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A 20th-century pioneer in the fashion industry, Adele Simpson attributed her significant achievements as an artist and a businesswoman to her practice of Christian Science. It benefitted her by 1) bringing the balance to her life that had been lacking and 2) the idea that all her creative work was governed by God, the one creative Mind, not herself.

Voorhees offers new scholarship on a broad array of topics related to Christian Science identity focusing on reception history. With attention to fully resourced details and modern scholarship, Voorhees outlines the reception history of Christian Science in fields of religion, women studies, American history, politics, medicine, and metaphysics. She probes Mary Baker Eddy’s relationships with contemporary scholars, religion leaders, and students.

The objective of Armer’s study of Mary Baker Eddy’s establishment of her Massachusetts Metaphysical College is to highlight the achievements of women pioneers in higher education and entrepreneurial successes. Characteristics of Eddy’s business success included taking risk, managerial skills, knowledge of the product and the market, financial resources to produce capital, and enough success to produce profits.

Eder finds in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings about masculinity that Christian Science could not be practiced only as an ethereal form of religion (caricatured as a woman) but reflect “a discernible and repeated thrust to extend the reach of Christian Science thought and practice beyond the sheltered sphere of nineteenth-century feminine religiosity into the proving grounds of the public realm.”

Prominent business woman of franchised beauty shops, Martha Matilda Harper, publicly accredited Christian Science with healing her and sustaining her through decades in business. Harper set up a system of training for the many women of modest means who became operators of the 500 franchises, which by the 1930s were spread throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

O’Brien’s interfaith reflections illustrate how sympathy can help bring heaven to earth—as evidenced in four women: Mary Baker Eddy, Emily Dickinson, Sarada Devi (wife and mission partner to Ramakrishna) and Simone Weil. O’Brien finds a basis for this sympathy in the common conviction found in many religions of “the experience of oneness between the supreme Spirit and everyday empirical reality.”

Reesman details many parallels between Mark Twain’s troubled later life and his one-dimensional literary portrayals of both Joan of Arc and Mary Baker Eddy. Both were visionaries. Joan’s voice in her trial record is consistent, but Eddy was delusional. Eddy uses her mentor, Quimby’s, words for her own profit. Both of Twain’s literary portrayals put his own personality on full display.

Swensen examines the initial flock and organization of the Church Mary Baker Eddy founded and then disbanded ten years later. The early 1880s brought new members and stability, spurring Eddy to organize. But this embattled precursor of today’s Mother Church would be irredeemably challenged by a volatile membership, unreliable preaching by invited clergy, and confusion over competing metaphysical groups.

Mina Loy’s Christian Science faith with its views of the body, along with 19th-century spiritualism informed her poetry. She conceptualized in her poetry a non-binary kind of embodiment—away from body/soul or life/death—to life as beyond the body. Loy saw death and the physical as illusory and thereby able to break with biological determinism and personality.  

Horton’s page-turner autobiography recounts her courageous experience rising to the highest place of distinction in the Army Chaplain Corps with, as she often heard, two strikes against her: her Christian Science faith tradition and her being among the first few women to enter the chaplain corps.

Implementing feminist rhetorical criticism, Tencza examines Mary Baker Eddy’s strategic use of rhetoric to create meaning in her writings, reinforced by the integrity of her character. Tencza sees Eddy working within three frameworks: an ethic of care [mother-like pathos], extreme utilization of ethos [her character integrity], and logos [ability to make meaning]—all of which coalesce into her rhetoric of confidence.

Feminist scholarship will benefit from this research on Eddy’s relation to the suffragist movement and why the chapter ‘Marriage’ is placed in an early, prominent position in Science and Health. Eddy had stated that Science and Health had ‘crossed swords with the free love’ as embraced by Spiritualists and Revivalists, even as they were drawn to Christian Science because of its radical departure from the patriarchal church.

The Society of Jewish Science was a response to the mass conversion of Jews, particularly women, to Christian Science. Its purpose was to revive a growing secular Judaism with elements Lichtenstein feared had been lost: healing, personal prayer, and belief in the Divine Spirit within. Unlike Christian Science, the Society did not reject medicine or deny the reality of matter.

Stokes argues that Mary Baker Eddy’s human story resembles the plot line of American literary sentimentalism of the 19th century, but she cautions that such sentimental narratives were not as emotionally overwrought as critics have charged. Sentimentalism did not merely trace tragedies but offered readers a protocol for managing agony and loss. It constituted Christian piety as incompatible with body glorification.

​​Squires takes up the 1915 novel, “The Genius,” by Theodore Dreiser and compares the many semi-autobiographical parallels between the novel’s main character, Eugene, and Dreiser. Dreiser’s personal philandering and materialism are reflected in his portrayal of Eugene. After scandalous affairs with tragic consequences, both grapple with their own crisis of morality by conversing with Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings in Christian Science.

Voorhees explains that Eddy never intended to become a role model for gender parity, but it emerged naturally as a by-product of her larger purpose and project of revealing the nature of Christian salvation. In contrast to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Voorhees illustrates how the ‘Woman Question’ for Eddy is emphatic and radical, yet qualified and ultimately subsumed by her soteriology.

Simon assesses autobiographies of some early Americans, including Mary Baker Eddy, using affect theory to assess primal sources of original thought that only later become expressible in language and reason. She focuses on Eddy’s Genesis-derived definition of deity that reverses the subordination of women, and her other statements about gender as culturally constructed.

Scalise explores the widespread public debate surrounding metaphysical healing in the late nineteenth-century, especially through the study of rhetorical theories and practices of Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins. They were both part of the conciliatory project of liberal Christianity during the period, challenging the assumption that the rhetorical practices exhibited in the liberal and Christian traditions are inherently contradictory.

Specific to Eddy, Ingham relates feminist themes to her groundbreaking textbook, Science and Health, as well as many of her earlier writings and sensibilities. Specifically, Ingham lays out Stanton’s and Eddy’s exegesis of the first and last books of the Bible, thereby providing an interpretive space from which to challenge a singular definition concerning creation in Genesis and prophecy in Revelation.

In the late 19th-century era, when the Pauline corpus was often quoted to legitimize women’s subordination, Mary Baker Eddy presented in her writings a rereading of the Pauline tradition as liberating for women. Huff shows how Eddy made the case and modeled in her life that women as well as men have legitimate dominion and must not be dominated.

Simon unpacks Mary Baker Eddy’s theological construct of the feminine divine and shows how Eddy mobilizes her conception of a benevolent maternal deity to challenge the gender ideology and conventions of her day. She finds in Eddy’s Genesis interpretation her ultimate goal: her feminized divine is an enabling belief that undoes Adam’s dream—the history of error, an assumed material selfhood.

Choi’s and Huff’s chapters explore how two 19th-century Christian women, Lucy Rider Meyer and Mary Baker Eddy respectively, interpreted Pauline and deuteron-Pauline texts to validate women’s empowerment in the Church. Hogan then details striking similarities between Meyer’s and Eddy’s approaches to these texts, and that of many recent feminist and womanist scholars.

Michell arrives at four main reasons for the steep decline in Christian Science membership during the second half of the 20th century by interviewing mainly women who have left the Church. Her specific feminist approach to the question provides a painful but valuable critique on the history of the patriarchal style of church decisions after Mary Baker Eddy’s death.

Within this all too brief chapter on the life of Mary Baker Eddy, Braude contextualizes Eddy among Spirit-moved women who believed that God’s call was more important than social conventions. These women contributed to American religious history as they balanced family, church, and leadership roles. But the complexity of Eddy’s life is better covered in Braude’s other works.

This article includes an examination of feminism and the quest for gender equality in 19th century America, particularly in rejection of interpretations of the second biblical creation story that justified male dominance and female subservience. One sub-section devoted to Mary Baker Eddy describes her unique interpretation of the spirituality of divine creation, which undergirds Christian Science and the church she founded.

Hall examines why Mary Baker Eddy was, and continues to be, underrated and misrepresented. She also provides an accessible introduction to Eddy’s life, and a look at her theology through a feminist lens. Hall cites Eddy’s practical emphasis on healing, the lack of gender hierarchy in her church, her seven non-gender-specific synonyms for God, and God as Mother. 

Cunningham provides a thorough introduction to the life of Mary Baker Eddy, theological distinctions of Christian Science, the Church founding, evolution of the Church Manual, more recent developments such as recent legal and financial struggles, the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library, and whether Eddy and her followers were feminists.

Curtis examines the ‘divine healing’ or ‘faith cure’ movement of the late 19th century which offered a liberalized theology that fundamentally uncoupled the long-standing and deeply gendered link between bodily suffering and spiritual holiness. Faith homes provided worship services, spiritual practices and alternative biblical models that facilitated healing. Examples were water-cure sanitoriums and Christian Science dispensaries, (later converted to Reading Rooms).

Setta, a feminist scholar of 19th-century American religion, identifies some cultural attitudes of Mary Baker Eddy’s day and Eddy’s distinct response to them. Rather than attributing her poor health to her gender, Eddy argued that ‘man’ (both male and female) is God’s spiritual reflection. Society, not God, produced the idea of gender; therefore women could take responsibility for their own health.

Treacy-Cole outlines Eddy’s rocky and sometimes tragic life story through childhood, marriages, motherhood, illnesses and financial struggles—leading up to years of deep Bible study, her discovery of Christian Science, the writing of her textbook, Science and Health, and organization of her Church. Treacy-Cole finds early Christian patriarchy as precedent for 19th-century male clergy and press dismissal of Mary Baker Eddy.

​​Kilde, specializing on the intersection of religion and architecture, describes the original 1895 Christian Science Mother Church edifice, built under Mary Baker Eddy’s close supervision, as very feminine with its stained-glass windows depicting many female biblical figures. Kilde contrasts this with the masculine cavernous Renaissance-style classicism of the Mother Church Extension built in 1906 with its ambience of public majesty.

Johnson contextualizes theologians Ruether and Eddy within feminist history showing how each “changed the boundaries of the Church’s theological thinking on the rights of women,” freeing them up to be seen and heard. Johnson finds feminist principles at work in Eddy’s writings on marriage laws, use of language, theology (especially her Father-Mother God), and church structure empowering women in roles as local leaders and healers.

Darling and Fiarman explain how a little-known, but important suffragist, Mary A. Livermore, provides an important link to an understanding of Mary Baker Eddy’s attitudes toward woman suffrage.  The movement consisted of multiple approaches. Eddy rejected some, especially those advocates who attacked the Bible as the source of women’s oppression. But with Livermore, Eddy found a suffragist with compatible religious views. 

Corbett examines the ways that Eddy exercised effective leadership in increasingly male-dominated fields from which women were excluded: education, health care, and religion. She is particularly interested in the way Eddy incorporated obstetrics into her system of healing. Corbett also responds to claims that Eddy expressed an ambiguous feminism by championing women’s authority yet promoting male authority within her Church.

Stein defends not only the importance of allowing place for minority religions but also their ultimate value to society as a whole. He views them as contributing substantially to the vitality and creativity of the nation’s religious life. Christian Science is one of the ‘alternative religions’ he studies in the context of religious dissent in America.

Michell examines the influences, and theological connections and differences, between the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, Emma Curtis Hopkins, the 19th-century Woman’s movement, and the New Thought and New Age movements. Hopkins, unlike Eddy, would see Truth in all religions, not limited to Christianity, and focused more on a prosperity gospel.

Simmons explores the reasons for the parting of ways between Mary Baker Eddy and one of her followers, Emma Curtis Hopkins. He speculates that the Hopkins-Eddy relationship embodied the second and third stages in the process of spiritual transformation where Hopkins moved through Christian Science and “graduated” to a higher spiritual level.

Nineteenth-century technological advances, credited to a superior Protestant-Enlightenment heritage, empowered women (physically the weaker sex) to rule by intellectual and religious power, even as they held on to the carefully crafted ideology of female spiritual exceptualism which gave them a kind of knowing beyond the knowledge of the material world.

This graduate level textbook on America’s religions intertwines a wide multitude of religious belief systems with the multi-faceted movements of American thought. Williams explains Christian Science in the context of 19th- and 20th-century American culture, which includes harmonialism, individualism, female empowerment, and cult–a term evangelists equate with theological deviancy but is otherwise characterized by charismatic leadership and isolation from the rest of the world.

This well-researched biography of Emma Curtis Hopkins, little-known founder of the 19th-century New Thought movement, includes Hopkins’s early-stage affiliation with Mary Baker Eddy—her tutelage by Eddy and editorship of The Christian Science Journal for 13 months before being suddenly discharged. Harley draws on a range of scholarship to contextualize the complexity of this knotty developmental stage of Christian Science.

Eddy’s Science and Health critiqued the contemporary ideology of invalidism. Male doctors had a vested interest in women’s weakness, making their own treatments necessary. Eddy, by contrast, validated the authority of the patient to bring about healing, thereby giving women more control over their bodies. Eddy’s message emphasized vitality and health for women and diminished biological differences between the sexes.

Seeing no social change favoring women’s rights, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton switched her energies to addressing the underlying issue of women’s subordination rooted in the Bible. Like Mary Baker Eddy’s opus, Science and Health, Stanton’s Women’s Bible was intended as a vehicle for emancipation. Kern includes Eddy among the many women bearing (indirect) influence on Stanton’s story.

​​Braude looks at how the flourishing of Spiritualism in the mid-19th century intersected with the inception of the women’s rights movement in the same period. She documents that the most serious challenge to Spiritualism and mediumship came from the new religious movement Christian Science. However, although Mary Baker Eddy rejected Spiritualism outright, Braude finds many sympathetic Spiritualists in Eddy’s initial audience.

Michell examines in detail the remarkable similarities where the unorthodox theologies of Julian of Norwich (14th century) and Eddy (19th century) converge. Both women struggled with serious illness and near-death experiences which became the basis for profound revelation and healing.  Eddy understood God as mother, and Julian’s vision of Jesus as mother reflected on the kindness and gentleness of God.

In a time when science and medicine were intent on removing religion from their midst, both Eddy and White actively integrated physical and spiritual concerns in their theology and practice. Although Eddy named her religion Christian Science, logically claiming that its principles could be demonstrated with mathematical certainty, White’s claim to authority was validated by her public visions with signs following.

Piepmeier studies five women, including Mary Baker Eddy, as examples in 19th-century America of the ‘outing’ of women’s bodies in the public sphere in ways not easily categorized. They had to address the powerful ideologies of domesticity and sentimentality to distinguish their own ideologies. Eddy’s textbook was a rewriting of major discourses, representing a significant rethinking of women’s roles and rights.

Both Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement and the New Thought Movement flourished in the late 19th-and early 20th-centuries. They agreed that one’s mental fears foster illness and distress. Yet unlike the New Thought Movement—believing in the human mind’s ability to control the world—Eddy thought a reliance on the mortal mind’s power distracted from one’s reliance on God.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Augusta Stetson is a chronology of her life from devout Methodist upbringing, to public orator, to Eddy’s request for her to establish Christian Science in New York City, to her increasingly problematic leadership and eventual excommunication from Eddy’s Church.

Schrager finds commonality between Eddy’s theological/therapeutic movement and Twain’s mental telegraphy. Both sought legitimacy by associating their convictions with the newly professionalizing discourse of science. But Twain was threatened by Eddy’s transgression of 19th-century female norms and monopoly of religious interpretation; and Eddy’s integrity of womanhood was threatened, if not seduced, by the aggressive masculinity of mesmerist and physician.

Roe recounts the history of Christian Science coming to Australia from 1890 to Mary Baker Eddy’s death in 1910, when there were 21 accredited practitioners and at least a thousand members. She notes that the earliest testifiers found healing and revelation through reading the Christian Science literature and Eddy’s textbook, Science and Health, but that later healing came through practitioners.

Gill, a feminist historian and biographer, offers a fresh view of Mary Baker Eddy’s achievements in the light of obstacles faced by women in her time. Without access to Church archives Gill relied on Peel’s archival research. Gill’s unique contribution challenges the traditional biographers’ view of Eddy as a hysterical invalid who abandoned her son and stole her ideas.

​​This book teaches mostly by pictures the sociological and historical view of women in the healing ministry. In her coverage of Mary Baker Eddy, Brooke emphasizes Eddy’s theological basis for healing from the teachings and example of Jesus. But she (Brooke) ignores the persecution Eddy suffered from the prejudices against women as both healers and Christian leaders.

In her chapter, “Alternative Religions in Nineteenth-Century America,” Lindley shows how this period of fermentation and experimentation fostered new Christian sects which challenged social, economic and religious orthodoxy. Christian Science is one of the four she highlights. Mary Baker Eddy, its founder, was a model of women’s revelatory and authoritative leadership who maintained overall control of her church.

Fox studies the process of becoming a Christian Science practitioner and establishing healer validation within the church community. She includes sections explaining Christian Science theology and healing metaphysics, and the relationship between practitioner and patient, from her perspective as a social anthropologist. Her 1995 conclusions suffer from inaccessibility of archival material prior to the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library.

Cunningham’s specialty lies with 19th-century American religious history focusing on women, institutions, money and power—perfect preparation for her PhD dissertation research on the fraught relationship of two charismatic women who rose from poverty to power and wealth: Augusta Stetson, a founding member and leader of the first Christian Science church in New York City, and Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement.

Christian Science and New Thought both conveyed a “metaphysical perfectionism” in sync with late 19th-century American can-do spirit and the golden glow of California culture with its promises of prosperity. Key women in Christian Science left the movement to become teachers and prime movers of New Thought in California. Other reasons for the decline in both movements today are discussed. 

Braude examines whether the doctrines of 19th-century Spiritualism and Christian Science empowered women or limited their opportunities. Although women accepted these opportunities, as mediums in Spiritualism and as teachers and healers in Christian Science, their roles required some passivity.  Christian Science women were empowered in support of their churches, but for the perpetuity of Eddy’s vision, women lived under her shadow.

Albertine surveys the media and publicity around the controversial 1898 death of Harold Frederic, London Chief of the New York Times. He then analyzes Robert Barr’s 1901 novel The Victors with its characters depicting a melodramatic and sarcastic version of the Frederic incident. Albertine finds a subtext: the fear of Christian Science “as a new kind of [financial, healing and social] power in the hands of women.” 

McDonald notes that most feminist and psychological explanations attribute the success of Christian Science not to its theological worth, but for its personal utility. These explanations ironically resemble the traditional reductionism assigned to public women by 19th-century men—ironic because a decade of feminist scholarship on Eddy has helped to reinforce patriarchy. McDonald examines these social, intellectual, and religious stereotypes.

Throughout Christian history those movements deemed heretical often included participation by women—including the much-criticized Christian Science founder, Eddy. Trevett wonders why Eddy, with all her germane experiences and theology, went mostly unnoticed by many feminist thinkers. She concludes Eddy’s nontraditional and non-creedal interpretation of scripture, contrary to most mainstream orthodox feminist scholars who critiqued patriarchal attitudes, contributed to the difficulties.

Lindley finds Mary Baker Eddy’s ideas of feminism ambiguous, whether seen within the context of 19th-century American views of womanhood or compared to contemporary feminist theology. For example, regarding gender equality, Eddy elevated the interpretation of women in the Bible and embraced the radical demand for equality of men and women. But she did not identify with the women’s movement.

Hansen examines the formative period of the Christian Science movement and discovers not only restorations of health but also healing as a religious act. From this, Hansen distinguishes Christian Science from the women metaphysical healers of the same period who eventually formed the New Thought movement. Eddy’s declaration, “This is woman’s hour” conveys the female contribution to Christian Science.

Bednarowski analyzes the roles of women in 19th-century marginal religious movements (including Christian Science) considering these movements’ perception of the divine, interpretation of the Fall, need for a traditional ordained clergy, and women’s roles other than marriage and motherhood. Regarding Christian Science, Bednarowski notes women were present as writers, preachers, teachers, and healers. They also found independence through opportunities for leadership.

Porterfield claims Mary Baker Eddy’s contribution to feminine spirituality in America took place during a significant cultural transition in American history and that Eddy’s religious practices were due in part to her legitimation of those practices as a science. Porterfield also explores Eddy’s views of Mary (mother of Jesus) bearing the Christ idea in the pure form of the female body.

Fox, a social anthropologist, claims that Mary Baker Eddy and the early Christian Science movement functioned socially as a protest movement against 19th-century social assumptions and roles assigned to women. Eddy and the women who followed her found leadership and healing roles independent of the social, religious and medical authority of men. But Christian Scientists did not recognize their historical role.

Modern scholars explain Mary Baker Eddy’s frequent childhood illnesses from a variety of perspectives. Setta argues they were symptomatic of the 19th-century form of American Calvinism. Eddy’s illnesses were pronounced when her femaleness was most pronounced (marriage and birth). Rejecting the 19th century female role, Eddy reinstated feminine qualities of Deity, whereby women and men are both seen as spiritual beings.

Parker’s psychoanalytical approach to understanding Mary Baker Eddy brings Twain’s ambition analysis and Fiedler’s sanctity of 19th-century female spirituality into tension. Parker sees Eddy’s desire to sublimate her willful personality through submission to the purity and safety of the feminine, while exploiting the culture of womanhood to fulfill her drive for success in leading a religious movement and hiding her ambition.

Messer, a mid-20th century women’s suffrage activist, sociologist, and Christian Scientist provides valuable insights into both the American self-understanding of political situations and the applicability of Christian Science in the world. Unlike most writing on Christian Science in her day, Messer applies Mary Baker Eddy’s metaphysics to the broader political and social elements, anticipating the ultimate model for global completeness.