Adventures in Victorian Anti-Protestant Rhetoric: Protestantism as a Danger to the Family
One of the standard-issue tactics in Victorian religious warfare was to accuse every religion--other than yours, of course--of endangering the nuclear family. Protestants accused Catholics, Catholics accused Protestants, both of them accused the Jews, and everybody accused the Mormons. (It's a wonder the nuclear family has survived, really.) I've usually written about this from the Protestant POV, which held that Roman Catholicism weakened the paternal role, disregarded the sanctity of domestic privacy, and (according to more salacious propagandists, like Charles Chiniquy) prematurely eroticized children. Catholics, however, had their own repertoire of complaints. For me, the one that stands out the most right now is the accusation that in interfaith marriages, Protestant fathers would use child custody as a vicious weapon against Catholic mothers, forcing the woman into an impossible choice--her children, or her faith? In Tyborne, for example, Frances Margaret Taylor writes that "There is bitterer sorrow still: they who are as one are parted asunder; and there are mothers in these days who have the martyr's heart, for they part with their very life-blood in giving up their children, in hearing taught by a stranger's lips those truths that are never learnt so sweetly as from a mother's accents" (xiii). Later on in the novel, a woman who converts to Catholicism can only maintain her allegiance to her new faith by relinquishing her daughter to her still-Protestant ex-husband and his new, ultra-Protestant wife. Similarly, in The Massingers, a young girl hears about a nasty Protestant husband who deprives his Catholic wife of virtually all access to her child (23).
I first stumbled across this topos several years ago in a Catholic response to the Edgardo Mortara case, which argued that Protestants could hardly claim the moral high ground when it came to child custody cases. Catholics were not, in fact, inventing their anti-Protestant charge out of whole cloth. As Danaya C. Wright points out, Roman Catholic mothers had historically been disadvantaged in child custody suits [1]. Strictly speaking, though, the Tenures Abolition Act (1660) also placed legal restrictions on fathers when it came to appointing guardians for their children, favoring guardians who would be "most likely to ensure a Protestant upbringing"--but with forseeable consequences for Catholic mothers [2]. Interestingly enough, however, the Catholic novels I've seen so far don't invoke the legal contexts that potentially destabilized the mother's position in an interfaith marriage. Instead, they "internalize" or "spiritualize" conflicts over children: Protestant fathers rip children away from faithful Catholic mothers because Protestantism itself constructs deformed male psyches. Even when the father is behaving morally according to his own lights, as in The Massingers--"The misguided man believed, no doubt, he was doing his duty, and therefore we will charitably hope his wife's death may not be charged to him, for that she died of a broken heart, I am greatly afraid" (23)--it's clear that his own extremist religious upbringing has fatally warped his understanding of both paternal and maternal love. In a sense, there's no reason to mention the actual laws involved, for according to the polemical logic, the laws merely confirm what the religion enables.
[1] Danaya C. Wright, "De Manneville v. De Manneville: Rethinking the Birth of Custody Law under Patriarchy," Law and History Review 17.2 (1999): 280-81. JSTOR. 5 December 2007.
[2] Sarah Abramowicz, "English Child Custody Law, 1660-1839: The Origins of Judicial Intervention in Paternal Custody," Columbia Law Review 99.5 (1999): 1377. JSTOR. 5 December 2007.