Abstract
This article explores the identity evolution of Anglican and Catholic women in England and Spain from 1950 to 2020, using oral history. It examines how secularization affected their lived religion and how these women, often in male-dominated churches, navigated faith and feminism. While Catholic women in Spain faced repression under Franco, many embraced Vatican II’s reforms before later resisting the church’s conservative turn. In England Anglican women experienced a shifting religious landscape, balancing tradition with social change and finding new ways to express their faith within a more adaptable church. Their life stories reveal how faith, gender, and secularization intertwined in shaping religious identity.
In 1960, during the implementation of profound reforms aimed at liberalizing and opening the Spanish economy to the outside world, the Franco dictatorship began popularizing the slogan “Spain is Different.” Its purpose was to attract foreign tourism by casting a positive light on long-standing European prejudices portraying Spain as backward, peculiar, and exotic. However, this slogan further widened the cultural gap between Spain and the rest of Europe, and its effects have proven to be long lasting, including in historiography. In fact, it was not until the turn of the millennium that some historians began connecting Spanish modern history with global phenomena and processes. While in the nineteenth century Spain actively participated in the formulation and development of ideologies and movements such as liberalism, nationalism, and imperialism (Luengo and Dalmau 2018), fundamental episodes in its twentieth-century history—such as the Second Republic, civil war, Franco’s dictatorship, and the transition to democracy—cannot be understood without considering their connections to global trends and events.
In line with this renewed trend in Spanish historiography, this article provides a necessarily general preliminary overview of a wider research project based on oral history, which will culminate in the publication of a book currently in preparation. The aim of the project is to analyze, through a comparative method, the lived experiences of the profound social and cultural changes that have occurred over the past few decades among women who belonged to the majority churches in their respective countries: the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in Spain. I believe this research topic is of interest because it adds complexity to our current understanding of religious change and secularization in a number of ways. First, these women belong to established churches that have had a very close relationship with secularization. As a result, many women—and men—have left these churches, attracting most interest from historians and sociologists. Second, being women in churches in which the leadership continues to be mostly or completely male, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church, has left them in a subordinate position. Third, these particular women share a progressive view of the world in denominations that traditionally have been connected with conservative ideas. Finally, these women share a feminist identity that has often been underestimated by secular feminism.
This work is located within the perspective of lived religion. According to McGuire and Ammerman, two theorists of this topic, in order to analyze the lived religion of a person or group of people we must not restrict ourselves to beliefs and doctrine. Instead, we have to approach all those aspects of everyday life where religiosity is more or less present. In addition, we need to keep in mind that at the level of the individual, religion is not fixed, unitary, or even coherent. Rather, it is changing, adapting, and growing (McGuire 2008; Ammerman 2014).
Lived religion has been studied especially in the field of sociology. However, in this article I aim to give it an historical dimension through the methodology of oral history. Oral history can give us information about the external reality in which its subjects have lived. However, its greatest potential resides in its capacity to access subjectivity, the identity formed by discourses, experience, and emotions (Abrams 2016, 54). From a cultural perspective, it is this capacity to access subjects’ interpretation of what happened to them that makes oral history especially valuable (Summerfield 2004, 66–67). In this article, I am interested in the process of identity construction in relation to gender and religion among Anglican and Catholic women. In other words, I want to know how these women have conceived of themselves during their lives as gendered and religious subjects. According to Sarah Williams, oral history provides a means by which to escape simplistic institutional definitions of religiosity that overlook the complexity and variety of popular expressions of belief. Furthermore, due to the fact that popular religion was passed down from one generation to the next primarily by women, they tended to speak more freely on the subject of their beliefs and to connect them with the public and communal dimension of their lives (Williams 1996, 30–32).
Between 2012 and 2021 I interviewed thirty-one Catholic women in Spain and fourteen Anglican women in England. The recruitment of interviewees in both countries was carried out using the snowball sampling technique. In the Spanish case, eighteen of the interviewees were born in the Basque Country, although there are women from six other Spanish regions. In the English case, the interviewees were recruited from various Anglican parishes in the city of Leeds, representing different traditions but mostly associated with the broad church. However, only four of them were born in Yorkshire, with the rest coming from six other regions in England. Regarding their social class, the majority of the interviewees belong to the middle class, although there are also women from working-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds.
I carried out semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions in order to understand the role that religion has played in the interviewees’ lives. I asked about piety during childhood (for example, at school and at home); memories of the Second Vatican Council (in the case of Catholic interviewees); family life; work; leisure time; engagement with civic causes; faith; opinions about feminism; and the degree of satisfaction about the role that women have played in the church. The interviews usually lasted around 1.5–2 hours and were conducted either at the interviewee’s home, at their place of work or, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, by videoconference. For this article, I have chosen to focus on women born between the 1920s and the 1950s.1
This article will address three main questions: How did these women engage with the intense process of secularization that began in both countries during the 1960s? How have these women managed to defend a progressive view of Christianity within these two established churches? And finally, when and how have some of these women been able to connect their Christian identity with feminism? I will explore the evolution of the religious identity of these women from a comparative perspective and, in connection to this, the way they have experienced and interpreted the social and cultural changes of their time.
1 Comparing Realities: England and Spain, Anglican and Catholic
The adoption of a global or transnational perspective in history, increasingly essential in an era when nationalist populisms aim to craft national histories based on an idealized past that never existed, can be pursued in two main ways: first, through the comparative approach, which seeks to understand events in one place by examining their similarities with, and differences from, how things happened somewhere else; and second, through the connective approach, which elucidates how history is shaped by the interactions of geographically or temporally separate historical communities (Drayton and Motadell 2018, 3)—or, we might add, by the presence of transnational phenomena and processes that affect different societies. In our object of study, it is evident that the historical differences in the political, economic, social, and cultural evolution of Spain and England, as well as in their two predominant churches, are essential factors in the distinct configurations of the life stories of the women interviewed for this project. However, the transnational nature of Christianity (whether in its Anglican or Roman Catholic branch), alongside transnational sociocultural phenomena such as secularization, has also contributed to shaping these identities over time.
The political evolutions of England and Spain over the past seventy-five years have been significantly different, at least in the period between the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939) and the Second World War respectively, and the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco in 1975. Nevertheless, in the contexts of both the relatively stable democratic British regime and the more turbulent political evolution of Spain, the two countries’ respective churches have played important roles. In the English case, the Church of England has historically been identified very closely with national values; however, from the 1960s onwards, increased competition from other faiths and, even more so, an accelerated process of secularization, have put that identification into doubt. This series of events nevertheless translated into greater autonomy for what had been, since the sixteenth century, a state church (Brown 2006; Hastings 2001).
In the Spanish case, Francoism was a National-Catholic dictatorship in which the church played a key role. During the first decades of the dictatorship, the church openly supported and legitimized the regime, but from the mid-1950s onwards some grassroots Catholic groups and associations began to oppose the dictatorship. Moreover, in the early 1970s there was a crucial shift when a majority of bishops publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the regime. It was this attitude that allowed the church to maintain, and even to expand, some of the privileges it had previously enjoyed under Franco during the subsequent transition to democracy. These included state funding, partial control of education, and independence from the state, with bishops no longer appointed by the head of state but by the pope (Ortiz and González 2011).
In addition to these political and ecclesiastical differences, we have to consider the internal differences between the two churches (Avis 2000). The Church of England (which has a Protestant or evangelical origin, though with an important Catholic influence), has evolved over recent decades toward a clearly synodal structure, with notable lay participation. In contrast, the Roman Catholic Church, in spite of the remarkable thrust of the Second Vatican Council, has never abandoned its monarchical and hierarchical structure. Within the clergy, the most important difference, apart from the possibility for priests or vicars to get married, is the presence of women in the Church of England. In fact, the passing of the female priesthood by the General Synod in 1992 meant that both sides suppressed any previous expectations of reunification between the two churches. However, the remarkable influence of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century allowed the Church of England to maintain the historic episcopate (bishops who, it is believed, can be traced back to the apostles of Jesus) and share with the Roman Catholic Church the triad of bishops, priests, and deacons. Another important similarity between the two churches is their global nature, quite evident in the case of Catholicism, but also relevant to the Church of England due to its tight connection with other churches that form part of the Anglican Communion. This is an important factor to bear in mind because some of my interviewees were able to maintain the bond with their church when they had to live abroad.
As a result of a centuries-long strict policy of religious intolerance, the religious landscape in Spain is relatively homogenous. Most of the population (almost 56.6 percent) is Catholic, whereas only 2.9 percent declare themselves to have another religion, mostly Evangelicals and Muslims (CIS 2021: 18). In the case of England (and Wales), the situation is quite different. Although Anglicanism continues to be the main denomination in England, the religious tolerance toward nonconformist churches and Roman Catholics, from the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, as well as the recent rise of charismatic churches, has resulted in a more plural religious landscape. This has been enriched in recent decades by the presence of other non-Christian denominations such as Muslims (around 6.5 percent of the population of England and Wales; ONS 2021), Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jews. Therefore, while Spain continues to be a mostly Catholic country, in England the religious situation is far more complex, with Anglicanism struggling to maintain a dominant position within a varied religious landscape.
Despite these evident differences, something has been common to both countries in recent decades: increasing secularization. The data appear compelling in both cases. Whereas in 1965 98 percent of the Spanish population identified as highly or moderately religious, by 2021 38.6 percent of the population declared itself to be nonbelieving, agnostic or atheist (see table 1). In Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s, between 6 and 9 percent of the population declared having no religion, whereas by 2018 this figure had risen to 52 percent of respondents. Furthermore, the proportion of people who declared themselves to be Anglican has diminished from 61 percent in 1963 to only 12 percent in 2018 (see table 2). Therefore, secularization has undoubtedly advanced in Britain and Spain in recent decades, and it has been the established churches (Church of England and Catholic Church in Spain) that have been most affected by this process.
Table 1
Religious self-identification in Spain
|
1965 |
2021 |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Catholic |
98 % |
56.6 % |
|
Other religion |
– |
2.8 % |
|
No religion |
2 % |
– |
|
Agnostic |
– |
12.3 % |
|
Nonbeliever |
– |
10.6 % |
|
Atheist |
– |
15.7 % |
|
N/A |
– |
1.8 % |
This apparently convincing data cannot conceal the fact that the theory of secularization—at least in its classical formulation—has long been in crisis. Some years ago, Talal Asad highlighted the need to uncover the myths generated by secularism to legitimize its social and political project (Asad 2003, 21–66). Similarly, Callum Brown emphasized this culturalist shift in the understanding of secularization in Britain, underlining two key ideas: first, that secularization proper did not begin until the 1960s and second, that the defeminization of religion during that decade was a crucial factor in this process (2009, 170–192). For her part, Alana Harris, in her lived religious history of English Catholicism since the Second World War, advocates replacing terms like religious decline or crisis with the broader concept of religious transformation (2013, 45–46).
Table 2
Religious self-identification in Britain
|
1963 |
2018 |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Church of England |
61 % |
12 % |
|
Free churches / Presbyterian |
19 % |
17 % |
|
Roman Catholicism |
10 % |
7 % |
|
Other religion |
4 % |
9 % |
|
No religion |
6 % |
52 % |
More recently, the work of Brewitt-Taylor appears to signal a genuine paradigm shift (2018, 2021). He concurs with Brown that secularization, in its true sense, began in the 1960s. However, rather than portraying religious individuals as victims of this process, he argues that they were, in fact, its initial drivers. Specifically, he identifies a group of radical Anglican theologians who, by the mid-1960s, began to envisage both the present and the future as entirely secular. Confronted with what they perceived as an inevitable development, they adopted an immanent conception of Christianity in its relationship with the world. Ultimately, this was a top-down movement in which the cultural sphere operated independently of social change, which followed later. In the ensuing years, the media played a crucial role in embedding this new narrative within society from the late 1960s onwards.
This renewed understanding of the origins of secularization is not without certain criticisms and shortcomings. Two specific issues can be highlighted. First, it is unclear whether this explanatory model can be applied to other Christian denominations or other countries. Second, the author’s overly elitist approach grants little autonomy to the agency of grassroots movements, the laypeople in general, and women in particular. In this regard, the remainder of this article aims to address, in relation to progressive Anglican and Catholic women in England and Spain respectively, two questions: (1) What role did these women assume in response to the significant social and cultural changes of the second half of the century, including secularization? (2) Were they merely spectators of these changes, or did they actively participate in their development?
2 Living Everyday Religion: Oral Life Stories of Anglican and Catholic Women
2.1 1950s
The end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War marked the start of a period of cultural conservatism in the West. Although with some nuances, historiography specializing in the British case largely agrees that, while the process of de-Christianization had begun decades earlier—as evidenced, for instance, by available data on the decline in religious practice—a discursive Christianity or a religious metanarrative remained dominant in the public sphere during the 1950s. These frameworks made religion compatible with modernity, while secularism, associated with paganism or communism, was discredited (Brown 2006, 177–223; McLeod 2007, 31–59; Brewitt-Taylor 2021, 320–326).
In the testimonies of most of the English interviewees who were children in the 1950s and early 1960s, this strong presence of religion in the public sphere is evident, although they tend to associate it with routine and boredom. Felicity King (born in Somerset in 1939) is quite critical of her religious education: “As a child, I was brought up as an Anglican. I don’t think, I wasn’t at all well educated as an Anglican, it was just going to church being incredibly bored.”2 Adele Milton (born in Lancashire, also in 1939) shares Felicity’s view of her religious education:
We moved to Yorkshire when I was five and a half and I went through the normal primary schools. It was a Church of England school. I remember we were asked, would we like extra religious education. I begged my parents to say, “No,” because I thought we had enough religious education anyway.3
It was a time in which nine people in every ten identified with a denomination, four-fifths of the population believed in God and Jesus Christ, and the Bible was to be found in nine out of ten homes (Field 2015, 107). As Angela Birkin (born in Birmingham in 1958) says, “it was expected that you went to church, it was a normal thing to do.”4 On Sundays, when no shops were open, in the words of Sue Lewis (born in Devon in 1947), “it was thought that you shouldn’t really go out and play, [but] should play quietly indoors.”5 Sunday schools were really the only source of entertainment for children. That is why they are normally remembered positively by my interviewees. For example, Anne Walker (born in Doncaster in 1950), who now identifies as a woman but grew up as a boy, experienced a complicated childhood due to the separation of her parents and the sensation that she should have been female. She remembers Sunday school as a form of escape, although she did not really know the meaning of the stories she was told: “I quite enjoyed Sunday school … The stories were wonderful. I thought they were excellent. I never really thought about what they meant. They just were very nice stories and it was comfortable talking about them in the church.”6
Unlike in Britain, Spain’s recent history includes periods in which secularist forces had a strong social and political influence, such as during the Sexenio Democrático (1868–1874) and the Second Republic (1931–1936). One of the key objectives of Franco’s dictatorship was precisely to eradicate this secularist legacy. As part of its effort to restore social order, the regime sought to impose the re-Christianisation of society through force and fear. Thus, by the 1950s, religion had assumed a hegemonic position in the public sphere, as it had in Britain, but in Spain this was enforced through strict social and moral control, particularly targeting women (Morcillo 2000). They were viewed as important contributors to the re-Christianisation of society, but their potentially perverse nature meant they were subjected to that strict control. For Francoism, social order had to be based on an unshakable gender order, and religion could ensure both.
Many of my Spanish interviewees went through childhood and adolescence in this atmosphere, which they defined as extremely oppressive and restrictive. During her interview, Miren Gerrikagoitia (born in the Basque Country in 1933) highlighted the difference between the strict and fearful piety she experienced at the nuns’ school she attended with the much more open and tolerant faith she received from her family. Her memories of her first communion are especially negative because she associates the event with the fear of sinning and of the consequences were she to break the established rules: “I don’t have nice memories of my first communion because it was characterized by fear: you couldn’t forget a sin, you didn’t want this, you couldn’t do that.”7 Juani Márquez (born in Galicia in 1947) remembered that after doing spiritual exercises with a priest, she was left with the idea that her mother was in hell because her family had not called the priest when she was dying.8 Finally, Remedios Arnalte (born in a rural area of Valencia in 1928) recounted sorrowfully how she was forced to swear an oath in front of the cross and before a priest that she would marry the man who would eventually become her husband, who at the time was living in Barcelona and learning a trade. Even though she had an unhappy marriage, Remedios never broke that oath, out of fear. “I didn’t dare,” she said in the interview.9
Therefore, within a shared context in which Christianity still held a hegemonic discursive position, English Anglican women associate this period in their memories with routine and boredom, whereas the testimonies of Spanish Catholic women, who experienced their childhood under dictatorship, emphasize fear of sin and hell. All of this would change radically during the 1960s.
2.2 1960s and 1970s
In recent years, a sector of Spanish religious historiography has begun to link the significant cultural changes of the 1960s, marked in the West by the consolidation of a genuine youth culture, the sexual revolution, and the emergence of new social movements, to the internal transformation of Catholicism itself. This has contributed to dismantling the traditional image of Catholicism as inherently opposed or always reactive to the changes brought by modernity (De la Cueva and Louzao, 2023). As in the English case, and following Brewitt-Taylor’s explanatory model, the influence of radical Catholic theologians and intellectuals (such as José María González Ruiz, Enrique Miret Magdalena, or Alfonso Carlos Comín), as well as progressive Catholic journals in disseminating their ideas (Cuadernos para el Diálogo, El Ciervo, or Vida Nueva), was crucial in shaping the profound social and cultural changes of the period, including secularization. However, equally important were religious congregations and lay associations (apostolic movements, grassroots communities), in which progressive Catholic women played a significant role.
The great agent of change within Roman Catholicism during this time was the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) (Horn 2015). In the testimonies of most of the interviewees, the council is perceived as the turning point in their shift in religiosity. They declared that they had clear visual memories of the council assemblies, of Pope John XXIII, and of some of the most tangible effects of the council, such as the changes that were made to the liturgy. If the Second Vatican Council inspired many Catholic women, this was especially because of the transformation of the conception of the church documented in the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium and other council documents. Thanks to the concept of the People of God, the traditional idea of a church as being strictly hierarchical in its organization was broken and the role of both laymen and laywomen revitalized. Many Catholic women were empowered by these principles, which not only contributed to modifying their way of practicing their faith but also granted them a more critical attitude, both outside and inside the church (De Dios and Mínguez 2016).
María Luisa Asumendi was born in the Basque Country in 1926 and was therefore in her late thirties when the council finished. She recognized that the council gave her much hope, and she enjoyed the feeling of freedom compared to the predominant piety that had existed previously:
The council came to us and offered a lot of possibilities, even at our age. It did not seem logical. Normally, when one reaches a certain age, one clings more strongly than ever to security and customs. It was a change but for me it filled me with a terrible hope, this freedom from it all, it all seemed terribly good. I really liked it a lot. It gave me hope to live. It was something different to [adopts a severe tone] obligation, strictness, law.10
María Luisa is surprised that the council prompted her to undergo a profound internal transformation, which also influenced her gender self-perception, despite her relatively advanced age. However, as Celia Valiente (2015) has demonstrated, aging did not hinder Catholic feminist mobilization in Francoist Spain—on the contrary, it actively contributed to it.
However, even before the Second Vatican Council, some priests and lay movements linked to Catholic Action (particularly working-class movements such as the Workers’ Brotherhood of Catholic Action [HOAC] and Young Christian Workers [JOC]) had already started to question the unwavering support of the Catholic Church for the dictatorship. During the sixties, these groups started openly to oppose the Franco regime, especially in the Basque Country and Catalonia. Also of importance was the movement of working-class priests (curas obreros), which emerged in the most industrialized areas of the country, like Biscay, and clearly contributed to delegitimizing the dictatorship (Montero 2009). Just as did many nuns—also deeply influenced by the Second Vatican Council—working-class priests became agents of secularization by fully immersing themselves in the secular world, in their case through work. A symbolic yet highly performative gesture was their renunciation of clerical attire—the cassock in the case of priests and the habit in the case of nuns (Ruiz 2021; García 2023).
Visi Bóveda, a working-class woman (born in 1947 in an industrial town near Bilbao), told me how, when she was only fourteen, she joined the JOC due to the influence of some working-class priests. It was through this organization that she became aware of the working class and of the Basque people’s rights:
When I was 14 … I was a member of the JOC in Sestao, in the Patronato [parish church], when the first murmurs of discontent with the church in relation to social rights and the rights of the Basque people began. At that time there was a series of priests who were more aware of social class, very progressive, Solabarria for example, and more people who have gone down in history … And it was then that I took a different path and became more concerned with the working class. There was Altos Hornos [a Spanish steel manufacturer] in turmoil, the whole industry, with more and more industries striking over time.
Many of the men and women who belonged to these Catholic movements came to join far-left parties in the early 1970s as a way to oppose the dictatorship. In the context of increasing secularization, many of these people abandoned their Christian beliefs. The participants in this research, however, tried to look for other ways to change the situation without leaving their religious identity. One of the platforms where many Catholic women found a way to channel their civic commitments was neighborhood associations (Radcliff 2011: 109–154). Pili Añón (born in 1942 in a rural area of Aragon) moved to the city of Zaragoza in her teens and, after having belonged to HOAC, she joined her local neighborhood association. From there, she was able to campaign for improvements to her neighborhood (paving the streets, building schools, etc.) while continuing as a member of Christian base communities with her husband.11
In England, the presence of a more plural religious landscape and, above all, the fact that certain sectors of Anglicanism not only did not oppose the cultural changes of the 1960s but actively contributed to their development, may explain why the interviewees’ narratives do not necessarily express disenchantment with religion. It is true that some of these women stopped attending church during their adolescence and early adulthood, but the term that perhaps best defines this period for them is discovery. The discovery of new forms of religion or spirituality usually took place at university, where most of the English interviewees had the opportunity to study for a degree in their twenties. Thus, Angela Birkin told me that “when I went to Cambridge, I started to experience a more questioning faith than what I had previously encountered.”12 Jennifer Foster (born in London in 1950) recognized that she did not go to church often during her university years, but belonging to the Student Christian Movement, a religious organization that had embraced a theological vision of secularization since 1963 (Brewitt-Taylor 2015), allowed her to learn more about her faith:
I enjoyed my degree. I was also a member of an organization called the Student Christian Movement, which is a liberal Christian movement. It’s not all happy-clappy and all that stuff. It’s very thoughtful, and it made me think and explore a lot about religion. We had some very good lectures. We had some really good discussion groups, and we were taken to some very interesting conferences.13
In fact, one possibility in the plural religious landscape of Britain was the opportunity to connect with other religions. This was the case of Caroline Ugbo (born in Guildford in 1941), who recognized having experimented with Islam as a rebellion against what she called the “church way of living”:
I flirted with Islam. I thought it was interesting. I suppose I had some ideological ideas at the time which didn’t fit, but I think mainly it was my lifestyle, because I was doing things that didn’t fit into what I saw as a church way of living. That’s where the rebellion came in and that’s when I stopped going to church.14
But on other occasions, the Church of England was the real discovery. For example, Kathryn Fitzsimons (born in a town in the West Midlands in 1957), who had received a Methodist education during her childhood, discovered the Church of England during her stays in Paris, where she was learning French. Years later, she became a deacon and then a priest in the Church of England:
When I was in France, I discovered the Church of England. It was called St. Michael’s, a church in Paris … I was in my early twenties. Being part of that church, I came to know so much more about God and so much more about Jesus and it felt really right to commit my life to the Christian faith and following Jesus.15
Unlike Abby Day’s “generation A” (2017), the majority of English women interviewed for the current study were born during or just after the Second World War (that is, the generation that succeeded the one studied by Day). Consequently, they participated in the transformations that took place in the sixties during their adolescence and youth, a fundamental period for identity formation. For that reason, unlike their mothers’ generation, these women were able to harmonize their religious beliefs with a progressive vision of society.
2.3 1980 onwards
The different paths traveled by the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England from the 1980s onwards had a great influence on the process of identity construction of religious women of both denominations. All my Spanish interviewees were fully aware of the conservative turn of the Catholic Church, which not only manifested in a rejection of the secularization process and its effects (partly driven by Catholicism itself in earlier years) but also had a significant impact on gender matters. It is important to remember that the encyclical letter of Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (1968), not only condemned abortion, as the Second Vatican Council had done, but also any contraceptive, including the pill (Harris 2018, 1–20). During the pontificate of John Paul II, women were constantly praised as virgins and mothers while their biological differences with men were relentlessly highlighted—the encyclical Mulieris Dignitatem (1988) is a good example. Furthermore, the hierarchy of the Spanish Catholic Church, which had lost part of its prominent position during the Franco dictatorship, has defended its still significant influence in areas like education, while it has been severely opposed to the legal approval of divorce, abortion, and same-sex marriage (Díaz 2019). In recent years, the ecclesiastical hierarchy has also been very critical of what they call “gender ideology” and have instead argued for an exclusively biological conception of sex differences.
Given that their own personal spiritual trajectories progressed in a completely different direction to that of the church, the interviewees displayed great frustration and annoyance toward the ideological evolution of the Catholic hierarchy in recent decades. Regarding gender matters, Pili Añón contrasted the current opposition of the Catholic Church to contraceptives with her own experience: she told me that she and other women from their neighborhood association were successful in their campaign for free access to contraceptive pills at the local walk-in clinic. For her, there is no contradiction between fighting for this right and being Catholic.16 With regard to abortion, all of the interviewees had moral doubts, although they were understanding of the women who felt obliged to have one.
Another cause of dissatisfaction among progressive Catholic women is the unequal power relations that exist within the church. Most of the Spanish interviewees have often felt undervalued by priests and bishops when they tried to lead social or religious initiatives in their parish. We can detect in their testimonies feelings of frustration and contained rage toward a male hierarchy that does not value women nor recognize their potential contribution to the church. The interviewees were also highly critical of the rejection of a female priesthood by the Catholic hierarchy, although only a few of them confessed to having desired to become a priest. This was the case for María José Arana, a sister of the Society of the Sacred Heart.17 For many years, she was in charge of a parish in a village in Biscay. She carried out all the functions of a male priest with the exception of consecrating bread and wine for the Eucharist, which is not allowed under Canon Law. However, she had the vocation of being a priest and in 1994 she wrote a book with Mary Salas, a prominent member of Spanish Catholic Action, titled Mujeres sacerdotes. ¿Por qué no? (Women Priests: Why Not?). Ironically, this book came out only some days before John Paul II published the apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, in which he wrote of banning women from priesthood “forever.”
The evolution of the Church of England in recent decades has been similar to that of the Catholic Church in Spain in some respects, but quite different in others. As well as the above-mentioned fall in indicators of belonging to this church, the bonds that joined it with the state for centuries have considerably weakened, a clear effect of the secularization process. Funding from the state to the church has reduced steadily over the years and ecclesiastical issues have been managed solely by the church since the 1970s. However, unlike the Catholic Church, the government is not monarchic but synodic through the institution of the General Synod with its three houses: the House of Bishops, the House of Clergy, and the House of Laity. Therefore, the decision-making in the Church of England has become far more participative than in the Catholic Church (Hastings 2001, 602–629). Women have also been included, first in the House of Laity and then, thanks to the acceptance of female priests in 1992 and female bishops in 2014, also in the two other houses (Gill 1994, 232–276).
Although there are highly conservative sectors within the Church of England (the organization Forward in Faith, which is clearly opposed to women priests and bishops, is a good example), it is also true that there are many believers who are decidedly against social inequalities, not only among the laity but also among the hierarchy. Although the extent of its impact has been limited by recent studies (Geiringer and Owens 2022), it should be noted that the publication of the report Faith in the City by an Anglican commission in 1985 was qualified as “Marxist” by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (Smith 1990). Finally, regarding matters of sexuality, the Church of England has had, in general, a more open view on issues such as contraception, but its position on homosexuality continues to be highly controversial within the Anglican Communion.
Because the Church of England has not disconnected from the cultural changes it helped to promote in the 1960s, it is uncommon to find much criticism of the church among progressive Anglican women, unlike among progressive Catholic women. One exception could be Jennifer Foster, who justified not having been ordained in the Church of England because “by nature, I prefer to be fairly egalitarian. The thing I dislike most about the Church of England is that sometimes it can be very hierarchical.”18 In any case, what is really valued among Anglican interviewees is the sense of community that belonging to the church gives them. Felicity King highlights that “the social aspects of the church are very important, the caring for people. It’s not just a matter of going in and praying but also that you actively are caring for other people in the church.”19 Eleanor Harrison (born in Leeds in 1948), has been very concerned about social inequalities during her life and, after a period of doubt about her faith, she came to the conclusion that being Christian was the best way to fight against those injustices:
When you see the need that is there and how wealth is so unevenly distributed and you see the injustice, it can make you very angry. I suppose that was part of what made me decide, “Yes, I want to do something about social injustice.” Being a Christian is part of that. Maybe being a member of the Labour Party is part of that. Christian first, before Labour Party if you get my meaning.20
Finally, all the Anglican interviewees were in total agreement with the ordination of women within the Church of England and most of them have vivid memories of the first time they attended a service led by a woman. In this testimony, Angela Birkin is extremely grateful to the named in 2025 Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullaly, for her help and advice when Angela was training to be ordained:
We had a wonderful pre-ordination retreat with the bishop of London, Sarah Mullally … Bishop Nick, the bishop of Leeds, thought, “She’s going to say I’m too busy,” but in fact she didn’t. She said, “No, it’s in my diary. I’ll come and do it.” It was wonderful to have her and she’s a former nurse. I was able to have a little talk with her and that was really, really helpful.21
Indeed, the possibility of being ordained and accessing leadership posts within the Church of England is one of the reasons for which many of the Anglican women I interviewed do not have a strong feminist identity nowadays. Of course, most of them agree with the idea of equality between men and women, and some of them became feminists in the 1980s by being members of the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW). However, the broadly extended stereotype about the aggressive character of feminism is the main reason that explains why many of the interviewees keep some distance from feminism. I think this testimony of Adele Milton provides a good example:
Adele: I think years on, some women have forgotten the fight to become equal citizens. But I wouldn’t call myself a strident feminist.Interviewer: You wouldn’t call yourself a feminist woman?Adele: I would call myself a feminist, but by strident I mean, making a big issue of it. I would stand up for the rights of women and for my own rights but not in an aggressive way.22
When assessing my Spanish interviewees, the situation is quite different. The presence of a totally male hierarchy and the impossibility for women to be ordained are perceived by progressive Catholic women as gender discrimination. Furthermore, the desire to gain a deeper understanding of their faith led many of my interviewees (fourteen out of thirty-one) to study theology. The decision to do this demonstrates an important point in their lives because theology and particularly feminist theology equipped them with the discursive tools they needed to reinterpret their position within the church in terms of subordination, due to the existence of a patriarchal structure. Finally, it should be born in mind that the present is always relevant in any life story. At the time the interviews were conducted, the feminist movement was at a boiling point and had widespread social support. For all these reasons, most of my Spanish interviewees do not have any problems expressing their feminist identity, which they link closely to their Christian faith. In fact, many of these women belong nowadays to Christian feminist groups and associations that are present in cities and towns across the country. These have not succeeded in bringing about deep changes in the ecclesiastical structure, but they have had a notable cultural impact on Spanish society (Valiente 2022). I think that this testimony, from Mercedes López (born in 1954 in Seville), shows an excellent example of this fusion of Christian and feminist identities: “Am I feminist because I am Christian, or am I Christian because I am feminist? For me, the most important project is the egalitarian project of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s all. Beyond this, there is nothing.”23
3 Conclusion
In conclusion, the faith journey traveled by progressive Catholic women in Spain and Anglican women in England has been different in some aspects because of the social and political contexts of the two countries and the distinct evolutions of their churches. In the case of Catholic women, we could talk of three different stages: one of fear during the first decades of Franco’s dictatorship, another of hope during the 1960s and 1970s due mainly to the Second Vatican Council, and a third of disappointment, as a consequence of the conservative turn of the church hierarchy, which has led many of these women to have a strong feminist identity. In the case of Anglican women, a first stage characterized by routine and boredom toward the church during their childhood was followed by another stage during their youth, marked by the discovery of new forms of religion and spirituality. It was in adulthood that most of them found that belonging to the Church of England was the best way to share their sense of community and their commitment to changing social inequalities.
In any case, adopting a comparative approach has allowed us to observe how transnational phenomena have also played a fundamental role in shaping these women’s identities. Christianity, in all its denominations, had a significant influence both on the conservatism of the 1950s and on the profound cultural transformation of the 1960s and 1970s in the West. The greater emphasis on its immanent rather than transcendent conception, in both Anglicanism and Catholicism, became one of the driving forces of secularization. All of this contributed to shaping a distinctive religious and gender identity that combined faith with the pursuit of a fairer and more egalitarian church and society.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Gregorio Alonso and Carrie Hamilton for their advice and assistance in the writing of this article.
Throughout the text, only those interviewees who requested anonymity during the interview have been anonymised; the others appear under their real names, in accordance with the consent forms they signed.
Interview, 18 February 2020, Leeds.
Interview, 7 May 2020, online. Pseudonym used at the interviewee’s request.
Interview, 21 February 2020, Leeds.
Interview, 17 February 2020, Leeds. Pseudonym used at the interviewee’s request.
Interview, 5 March 2020, Leeds. Pseudonym used at the interviewee’s request.
Interview, 7 June 2016, Amorebieta.
Interview, 17 February 2016, Bilbao. Pseudonym used at the interviewee’s request.
Interview, 7 and 8 January 2012, Teruel.
Interview, 16 December 2016, Bilbao.
Interview, 5 December 2018, Zaragoza.
Interview, 21 February 2020, Leeds.
Interview, 26 May 2020, online. Pseudonym used at the interviewee’s request.
Interview, 8 June 2020, online.
Interview, 5 March 2020, Leeds.
Interview, 5 December 2018, Zaragoza.
Interview, 26 May 2016, Getxo.
Interview, 26 May 2020, online. Pseudonym used at the interviewee’s request.
Interview, 18 February 2020, Leeds.
Interview, 17 February 2020, Leeds. Pseudonym used at the interviewee’s request.
Interview, 21 February 2020, Leeds.
Interview, 7 May 2020, online.
Interview, 24 June 2019, online.
References
Abrams, Lynn. 2016. Oral History Theory, London: Routledge.
Avis, Paul. 2000. The Anglican Understanding of the Church: An Introduction, London: SPCK.
Ammerman, Nancy T. 2014. “Finding Religion in Everyday Life.” Sociology of Religion 75:2, 189–207.
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brewitt-Taylor, Sam. 2015. “From Religion to Revolution: Theologies of Secularisation in the British Student Christian Movement, 1963–1973,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66:4, 792–811.
Brewitt-Taylor, Sam. 2018. Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957–1970, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brewitt-Taylor, Sam. 2021. “Notes Toward a Postsecular History of Modern British Secularization,” Journal of British Studies 60, 310–333.
Brown, Callum G. 2006. Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, Harlow: Pearson.
Brown, Callum G. 2009. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000, Abingdon: Routledge.
CIS. 1965. “Actitudes Religiosas 1006,” Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. https://www.cis.es/documents/d/cis/es1006marpdf.
CIS. 2021. “Opinión Pública y Política Fiscal (XXXVIII) 3332,” Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. https://www.cis.es/documents/d/cis/es3332marpdf.
Curtice, John, Elizabeth Clery, Jane Perry, Miranda Phillips, and Nilufer Rahim (eds.). 2019. British Social Attitudes 36, London: The National Centre for Social Research. https://natcen.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2023-08/BSA_36.pdf.
Day, Abby. 2017. The Religious Lives of Older Laywomen: The Last Active Anglican Generation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De la Cueva, Julio, and Joseba Louzao (eds.). 2023. Un 68 católico: Catolicismo e izquierda en los largos años sesenta, Madrid: Marcial Pons.
De Dios, Eider, and Raúl Mínguez. 2016. “De la obediencia a la protesta: Laicas católicas ante el Vaticano II,” Feminismo/s 28: 213–233.
Díaz, Vicente Jesús. 2019. Las transiciones de la Iglesia: Del repliegue a la revanche, Granada: Comares.
Drayton, Richard, and David Motadel. 2018. “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13:1, 1–21.
Field, Clive D. 2015. Britain’s Last Religious Revival? Quantifying Belonging, Behaving and Believing in the Long 1950s, Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan.
García, Verónica. 2023. “Crossroads of Identities in Women Religious in Spain: Catholicism, Society and Second Vatican Council (1953–1969),” Journal of Religious History 47:3, 469–485.
Geiringer, David, and Alastair Owens. 2022. “Anglicanism, Race and the Inner City: Parochial Domesticity and Anti-Racism in the Long 1980s,” History Workshop Journal 94: 223–245.
Gill, Sean. 1994. Women and the Church of England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, London: SPCK.
Harris, Alana. 2013. Faith in the Family. A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945–1982, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Harris, Alana. (ed.). 2018. The Schism of ’68: Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe, 1945–1975, Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan.
Hastings, Adrian. 2001. A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000, London: SCM Press.
Horn, Gerd-Rainer. 2015. The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luengo, Jordi, and Pol Dalmau. 2018. “Writing Spanish History in the Global Age: Connections and Entanglements in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Global History 13: 425–445.
McGuire, Meredith B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McLeod, Hugh. 2007. The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Montero, Feliciano. 2009. La Iglesia: de la colaboración a la disidencia (1956–1975), Madrid: Encuentro.
Morcillo, Aurora. 2000. True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
ONS (Office of National Statistics), “Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021,” https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021
Ortiz, Manuel, and Damián A. González (eds.). 2011. De la cruzada al desenganche: la Iglesia española entre el franquismo y la transición, Madrid: Sílex.
Radcliff, Pamela B. 2011. Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition, 1960–1978, New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Ruiz, Rafael. 2021. “La crisis de los sacerdotes y religiosos: reflejo y factor del proceso de secularización en España,” Hispania Sacra 73:147, 259–271.
Smith, David J. 1990. “Faith in the City and Mrs Thatcher,” Policy Studies 11:2, 18–23.
Summerfield, Penny. 2004. “Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews,” Cultural and Social History 1: 65–93.
Valiente, Celia. 2015. “Age and Feminist Activism: The Feminist Protest within the Catholic Church in Franco’s Spain,” Social Movement Studies 144: 473–492.
Valiente, Celia. 2022. “Cultural Impacts of Social Movements: Feminism within the Catholic Church in Spain,” Feminist Review 132: 61–78.
Williams, Sarah C. 1996. “The Problem of Belief: The Place of Oral History in the Study of Popular Religion,” Oral History 24:2, 27–34.
