Resources Discussing Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

“Discovery” is the first in a three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy by Peel, a literary critic, counter-intelligence officer, and editorial consultant to the Christian Science Church. Striving for a straightforward account, without apologetics or polemics, Peel examines Eddy’s intellectual and spiritual path of discovery, from her life of obscurity and loss to her search for health and spiritual breakthrough.