Rethinking New Thought

Beryl Satter. Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xii + 382 pp. Charts, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Each Mind a Kingdom offers a fascinating array of evidence that promises to transform our understanding of the mind cure movement. It is simultaneously an important and a frustrating book. Beryl Satter's meticulous research has uncovered dimensions of New Thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that previous historians of the mind cure have failed to notice or note. Through this process of recovery, Satter radically revises the prevailing historiography. She introduces a new periodization, identifies Mary Baker Eddy's dissident student Emma Curtis Hopkins as the most important promulgator of New Thought, persuasively links New Thought to social reform in the early period, and argues convincingly that culturally pervasive New Thought assumptions shaped the context for the popularization of modern psychology in the early twentieth century and continue to inform popular therapies and New Age practices. Her evidence shifts the geographic focus away from New England and establishes Chicago as the effective center of New Thought. Her narrative is studded with engaging capsule biographies of long forgotten mental healers and teachers. She imaginatively utilizes New Thought novels to reveal intersections between the new science and dominant cultural themes. Satter focuses primarily on the first thirty years, the period before New Thought developed into a religion of success. It is the interpretive frame in which Satter places her rich and richly suggestive materials that undermines the substantial, indeed remarkable achievements outlined above. The aspects of the study that I have highlighted Satter presents as almost incidental to the theme that her subtitle announces as her central concern, "American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920." The conceptual flaws in Satter's discussion of gender and desire, and the interpretive problems that this framing of the evidence produces threaten to obscure her substantial contribution to a revisionist history that restores New Thought's cultural significance.

Satter's opening revisionist move is possibly her most dramatic. Most historians have made Mary Baker Eddy the central figure in the early history of mind cure, and certainly the most important female leader in the new religion. Satter deftly resituates Eddy and her Christian Science in the context of a movement that quickly overshadowed Eddy's operation and her influence. Eddy's genius for institutional control enabled her to consolidate support and construct an organization that would effectively perpetuate her new religion; its very survival has contributed to the distorted historical perception that it was at the heart of the more institutionally diffuse mind cure phenomenon. Satter examines both the specific contours of and the limits to Eddy's contribution to the New Thought that flourished at the turn of the century as a female-dominated religion.

For the first thirty years, Satter notes that New Thought adherents were primarily middle-class white women and their male allies "who understood themselves as part of a women's religious movement that would herald a new "women's era" (p. 8). It is this gendering of New Thought that Satter makes the focus of her analysis. She develops a complex argument that those drawn to New Thought were engaged in a central cultural debate, rooted in controversy over gendered ideals, "over whether the key to progress, civilization, and race perfection was [Anglo-Saxon] male desire or female virtue"
(p. 9). To sort out this issue, Satter draws the reader into long forgotten discussions of competing genderings of mind, matter, spirit, selfhood, and desire. She concludes that the diversity of New Thought opinion on these matters can be divided into two competing schools, an "anti-desire" faction that dominated in the early years and a "pro-desire" minority. The first school demanded the denial of matter and desire, while the second (more popular among economically marginal types) affirmed the divinity of desire, both sexual...