“Mary Baker Eddy” in the Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion

Benowitz, June Melby. “Mary Baker Eddy.” Pages 97–99 of Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. 1998.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Mary Baker Eddy is a chronology of her life: her childhood troubled by illness, early interest in religion, marriage followed by widowhood, loss of her son to the family nurse, failure of her second marriage, desperate attempts to find healing of chronic illness, relationship with Phineas P. Quimby, and the 1866 accident and consequent healing upon which her movement was founded. What followed next were her early struggles to establish herself as she moved from one household to another: her partnership with Richard Kennedy in the healing practice; the publication of her textbook, Science and Health, in 1875; marriage to Asa Eddy in 1877; and then the tumultuous beginnings of her Church characterized by lawsuits and disenchanted students. Eddy would begin again, and her following grew. She dedicated The Mother Church in 1895, established The Christian Science Monitor in 1908 and, although in her later years she took a less active role, she remained in control of her movement until she died.

ISBN-10: 0874368871
ISBN-13: 978-0874368871