Goodwyn Barmby and The Woman-power - John Noyce

Goodwyn Barmby and The Woman-power

Goodwyn Barmby (1820-1881) was an English social reformer who in his younger years was involved in several short-lived attempts at communal living, particularly after his marriage to Catherine. They founded and ran the Communist Church in London (1841-1849), but met with derision from their contemporaries.

Goodwyn Barmby wrote a poem, The Woman-power (1842), containing a prophetic vision of the Divine Feminine:

Woman-Saviour now we muster

To await thy advent sure,

In the cluster of thy lustre,

Come and leave the earth no more?

Then before thy gentle look,

Swords shall quail and warriors fail,

And the spear, a shepherd’s crook,

Shall adorn the daisied dale.

Woman-power! Incarnate love!

Human Goddess come and be,

If the Bridegroom’s tears can move,

Bride unto Humanity.

Thou alone of all can save us

Let us be what thou would have us!¹²

The Barmbys realised that this was in the future. Thus Goodwyn Barmby wrote to a friend in the early 1840s: ‘But the Free Woman who shall give the womanly tone to the entire globe is not yet manifested.’

Catherine Barmby (1816-1853) in her pioneering feminist pamphlet, The demand for the emancipation of women (1843), insisted that; ‘We have the priest, we therefore demand the priestess, the Woman teacher of the word, the woman apostle of God’s law!’¹⁴

After their ‘communist’ experiment the Barmbys were involved in Chartism and other social movements. Goodwyn Barmby became a Christian minister leading Unitarian congregations in several cities, settling eventually in Wakefield.

References:

Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century (London: Virago Press, 1983)

W.H.G.Armytage, Heavens below: utopian experiments in England 1560-1960 (London: Routledge, 1961)

Dennis Hardy, Alternative communities in nineteenth century England (London: Longman, 1979)