying' of gender definitions. She also finds,however, that early Quaker theological writings imposed on women compared with men'a greater distance between their sense of themselves as people and as prophets', so thatprophesying might be depicted by both sexes as 'killing the woman within the self.Hence, prophesying might mean for Quaker men 'self-transcendence'. For Quakerwomen, however, it might bring a kind of 'self-alienation'.29 In contrast, as we have seen,Christian Science emphasised the feminine attributes of the divine and placed a highvalue on the feminine as revealing more fully the spiritual origin of humanity. It offereda reinforcement of Alice Clark's own sense of the importance of women's perspective onworld affairs, and also her increasing assertiveness about the value of the feminine insocial and political arrangements. Both in their turn seemed to offer her a satisfyingexplanation for how the world had come to such a pass in 1919, in terms of the existingdominance of masculine perspectives and ways of understanding. Christian Science notonly promised to restore the strong and integrated sense of herself that had beenshattered by the war and its aftermath, it offered her a way out of the passivity andparalysis that threatened her in the face of such overwhelming human devastation andthe continuing enmities and ill-will all too evident in Paris. Thinking of her old friendstruggling 'for peace and righteousness' in the midst of the 'the flood of sin and misery'there, she wrote encouragingly:

You have been asserting the power of truth and human love and honestyagainst the mass of selfishness and falsehood and for the moment the proudwaters have gone over your soul. But you have life on your side, whereas theyhave corruption and death in their very nature ... .the truth which is under-stood perfectly and completely by one human being becomes part of thecommon human stock of ideas and is never forgotten.

For her own part, her involvement in famine relief took on a fresh meaning in the lightof the emphasis in Christian Science on the feminine aspects of the divine. In the faceof official rebuffs and the doubts of colleagues in the Quaker relief effort, she and HildaClark won the support of the Save the Children Fund to undertake an act at oncesupremely practical and symbolic. They provided cows to give milk for the starvingchildren of Vienna, a difficult undertaking both financially and logistically given the scaleof dislocation and devastation that still prevailed in middle Europe at this time.Afterwards she wrote to Jan Smuts:

To me one of the signs of hope is that Europe is returning to the cult of theMother and Child. I believe it to be an entirely new development in WesternCivilization for public opinion as a whole to be directed to the child as thedominating factor of society. ... We need not fear the future, when the child isleading us in our social arrangements. Such adjustments of social values havethe most profound influence on human destiny—Hitherto the child has existedfor the sake of the father. Now we are concentrating all our care upon thepreservation of the children, and the fathers will only come in to the schemes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul 289

of relief as appendages of the children! This is an exaggerated statement, butyou know how I like paradoxes.31

On a more immediate level, too, Christian Science offered Alice Clark a means ofhealing that required only understanding the origin of disease in the mind, andabolishing that mental picture. Initially, a healer, or 'practitioner', would work silentlyfrom within her or himself. Once the disease began to abate, the patient was ready toreceive the Christian Science message, so as finally to defeat the sickness. The healer hadto 'speak to the disease as one having authority over it', for 'not to admit disease is toconquer it'. It was not necessary, of course, for the healer to be present, for mind wasthe tool. The corpse represented, by this account, 'the going out of a belief in thephysical world.32 As Alice Clark explained to Jan Smuts: 'Death I cannot regard as evil,but I think of it as you do—Death the most holy—Death and birth are beats in therhythm of existence.' All this appears to have spoken directly to Alice Clark in her owncontinuing struggle against tuberculosis.

Her new faith must have been severely tested, then, when she fell victim to theinfluenza pandemic then sweeping the world's war-weakened populations. She wrote toJan Smuts, apparently without any irony: 'I am engaged at the moment is an attemptto deny an error commonly called influenza and my efforts up to the present have notbeen so very successful, so that I retired to the vantage post of bed.' She had now writtento a 'healing lady in London for assistance, so with our joint efforts the error should soonbe effectually put down'. Jan Smuts not altogether kindly replied: 'Yes, that mistake inthe form of influenza is a bit trying. But I noticed that you were getting somewhat uppishwith your new powers. And this is to make you more humble and more human!' HildaClark was less charitable still, writing to Jan Smuts of her concern, and her belief thather sister was 'risking her health very unnecessarily for what is hardly worthwhile'.34 Infact, Alice Clark enjoyed a period of wellbeing in the years that followed, declaring in1920: 'Never have I been in such robust health. The only thing is that I dont feel I makeas much use of it as I should—However one cant do more than be willing to be usedfor what is demanded.'35 Both at this time and after her death many of those close toher attested to the renewed vigour she found. There were changes also in hertemperament, as a softer manner mellowed her formerly somewhat austere presence.36

Less positively, Christian Science was also associated with some fundamental shiftsaway from Alice Clark's earlier range of interests. She discontinued writing the secondvolume of her historical account of women's lives in the seventeenth century, forexample. Intellectual understanding of social questions no longer greatly concerned her.None of her research materials for either this new study or its predecessor were preservedamong her papers. Her attitude to public life and political activity changed just asradically. Jan Smuts himself was by this time back home in South Africa, contemplatinga return to his political career there. She wrote lovingly to him:

Dear heart it is not our ideals which have suffered loss in these dismal years,except in so far as they have in our thoughts been separated from men andwomen. They have no real existence apart from us, and we have no realexistence apart from them.

She advised him: 'Dont let yourself be too much engrossed with politics. You must giveyourself leisure to love your fellows and to think clearly and truly of the simple, greatproblems of their lives.' Similarly, she insisted: 'It isn't by conducting the machinery ofGovernment that you save people; it is by filling their minds with good thoughts insteadof wrong ones; and that is only done through the loving of them—genuine individual

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

290 S. S. Holton

love.'37 Such a perspective led her to re-evaluate the course of her own life, with a newemphasis on serving those who inhabited her immediate circle, however this mightchance to be.

This shift of outlook on social and political activism became evident also in AliceClark's attitude to the League of Nations over the course of the next few years. Manyof her family and friends became deeply involved with the work of the League of NationsUnion. They included Hilda Clark who made this the principal cause to which shedevoted her energies after the immediate need for famine relief had passed. Once theLeague of Nations headquarters had been established in Geneva, Hilda Clark maderegular visits there to attend its sittings. This work she undertook in conjunction withfact-finding missions for the Women's League for International Peace and Freedom(WILPF) regarding refugee problems in Greece and the Balkans. By the early 1930sHilda Clark was considered an authority on international relations, interviewed regularlyin national newspapers and broadcasting on the BBC.

While Alice Clark sympathised greatly with such activities, and subscribed to theWILPF until her death, she did not herself any longer feel called to such large andfar-flung causes. However much bad faith she might observe in the actions of govern-ments and statesman, her religion allowed her to take heart from the knowledge that theidea of a League of Nations had taken form. She wrote to Jan Smuts in 1920:

The League of Nations has been established as an ideal which will not ceaseto shape the destiny of mankind—though for the present the powers that behave travestied it. But the governments are not the Nations, the nations are thepeople, and the seed which has been sown in the people's hearts will bear fruit.

The remainder of her life was not given over, then, to the great political andhumanitarian causes that had absorbed her youth and her middle years. Though shecontinued for a time to offer help to her local Independent Labour Party branch, shedeclared: 'For myself there seems no interest in party left.' As with the League of Nations,she believed that it was the spirit that moved political action, not the action as such, thatwas significant:

However much power the ruler of a country may have, the administration ofthe best laws he may introduce depends on the will and character of countlessobscure people; and whose wills and characters are only moulded by ideas;ideas which are as often spread by a humble person like George Fox, a businessman like Cobden, a scientist like Darwin, as by a statesman.38

Once her own involvement in famine relief came to an end, she returned to her familyhome to live beside her parents for the remainder of their lives, and focused her energieson serving her neighbours, and as once again a shoemaker, factory manager, and ateacher in the local adult school. From this time on, she never despaired about the stateof the world, and sometimes chided Jan Smuts on his 'weariness and discouragement',or sought to cheer him with some report of the beauty she found everywhere in hersurroundings. She also advised him to put aside his philosophical musing: 'What we needto understand is the power of Good. Philosophy will never help us to understand that.No intellectual subtlety can trace it out. The only means is simple honesty, making ourlife perfectly harmonious without thought, bringing our instincts and our emotions intothis same harmony.'39

She was guided by Christian Science also in the way of her own dying. Her healthbegan to falter once more towards the end of 1927, and Margaret Clark Gillett, whoremained a Quaker, wrote to Jan Smuts: 'I think she is only keeping her head above

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul 291

water by the most strenuous practice of Christian Science.'40 Evidently, Alice Clarkrallied for a time, but her sister was again voicing considerable concern at the beginningof 1932, in terms that suggest a return of tuberculosis. After a visit, Margaret ClarkGillett reported, 'I came away feeling rather sad about Alice though I think she is happy.One cannot tell what may happen, and it may go on quite long, or she might just shrivelup at any time.' No improvement came, despite her continuing practice of ChristianScience, and later that year Alice Clark remained 'very infirm and unfit for work oranything active', though the company records show that she was still attending manage-ment meetings.*1 Hers was to be a long, slow, drawn out death.

The way she managed her last illness in accordance with Christian Science beliefsserved to cut Alice Clark off from family and friends in ways that were often painful tothem. She appears to have stopped writing to Jan Smuts from this time, so that he reliedon her sister's letters for news of her. He was, however, able to visit her twice in thesummer of 1933, and afterwards wrote: 'You do not know what a blessed time of peaceand fruitful enjoyment I have had at Millfield these last two visits'. But he also remainedhaunted by the memory of how she had now to fight for every breath, writing toMargaret Clark Gillett: 'I always hear that dreadful exhausting cough which was almostmore than one could bear.' For her part, Margaret Clark Gillett wrote: 'It is very hardto see my beautiful Alice sucked down as it were by this form of slow death.'42 Jan Smutsceased to write during these last months, declaring 'my heart and mind are with her allthe time' but he found it impossible to know what to say in the face of Alice Clark'sdenial of the reality of her illness, or the coming separation from her friends and family.When news of her death reached him, he wrote: 'I have been much occupied these lastweeks with the thought of Alice. She was very near and dear to me. And she has leftbehind a message and a faith in Good which I am very desirous to assimilate. But I amvery glad her physical sufferings are over.'43

Those who observed her final struggle with tuberculosis remained in no doubt theyhad been witness to a great spiritual undertaking. Jan Smuts could not in the end accedeto Alice Clark's viewpoint: 'Being an optimist on the whole, I am inclined to underratethe forces of "Evil", but I am always in the end forced to admit their power. Someangel-souls arc almost too good for this world of ours. Is this heresy to say? Alice wouldhave said "Yes".' Unable to follow her in her religious beliefs, he could only maintain:'Nothing could ever do real justice to Alice. That radiant form is still often before meas I saw her in 1906 before disease had got hold of her. ... and her battle of the spiritagainst disease is one of the most heroic things I have ever seen.'44 This war-seasonedsoldier and statesman had no doubt that in her dying Alice Clark most fully realised herfinal calling: to bear witness to the reality of the spirit against the materialism of ourtimes.

Conclusion

In Christian Science Alice Clark found a set of beliefs that provided answers to thequandaries she confronted in 1919. Its radical-idealist ontology meant that the last 15years of her life were increasingly focused on the life of the spirit, rather than the socialand political activism of her earlier career. According to her new faith, of course, this wasthe most effective means by which any individual could act to change the world. Hernew religion allowed her, therefore, to maintain a sense of herself as an active Christian,as a reformer, and as a feminist. Her positive and strong sense of self and her owncapacities were maintained by the unshakeable optimism and tranquillity that she

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

292 S. S. Holton

derived from Christian Science, especially as that faith promised new resources withwhich to resist the 'invalidism' that had threatened since childhood to overtake her.

It is also the case that through her new religious orientation she gave expression to awoman-centred view of the world that celebrated the supplanting of the rule of thefathers by a new emphasis on the value of women and children. She chose thereafter notto work through feminist or other political organisations, but through channels closer tohome, for example, in pursuing and defending the wage levels and conditions of thewomen employees in the deliberations of an otherwise all-male management in C. &J.Clark's; in pressing the establishment of a non-contributory pension for waged workersin her family firm; and in one of her last wishes, that a swimming pool be built in hertown to provide for the recreation of women and children. Her new outlook elevated thenurturing of individuals above working for the welfare of her sex, or of populations ingeneral, by means of the state. Equally, her religious belief was marked by a continuingfeminist consciousness, especially with regard to the need to defend and advance theposition of women and children in a world still largely, and often devastatingly,controlled by men.

There seems little ambiguity, then, about Alice Clark's feminist convictions at anypoint in her adult life. Certainly, these shifted from a worldly to a spiritual dimensionthat saw women's emancipation as immanent, as part of the divine ordering of thingswhich humankind had only to understand to realise: hence the serene optimism of herlast years. Any ambiguity lies rather in the limited capacity of the practice of history foracknowledging such movements of the soul. Feminist history may explore systems ofbelief in terms of their significance for gender identities; it may analyse how the sexualhierarchy informs the production of knowledge, religious and otherwise; and, finally, itmay examine the use to which such knowledge may be put in gender contestation andsexual politics. But it is in the nature of history not be able to work within the terms ofspiritual life. Hence it is possible to trace the shift in Alice Clark's religious beliefs,examine the evidence that remains regarding her mystical experiences, link these tochanging patterns of activity, and in so doing may provide a more coherent interpret-ation of her story that also reflects more adequately the evidence in the documentarysources. That story may then address at least part of the research agenda set by PhyllisMack, and referred to at the beginning of this article: the evidence suggests that both agendered sense of her feminine identity and feminist concerns informed and wereinformed by Alice Clark's religiosity, as Quaker and as Christian Scientist. But changesin religious belief took her away both from her pioneering work in women's history andfrom political activism, because of the very different sense of time and the denial ofmateriality that are part of Christian Science beliefs. My narrative assumes a linear senseof time and works with materialist categories like 'tuberculosis' that are at odds with thecosmology examined here. The categories of 'soul' and 'history' remain, in such respects,incommensurable.

NOTES

1. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (George Routledge) London, 1919, remains inprint as a major reference point in the history of women and work. For a brief memoir see MCG[Margaret Clark Gillett], Alice Clark of C. & J. Clark Ltd, Street (published privately), Street, n.d., c.1934.

2. Alice Clark to Arthur B. Gillett, 7 June 1927, explaining her resignation from the Society of Friends toher brother-in-law, Margaret Clark Gillett Papers (hereafter MCGP), Box 11, Clark Archive, C. &. J.Clark Ltd., Street, Somerset, UK (hereafter CA), with my thanks to the trustees for permission to drawon these and other private family papers cited below.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul 293

3. MCG, Alice Clark, p. 11.4. Jan Smuts to Alice Clark, 16 May 1919, Jan Smuts Papers (hereafter JSP), vol. 98, no. 82, State Archives

Service, Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology of the Republic of South Africa, Pretoria,ref. no. SAB A1. Other friends also left similar reports as to the mystical experiences of Alice Clark.

5. See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the EnglishMiddle Class 1780-1850 (Hutchinson) London, 1987; Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England1500-1720 (Routledge) London, 1993.

6. See, for example, Jill Roc, Beyond Belief. Theosophy in Australia (University of New South Wales Press)Sydney, 1986; Judith Smart, ''For the Good that We Can Do": Cecilia Downing and Feminist ChristianCitizenship', Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 19, 1994, pp. 39-60; Sandra Stanley Holton and MargaretAllen, 'Offices and Services: Women's Pursuit of Sexual Equality within the Society of Friends,1873-1907', Quaker Studies, vol. 1, 1997, pp. 1-29; Sandra Stanley Holton, Alison Mackinnon andMargaret Allen, 'Between Rationality and Revelation: Women, Faith and Public Roles in the Nineteenthand Twentieth Centuries', Women's History Review, vol. 7, no. 2, 1998, forthcoming; Eileen Janes Yeo,'Protestant Feminists and Catholic Saints' in her Radical Femininity: Women's Self-representation in the PublicSphere (Manchester University Press) Manchester, 1998, pp. 150-71.

7. Anne Braude, 'Women's History Is American Religious History' in Thomas A. Tweed (ed.), Retelling USReligious History (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1997, pp. 87-107, 251-5.

8. Jill Roe, '"Testimonies from the Field": the Coming of Christian Science to Australia, c.1890-1910',unpublished paper presented to the Australian Historical Association conference, 1996, p. 4.

9. On spiritualism sec Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England(Virago) London, 1989; Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-VictorianLondon (Virago) London, 1992, especially chapter 6. On theosophy see Roe, Beyond Belief.

10. Susan Hill Lindley, 'The Ambiguous Feminism of Mary Baker Eddy', Journal of Religion, vol. 64, 1984,pp. 318-31, especially p. 318. See also Gail Parker, 'Mary Baker Eddy and Sentimental Womanhood',New England Quarterly, vol. 43, 1970, pp. 3 1 8 ; Susan M. Setta, 'Denial of the Female—Affirmation of theFeminine: the Father-Mother God of Mary Baker Eddy' in Rita M. Gross (ed.), Beyond Androcentrism: NewEssays in Women and Religion (Scholars Press) Missoula, Montana, 1977, pp. 289-304; Janice Klein, 'AnnLee and Mary Baker Eddy: the Parenting of New Religions', The Journal of Psychohistory, vol. 6, 1979,pp. 361-75.

11. Ann Braude, 'The Perils of Passivity: Women's Leadership in Spiritualism and Christian Science' inCatherine Wessinger (ed.), Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream(University of Illinois Press) Urbana, 1993, pp. 55-67.

12. Mary Bednarowski, 'Outside the Mainstream: Women's Religion and Women Religious Leaders inNineteenth-century America', Journal of the American Academy of the Religion, vol. 48, 1980, pp. 207-31,especially pp.218, 221.

13. Phyllis Mack, 'Teaching about Gender and Spirituality in Early English Quakerism, Women's Studies, vol.19, 1991, pp. 223-37, especially pp. 225, 226; Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling theTruth about History ( W . W . Norton) New York, 1994, pp. 247, 255.

14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts', Perspectives, vol. 35, no. 8, November 1997,pp. 37-43, especially pp. 37-8.

15. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts', pp.40, 41; Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'MinorityHistories, Subaltern Pasts: a Rejoinder', Perspectives, vol. 36, no. 4, April 1998, p. 31.

16. Sec Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Day: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement (Routledge) London,1996, especially pp. 161-73; and Feminism and Democracy: Women's Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain,1897-1918 (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1986, especially chapter 4.

17. Sandra Stanley Holton, 'To Live Through One's Own Powers: Gender, Class and Agency in AliceClark's Struggle against Tuberculosis and "Invalidism"', Journal of Women's History, vol. 11, 1999,forthcoming.

18. Jan Smuts to Margaret Clark Gillett, 11 June 1934, JSP, vol. 237, no. 169.19. Jan Smuts to Margaret Clark Gillett, 16 May 1919, JSP, vol. 206, no. 237. A copied extract from Alice

Clark to Jan Smuts, 13 May, JSP, vol. 289, no. 50, the letter in which almost certainly she reported hermystical experience, is all that remains now among the Smuts papers, and the extract was made byMargaret Clark Gillett for Keith Hancock's research for Smuts's biography, so it records only that partof the letter that refers to the Paris peace conference proceedings. For more on the creation of thisarchive, see Sir Keith Hancock, The Creighton Lecture in History 1955: the Smuts Papers (Athlone Press)London, 1956, especially pp. 3, 5.

20. Alice Clark to Mary Priestman, 14 November 1907, Millfield Papers, Box 75, CA.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014

294 S. S. Hollon

21. W.K. Hancock, Smuts: the Sanguine Years 1870-1919 (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1962,pp. 290-308.

22. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from theEarliest Times to the Present Day (1946) (George Allen & Unwin) London, 1961, especially pp. 555-7.

23. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 14 November 1917, 13 July 1918, 23 September 1917, JSP, vol. 290, nos 101,116, 100E. Note that Alice Clark did not always use conventional punctuation in her private letters.

24. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 10 February 1918, 20 January 1919, 28 January 1919, JSP, vol. 290, nos 108,133A, 134B, respectively.

25. Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909)(University of Nebraska Press) Lincoln and London, 1993, p. 179.

26. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 30 April 1919, JSP, vol. 290, no. 147.27. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 8 May 1919, and see also 13 May 1919, both JSP, vol. 290, nos 141, 150.28. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 30 April 1919, JSP, vol. 290, no. 147.29. Mack, 'Teaching about Gender', pp. 228, 229-31.30. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 18 May 1919, JSP, vol. 290, no 152.31. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 10 February 1920, JSP, vol. 207, no. 32. Compare this perspective on

maternalism with the wide-ranging discussions in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World:Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State (Routledge) London, 1993.

32. Eddy quoted in Cather and Milmine, Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 204, 205-6.33. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 28 January 1919, JSP, vol. 290, no. 134A.34. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 14 June 1919, 21 June 1919, JSP, vol. 290, nos 162A, 166, and Jan Smuts to

Alice Clark, 23 June 1919, in W.K. Hancock and Jean Van Der Poel (eds), Selections from the Smuts Papers,vol. 4 (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1966), p. 243; Hilda Clark to Jan Smuts, 22 June 1919,JSP, vol. 290, no. 75.

35. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 2 February 1920, JSP, vol. 207, no. 31.36. See Edith Pye's account of these changes reported in 'Memorial Service at the Crispin Hall', Central

Somerset Gazette, 18 May 1934, p. 8; MCG, 'Alice Clark', pp. 19-20.37. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 6 December 1919, 29 November 1920, JSP, vol. 205, no. 55, vol. 207, no. 54.38. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 2 February 1920, 18 September 1925, 30 August 1925, JSP, vol. 207, no. 31,

vol. 215, nos 108, 107.39. Alice Clark to Jan Smuts, 11 January 1920, JSP, vol. 207, no. 28.40. Margaret Clark Gillett to Jan Smuts, 1 December 1927, 20 January 1928, JSP, vol. 221, no. 158, vol.

224, no. 52.41. Margaret Clark Gillctt to Jan Smuts, 9 February, 3 August, 2 September 1932, JSP, vol. 233, nos 64,

92, 100.42. Jan Smuts to Alice Clark, 23 August 1933, Jan Smuts to Margaret Clark Gillett, 12 March 1934,

Margaret Clark Gillett to Jan Smuts, 3 October 1933, JSP, vol. 289, no. 161, vol. 237, no. 153, vol. 235,no. 59.

43. Jan Smuts to Margaret Clark Gillett, 23 March 1934; 4 June 1934, JSP, vol. 237, nos 155, 168.44. Jan Smuts to Margaret Clark Gillett, 2 March 1935; 10 February 1935, JSP, vol. 238, nos 195, 192.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Col

umbi

a U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

21 2

7 N

ovem

ber

2014