Adam and Eve: Gender in the English Free Church Constituency

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Abstract
The vital contribution of women to the early development of English dissent, especially during the era of the Civil War and Interregnum, has received considerable scholarly attention since the appearance of Keith Thomas's seminal study in 1958. However, the focus of interest has chiefly been on the roles played by individual women as preachers or church founders, and no concerted attempt has yet been made to replicate analyses of New England Puritanism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which have highlighted the disproportionate numbers of women in church membership. There has been a similar lack of effort to document the effects of gender in determining English religious practice in the period after 1700, despite the beginnings of academic preoccupation with women's experience of Christianity in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and despite an abundance of evidence from sociologists and statisticians since the Second World War about women's greater performance on most indicators of religious belief and behaviour. This brief article therefore hopes to break new ground in assembling evidence about the strength of female support for Protestant Nonconformity in England from 1650 to the present day, using three distinct assessment criteria: membership, attendance, and profession.

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