“Protest in Piety: Christian Science Revisited”

Fox, Margery. “Protest in Piety: Christian Science Revisited.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 1, no. 4 (1978): 401–17.

Fox, a social anthropologist, claims that Mary Baker Eddy and the early Christian Science movement functioned socially as a protest movement against 19^th-century social assumptions and roles assigned to women. She sees this as a “latent function” because Christian Scientists did not recognize their own historical role (402). For example, hysteria was a typical women’s ailment, and the young Eddy was no exception. However, both Eddy, and the women who followed her, would find leadership and healing roles that were independent of the social, religious and medical authority of men. “The major Protestant churches would wait another 75 years to confer similar statuses on women” (412). Fox proposes that social dysfunction triggered women’s illnesses, which in turn became their way to gain freedom from traditional roles. Victimhood was an unconscious stance against the dominant sex; and the powerful role Eddy later embraced became a major contributor to her cure. Unfortunately, Fox’s 1978 research suffers from lack of access to Church archives (opened in 2002). She relies on hostile and dated biographers for Eddy’s childhood, her relationship with Phineas P. Quimby, and her mature years as leader.

ISSN: 0703-8240

See also annotations:

A Story Untold: A History of the Quimby-Eddy Debate by Keith McNeil

Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement by Beryl Satter

“Religion and Remedies Reunited: Rethinking Christian Science” by Rosemary Hicks Corbett

“Mary Baker Eddy and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Public’ Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal” by Jean McDonald

“Woman Goes Forth to Battle with Goliath: Mary Baker Eddy, Medical Science and Sentimental Invalidism” by Alison Piepmeier

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff

“Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy: Gendering the Transpersonal Subject” by Cynthia D. Schrager

Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism by Stephen Gottschalk