Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality

1. Sex, Suffrage, and Religious Seekers

11 In the decades after the Civil War, Brooklyn was a center for activist women who rejected Victorian notions of womanhood and who sought ways to express their spiritual yearnings beyond the bounds of mainstreamreligion.Overwhelminglywhite,middle-class,andofProtestantheritage ,thisfirstgenerationof “NewWomen”brokedownsocialand economic barriers and entered the work force as professionals and wageearners . Many women lacked the opportunity for higher education, but a large number nevertheless followed careers as writers, journalists, and lecturers. Some obtained scientific and medical training allowing them to teach other women about their bodies and to lobby for sex education in the schools. Many women were active in movements for women’s rights, whilestillothersworkedforanequitableeconomicsystembasedoncooperation rather than competition. Despite their varying professional paths, theyjoinedtogethertocreateorganizationsthatsupportedwomen’squest for education, meaningful work, and self-development. These efforts to enlarge women’s lives and to reform society were inspired and sustained by a changing religious climate. Rejecting traditional sources of authority and reformulating liberal Protestantism, such women were freed to envision a New Age of social, sexual, economic, and spiritual equality.1 Women’s organizations created a social space where members could expressandcontestnewideas,andwheretheycouldexperimentwithnew social, political, and religious roles. A number of scholars have detailed 1 Sex, Suffrage, and Religious Seekers S 12 front/backmatter Yearning For the New Age 12 the role of such societies as sites for “intimate” practices of reading and writing and as forces in progressive politics.2 Women’s clubs, however, also nourished unconventional ideas and encouraged women to become religious and social leaders. Located between the private, domestic world of family life and the public world of work and politics, they established a milieu in which women could expand their religious knowledge and diversify their spiritual vocabularies. Through the organizations they established and led, Laura HollowayLangford and her friends transmitted radical ideas to the bourgeois women of Brooklyn. Unlike Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, or Mary Baker Eddy, who originated Christian Science, these women are largely forgotten; yet theywere the culturalworkers who disseminated new ideas to the American public. Because of their AngloProtestant heritage and their economic and social standing, they were able to “defy proprieties, pioneer new roles, and still insist upon a rightful place within the genteel world.”3 Through the reforms they championed, the speeches they gave, and the papers they published, Laura HollowayLangfordandhercolleagueshelpedtomakeBrooklyncomparabletoBos ton as a center of feminist and religious ferment. Their patronage of alternative religious views lent respectability to ideas that were once deemed radical but that by the twentieth century had come to seem ordinary. CHANGING RELIGIOUS IDEAS By 1870, a generation of Protestants in Brooklyn had been raised on a heady diet of rationalism and Transcendentalism, seemingly contradictory philosophies that were nevertheless often intertwined in the minds of those seeking new forms of spirituality. For many seekers, Emerson was a touchstone for their inner lives. Religiously liberal women frequently quoted him, finding in his writings sanction for their belief in an indwelling God who could be known intuitively. Through Emerson and other Transcendentalists, many intellectual Brooklyn women were also introduced to Eastern philosophy. At the same time, however, they were influenced by intense forms of Protestant rationalism, exemplified by the front/backmatter 13 Introduction 13 Sex, Suffrage, and Religious Seekers FreeReligiousAssociationthathadbeenformedin1867andthatopposed all forms of supernaturalism. Emerson was one of the Association’s early membersandaspeakeratitsfirstgathering.Fromitsinception,theleadership of the Free Religious Association supported women’s rights. Ednah Dow Cheney, a Boston social reformer and member of the New England Women’sClub,wasoneofthefounders.Speakersatthefirstconvention included Robert Dale Owen, the utopian socialist and spiritualist; Lucretia Mott,women’srightsactivist;ThomasWentworthHigginson,advocateof racial and sexual equality; and Isaac M. Wise, the liberal reform rabbi. At his temple, Wise had initiated accepting women as equals in the minyan required for synagogue prayers. Participants in the Free Religious Association were, for the most part, Unitarians, liberal Universalists, or Quakers , but the gathering included spiritualists, Jews, and the “unchurched.” Professing an all-inclusive religion of humanity, the Association was also committed to the “scientific” study of religion. Most Brooklyn women were not led to doubt the religious orthodoxies oftheiryouthbystudyingthenewbiblicalscholarshipthatchallengedthe supernatural claims of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. Nor, with the exception of a few intellectuals such as Dr. Clemence Lozier, who advised alumnae of the New York Medical College to read “Darwin, Tindall, Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and Agassiz,” did they read the original work of the seminal thinkers of their day.4 Instead, they came into contact with...