Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (review)

Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920. Beryl Satter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 382. $39.95 (cloth).

It has been barely noticed that the celebration of the new millennium is one full year ahead of schedule; the third millennium in fact begins in 2001. The reason for this prematureness might be that millennarianism is so well entrenched in American culture that bending chronology to hasten the arrival of the new era seems natural. Past announcers of new eons felt even less constrained by chronology. In 1869, the "first Woman's Parliament," organized by Jane Cunningham Croly, made American women hope that their advancement would be "a step towards the coming millennium," as one member put it (23). The new age was to be a creation of refined women whose religious devotion and high aspirations would help the weak, ennoble humanity, and convert the world. As Beryl Satter shows in her recent book on mental healing, the woman's independence from the lower instincts was the common theme of a cluster of movements that, in the last third of the nineteenth-century, aimed at giving women a new role in society as witnesses of the spirit and liberators of the mind from its dependence on the body.

The new role was a polemical answer to the scientific and commercial rationality that Darwinism and social Darwinism took to be an intrinsic feature of the "Aryan" race in general and of the Anglo-Saxon male in particular. While the masculine ideal promoted by social Darwinism was the healthy, aggressive entrepreneur, women were seen either as strong, instinctual beings, close to nature and untamed by reason, or as weak and passive creatures incapable of providing leadership. More subtle Darwinists (Lester Frank Ward, John Fiske, and G. Stanley Hall) discussed the importance of altruism and the power of the mind in the behavior of "truly superior" races, i.e. the Anglo-Saxon. In opposition to the ideal of active rationality defended by social Darwinism, various movements devoted to the cause of women played up the importance of love for the moral order and created a feminine ideal based on the alliance between head and heart (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucinda B. Chandler, and Winnifred Harper Cooley). "Mind over matter" was the unifying concept that mobilized the energy of late-nineteenth-century feminism in the political arena, as well as in the growing field of psychic healing.

The target of psychic healing was neurasthenia, which, like nervous depression nowadays, pervaded nineteenth-century America. As mainstream medicine was unable to understand and cure neurasthenia, alternative approaches increasingly attracted patients, with various degrees of success. One of the best-known approaches was Christian Science or New Thought, an offshoot of mesmerism. The beliefs of its founder, Phineas Quimby, who professed that Man is matter, while Woman is spirit or wisdom, were developed by Mary Baker Eddy, creator of Christian Science, who was convinced that spiritual reality is more powerful than mortal, material reality. There are two minds, she taught: God's Mind and the Mortal Mind, that latter being the source of all illnesses, which, in her view, were not caused by germs but by mental fears and could therefore be cured by the individual's surrendering to God's mind and power. These themes were further elaborated by Emma Curtis Hopkins, the founder of "New Thought" proper, who taught that since God, who is good and spirit, is all, evil and matter do not exist. Since, in Hopkins's opinion, the cause of disease lies in the mistaken belief in the existence of evil, health returns as soon as one corrects such false beliefs through the development of the "God-self" or the divine power within the individual.

"Mind over matter" did not necessarily mean "mind over money." All promoters of New...