A Liverpool Exemplar - Maude Royden

Agnes Maude Royden was born in the family's Liverpool home at Holmefield House in Mossley Hill on the 23rd of November 1876, the youngest of eight children and their sixth daughter. The family fortune was built on ships, and her eldest brother, Sir Thomas Royden, became chairman of the Cunard Steamship Company. Known to all as Maude, she was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College where she graduated and in 1897 went to Oxford University to continue her studies at Lady Margaret Hall. Reading history she achieved second-class honors and it was here that she formed two important and enduring friendships, with Evelyn Gunter and Kathleen Courtney. They both shared her strong desire to make a contribution to the world and they worked together for the cause of women's suffrage and world peace. In 1900 after leaving university and returning home to Frankby Hall in Cheshire, she entered into settlement work in the slums at the Victoria Women’s Settlement in Liverpool. After working there for eighteen months, her lameness due to dislocated hips left her worn-out and disappointed. At a low ebb, she was persuaded by Evelyn Gunter that she come to Oxford to take counsel with the Anglican priest, Reverend Hudson Shaw, a lecturer and leading figure in the Oxford University extension movement. He suggested a change of scene, inviting her to help out in his Rutland parish in South Luffenham which became her base from 1902 until 1905. Here she became a lecturer in English Literature and proved a popular speaker and for the next two years maintained a steady schedule of lectures. In 1905 she moved to Oxford, and this marked the beginning of her involvement in the suffrage movement as she became increasingly involved in the campaign for Womens Rights and working under Millicent Fawcett soon became one of the organisation's main public speakers. In 1909 she helped form the Church League for Women's Suffrage and that year was elected to the executive committee of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and edited the Union's newspaper, the Common Cause, as well giving regular speeches to organised gatherings. She preached a positive approach to sexuality within marriage and, contrary to the Church of England's position, she approved of birth control.

After the outbreak of WW1 she found herself in conflict with many in the NUWSS who supported the war effort and in February 1915 she resigned as editor of Common Cause and gave up her place on the NUWSS executive council. As a pacifist throughout her life, she was elected Vice-President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915. By now her fame (and notoriety to many of her male critics) was spreading and Maude became even more well known as a speaker on social and religious subjects. In 1917 she became assistant preacher at the City Temple in London, the first woman to occupy this office. She sought better working conditions for women as well as equal pay for equal work; the protection of children; and equality of sexual standards for men and women often addressing sexual issues in her lectures and sermons.

In 1918 Maude adopted a baby girl Helen, orphaned by the war, and as a response to the terrible plight of children in the postwar famine in Europe she also fostered a young Austrian boy, Friedrich Wolfe, for several years. Her reputation as a preacher and spokesperson for peace grew to international proportions and she travelled to the United States in 1923 for the Women's International League. In 1928 she went on a round-the-world preaching tour, which took her again to the United States and then to China, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and also India where she visited Gandhi. In 1929 she began the official campaign for the ordination of women when she founded the Society for the Ministry of Women and was the first woman to preach in Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral. In 1930 she was awarded the Companion of Honour by the British Government. In 1931, she became the first woman to become Doctor of Divinity but, on the outbreak of WW2, even Maude temporarily renounced pacifism as she accepted that it was necessary to fight against the evils of Nazi Germany.

From their first meeting in 1901 she had grown strongly attached to the Reverend Hudson Shaw and his mentally fragile wife,Effie, who knew of the love between her husband and Maude but wished nothing more than that the relationship among the three of them to continue. However despite their love for each other, the commitment of both to the sanctity of marriage and their religious vocations meant that the relationship never became physical. In October 1944 she married the recently widowed Hudson Shaw who was then eight five years old and who died two months later.

Maude died at the age of 80 in 1956 leaving a legacy of philosophical and religious teachings and was an inspiration for many who were to follow in her footsteps. While on a speaking tour in Australia in 1928 the Sydney press referred to her as 'the really famous Maude Royden, England’s first woman preacher and described by one considerable person as England’s greatest woman'.

see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2021/03/a-liverpool-exemplar-william-earle.html