Mary Sumner: Mission, Education and Motherhood: Thinking a Life with Bourdieu

by Sue Anderson-Faithful

The founder and president of the Mothers’ Union, one of the first and largest women’s organisations, Mary Sumner (1828-1921) was an influential educator and a force to be reckoned with in the Church of England of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the analytical tools of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Sue Anderson-Faithful locates Mary Sumner’s life and thought against social and religious networks in which she was restricted by gender yet privileged by class and proximity to distinguished individuals. This dichotomy is key to understanding the achievements of a woman who both replicated and shaped Victorian attitudes to women’s roles in society.

To Mary Sumner mission and education meant the propagation of religious knowledge through progressive pedagogy. Her activism was intended to promote social reform at home and nurture the growth of the British Empire with mothers wielding their political power as educators of future citizens. The symbiotic relationship between Church and State concentrated power in the hands of a ruling class with which Mary Sumner identified and which she supported. In her view the legitimacy of national and imperial rule was intertwined with the moral force of Anglicanism. Sue Anderson-Faithful interprets Mary Sumner’s lifelong work in the light of these relationships, contrasting her assertion of personal agency and an empowering discourse of motherhood with her simultaneous reinforcement of patriarchy and class privilege.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Illustrations
Author's Note
Timeline
Objects of the Mothers' Union
Mary Her Life and Work, Perspectives, Sources, Interpretations

1. Thinking Mary Sumner with Habitus, Field, Capital, Pedagogic Authority, Symbolic Violence and Reproduction

Part 1: Religion
2. A Family Mary Sumner, Religious Habitus, Evangelical Enthusiasm and Anglican Advocacy
3. Anglican Motherhood for Church and Mary Sumner, Religious Networks and the Mothers' Union

Part 2: Mission
4. Home and Mary Sumner and Traditions of Philanthropy, Evangelical Religion and Civilising Mission
5. Mary Sumner, Missionary Mothers and Imperial Aspirations

Part 3: Education
6. 'Education Begins at Home': Educational Habitus, Childhood and Childrearing
7. Spreading the Educating the Populace
8. Mary Agency and Constraint, Reproduction, Symbolic Violence and Changes in the Doxa

Tables
Table 1: Activists in the Mothers' Union and GFS
Table 2: Episcopal Contacts of George and Mary Sumner
Table 3: Wording of Mothers' Union Cards

Appendices
Appendix 1: Mary Sumner's Speech to the Portsmouth Church Congress
Appendix 2: Biographical Notes on Women Activists

Primary Sources
Bibliography
Index

288 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2018