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Introduction
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1 Introduction To President Andrew Johnson she was a “little rebel.” To Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, she was a “bomb-shell from the Dugpa world.” In occult fiction, she is portrayed as a busybody who fancied herself a mental healer. Some Theosophists labeled her a “Sex Maya.” Brooklyn newspapers identified her as the “chief priestess” in the Wagner cult, but Henry Ward Beecher praised her as the most eloquent lecturer on the subject of woman in America. Who was this person who evoked such strong and disparate reactions? Laura Carter Holloway-Langford (1843–1930) appeared to be a conventional Victorian woman. She was slender, with brown hair and blue eyes, polite and soft-spoken, but wielding a strong Southern accent. Today she is remembered as the author of a popular tome, Ladies of the White House, and as the founder of the Seidl Society, an organization that brought musical culture to women and children. She is also recognized as one of the first women to work in a newsroom, becoming an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Beneath the veneer of professionalism and middle-class sobriety , however, Laura Holloway-Langford led a shadow life as a spiritual seeker. She was, by turns, a spiritualist, a Theosophist, a Buddhist, and so closely allied with the Shakers that some called her “Sister Laura.” Until recently most accounts of her accomplishments relied on embellished stories that she perpetuated, some of which are repeated in studies on the Theosophical Society, the Shakers, Buddhism, and Wagner.1 It was only in 2007 that an accurate chronology of her life was established by S 2 front/backmatter Yearning For the New Age 2 Claudia J. Keenan for the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. About the same time, I published articles detailing her relationship with the Shakers and her attitude toward her Southern identity.2 Yet the common thread in all these aspects of her life, her spiritual quest, has been unexplored. Laura Holloway-Langford believed that a new era was emerging when universal truths would be acknowledged, moral purity would triumph, and harmonious social and economic relations would prevail. In this study, I trace her search for this “New Age” over more than half a century of American social and religious change.3 Holloway-Langford’s life can be a lens through which to view the emergence of a distinctively American spirituality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her attraction to alternative religions was inextricable from her desire for personal autonomy and her belief in women’s social and economic rights. She was ambivalent about suffrage, but unequivocal about the necessity of transforming family and sexual relationships. At the same time, she embodied the internal contradictions that feminist women faced even as they aspired to take on new roles.4 She rejected domesticity but married twice and was a devoted mother. In her writing and lectures, she voiced Victorian pieties about womanhood while she fought to free herself from them. Laura Holloway-Langford claimed to be a delicate, “true” woman who worked outside the home only from necessity, but she was an ambitious journalist and a shrewd businesswoman. She portrayed herself as a humble worker in benevolent causes, but dreamed of creating powerful organizations that she could control. She allowed her desire for respectability tolimitherpotential,yetshewelcomednewwaysofunderstandingherself and her place in society. Rejecting creedal formulations and institutional religion,like other“restless souls,”shesetoutonapath thatledawayfrom conventional Protestantism and toward a syncretic mix of Christianity, theosophy,andEasternreligioustraditions.5 She cameto believe that hidden , esoteric truths were at the core of all sacred traditions and texts. For Holloway-Langford, the unity of East and West signaled the dawning of a New Age when the material world would yield to the spiritual. This book focuses primarily on the years between 1870 and 1910, with the last chapter set in the 1920s. The story begins in Brooklyn of the 1870s, [54.162.130.75] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:01 GMT) front/backmatter 3 Introduction 3 after Laura Holloway-Langford and her family left Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War. There, she found a home among ultraliberal Protestants—Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Free Thinkers—who rejected the Christian claim to an exclusive path to salvation. Struggling to reconstitute her life economically as well as socially, Holloway-Langford turned to phrenology, which asserted that the characteristics of each human body revealed truths about the moral, emotional, and intellectual makeup of the individual. Like many who...