‘I Just Kept it to Myself’: Unbelief, Feminism and Secularisation in English Canada, 1960s–1980s

Abstract

This article is based on newspapers and magazines, statistical sources and oral histories with 42 white, English Canadian women who rejected religious belief in the 1960s–1980s. During that era, organised religious involvement declined sharply in Canada and levels of unbelief gradually increased. This article explores how feminism shaped women's departure from religion in those years. The second‐wave women's movement tended to disregard religious feminisms and to associate religiosity with women's disempowerment; while secularity was endemic to the movement, the focus was on challenging institutional religion rather than belief itself. The secularity of the second wave could be narrow and exclusionary, but it also helped some women to challenge religious constraints. Although few interviewees were active in the women's movement, many recalled that feminism informed their journeys away from religion. Most came to an awareness of the patriarchy of organised religion – and dismissed it as such – in their teens or twenties, but rejected religious belief later in life. Due to persistent religious and gender norms, nonbelieving women were often reticent in voicing their unbelief. Nevertheless, they disseminated irreligion in a range of subtle yet powerful ways, and played a central role in the secularisation of post‐war English Canada.