Mary Baker Eddy, ‘the Woman question,’ and Christian salvation

Amy Black Voorhees | from The Christian Science Journal

The term feminism was not in wide circulation in the 19th century, but the concept was. People talked about “women’s rights” or used the phrase “the Woman question.” They often meant suffrage, or the right to vote. Those who worked for women’s rights and other social reforms were called reformers.

Mary Baker Eddy’s comments about reformers were mixed. She generally admired the courage of those who took on sexism as a cause, occasionally praising them and others, such as abolitionist (antislavery) and Temperance (antialcohol) workers. At the same time, she disagreed with reformers when their words or methods went against the grain of what she felt was spiritually right.

Man is the generic term for both men and women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most famous reformers of her time. When she wrote The Woman’s Bible in 1895, a book that commented on many Bible passages that Stanton felt oppressed women, the Christian Science Leader privately drafted this response: “The man’s Bible is the woman’s bible. We cannot have two if the sexes are equal …. Man is the generic term for both men and women and if the most radical suffragist cannot ask or would receive a greater emolument than to be made in the image and likeness of God, I must dissent from their ideal and accept gratefully as humbly woman’s rights and birthright to be an heir with Christ and joint heir with Jesus …” (A10873, Mary Baker Eddy, undated, circa 1895, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity).

Mrs. Eddy (as Christian Scientists affectionately refer to her) clearly felt the sting of “unfair discrimination” based on sex. Frequently, clergy members and others who did not accept her theology targeted her gender. She wrote several passages supporting the goal of legal rights for women. But she opposed the way reformers like Stanton went about securing such rights when their methods conflicted with her primary spiritual commitments. Instead, she articulated the Christian Science method of securing needed societal reforms: through Christian salvation (See Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 63. Jean A. McDonald provides a detailed view of the sex discrimination Mrs. Eddy faced in “Mary Baker Eddy and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Public’ Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Spring 1986, pp. 100–111).

Using the Biblical definition of man from Genesis, in which God created man both “male and female” (Gen. 1:27), Mrs. Eddy wrote: “That which bloomed out of the life of Jesus, filling the world with the odor of divinity, was the ensample for man, and this coincidence of the human [and the divine] must yet appear in our lives.

“It may take a longer life than that of mortals to quicken it into vitality. Buried deep it may be from human sight and lie dormant for thousands of years, like the wheat found in Egyptian tombs, but in the Father’s house, the many chambers of Soul, it must sometime fully disclose its identity with the spirit of Jesus. Heaven only knows what searching methods, what agonies, what ages of crime, what revolutions, may be required for this imperishable germ of greatness and goodness, to struggle up to freedom” (A10624, Mary Baker Eddy, undated, emphasis added, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).

She measured reform efforts against the totality of human salvation in Christian terms.

The Discoverer of Christian Science thought in terms of centuries, even millennia. As a result, she sometimes felt the reform efforts of her era to be self-defeatingly shortsighted. When reform efforts were built around temporal instead of God-given ideas about justice, she considered them well-intentioned but naive about the nature, tenacity, and proper extermination of evil beliefs. Rather than measuring the activities of reformers against a particular standard of social justice, she measured them against the totality of human salvation in Christian terms.

It could never be said that Mary Baker Eddy lacked a revolutionary spirit. In the first edition of Science and Health, the first page reads, “The time for thinkers has come; and the time for revolutions, ecclesiastic and social, must come” (Science and Health, 1st ed. (Boston: Christian Scientist Publishing Co., 1975), p. 3). Her descriptions of moral reformers make clear that she felt herself to be one; she referred to her lifework, using reform parlance, as “the labor of uplifting the race” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 236). However, she also saw key differences between her project of religious reform and the social reform efforts of the era, particularly in terms of scope and method. As the voice of Christ to this age, her work includes, but could not be reduced to, any particular set of social concerns, including the advancement of women.

She was sympathetic to feminist ideals, but was not herself a feminist.

This is why Mrs. Eddy’s views on suffrage were mixed, and why every scholar who has seriously studied her life has concluded that she was sympathetic to feminist ideals, but was not herself a feminist. Robert Peel wrote that she had a “passing word of approval for woman suffrage” but “was in general no feminist” (Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 109). Gillian Gill wrote that “Mrs. Eddy was no political activist and no worker in the vineyards of female suffrage” (Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1998), p. 229) and that although she was generally in sympathy with the goals of many reform efforts, a sampling of her views would “probably satisfy neither the militant feminist nor the ardent defender of traditional sex roles” (Gill, p. 417). Backing up these views, the suffragists who were contemporaries of Mary Baker Eddy did not think of her as a comrade in arms. Susan B. Anthony admired some of her achievements and in 1887 even took a course of instruction in Christian Science from Laura Lathrop, a loyal teacher of Christian Science in New York. However, Anthony later distanced herself from Christian Science and indeed all theologies, and she clearly never felt Christian Science or its Discoverer to be feminist. She was impressed with Mrs. Eddy’s success in founding the Christian Science Church and wrote about her with admiration, but added that “woman” has yet to “write her creed.”¹

Rather than signing on to the causes of various social reformers, Mrs. Eddy tended to appropriate their language for her own spiritual purposes. In the 19th century, if you were an unusually committed or enthusiastic reformer, you were called ultra. Jesus “was ultra” (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 23), Mrs. Eddy wrote. He “was, is, the reformer of reformers” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 288.). Proponents of the Social Gospel, or liberal theology focusing on social justice, thought of Jesus as a reformer based on his social or ethical teachings. But Mrs. Eddy’s view was different. Jesus was ultra, she wrote, because “he laid the axe at the root of all error …. He used no material medicine, nor recommended it, and taught his disciples and followers to do likewise; therefore he demonstrated his power over matter, sin, disease, and death, as no other person has ever demonstrated it” (Message for 1901, p. 23).

She maintained a sincere but secondary interest in ‘the Woman question.’

Probably the best way of summarizing Mary Baker Eddy’s viewpoint on feminism is to say that she maintained a sincere but secondary interest in “the Woman question,” which she consistently subjected to her religious vision. She was, as Gill observed about her early life, “in basic ideological agreement” (Gill, p. xviii) with many of the reform movements of her day. Moving beyond Gill’s argument, it would be accurate to say that this basic agreement was wholly secondary to—and often overridden by—Mrs. Eddy’s central interest in humanity’s salvation through the legacy of Jesus Christ.

At the individual level, reform meant to Mrs. Eddy what the New Testament means in Greek by metanoia—a change of heart and life through Christ, repentance from sin that results in moral renewal. She understood this to be an ongoing, exacting exercise for most human beings, loath as we are to give up the sins we cling to even while they so terribly separate us from God. “Every pang of repentance and suffering, every effort for reform, every good thought and deed,” she wrote, “will help us to understand Jesus’ atonement for sin and aid its efficacy ….” For Mrs. Eddy, there was no way for human wisdom to discern the wise or unwise path without first experiencing the reforming power of God, through spiritual struggle and ultimately exalting participation in Christ’s atonement. She continued: “… if the sinner continues to pray and repent, sin and be sorry, he has little part in the atonement,—in the at-one-ment with God,—for he lacks the practical repentance, which reforms the heart and enables man to do the will of wisdom” Science and Health, p. 19. Mrs. Eddy constantly enjoined her students to pursue this individual reform as a safeguard for their public activities. As she wrote to John and Ellen Linscott, one of whom had a background in social activism, “Christian Science cannot be carried as anti-slavery and temperance are or have attempted to be.” Referring to the term “agitators,” which radical reformers sometimes called themselves, she went on to say, “Agitation injures our Cause. We should always be … Christlike. His voice was not heard in the street …” (L05221, Mary Baker Eddy to John F. and Ellen Brown Linscott, May 30, 1898, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).

One recent argument is that even though Mrs. Eddy did not consider herself a feminist, she still was one because she lived a public, unconventional life at a time when most women didn’t, and because her Church was hospitable to women. This is one valid way of interpreting some of the effects her life and Church have had on society. To reduce her lifework to this narrow interpretation, though, misrepresents her own feelings on the issue. Her vision for reform was broader and deeper than a single social issue. Her main concern was Christian Science and its radically unorthodox plan for Christian salvation, which equally includes women, men, and children.

Freedom from oppression of all types is key to Christian Science theology.

Freedom from oppression of all types—sexual, racial, religious, materialistic, and at the root of all of these, mental—is key to Christian Science theology. Our Leader’s founding of The Christian Science Monitor in 1908 indicates how important she felt world affairs should be to her students. Even as she urged them not to blend their methods with the social reformers of her era, she also urged them to remain engaged with, to care about, and especially to heal the world around them. “The act of healing the sick through divine Mind [God] alone, of casting out error with Truth [God], shows your position as a Christian Scientist,” (Science and Health, p. 182) she wrote, and dedicated the Christian Science textbook to explaining how this is to be done. For Christian Scientists to truly help others and advance society as a whole, they must heal the sick and sinful in the way Christian Science points out. This is the radical reform effort Mary Baker Eddy endorsed.

¹For Susan B. Anthony’s comments distancing herself from Christian Science and other religions, see her 1897 letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years, Vol. 2 (Indianapolis, Indiana: The Bowen-Merril Company, 1898), p. 918. For Anthony’s comments on Mrs. Eddy, see “The Work of Mrs. Eddy,” Christian Science Sentinel, December 14, 1899, p. 245. Anthony wrote: “What of Mrs. Eddy? No man ever obtained so large a following in so short a time,” and then added, “When woman does write her creed, it will be one of right actions, not of theological theories.”

Amy Black Voorhees has a Master’s degree in women’s studies and one in American religious history. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is based on her thesis paper. She can be reached at amybv@mindspring.com.