Mary Baker Eddy—proving the freedom of womanhood

Tony Lobl | from The Christian Science Journal

As the vital role of women in culture, business, art, and politics is celebrated anew each year in the United States—where March is designated as Women’s History Month—Mary Baker Eddy is increasingly being recognized as a pioneer with an enduring and powerful message that is still relevant.

Mary Baker Eddy’s historic accomplishments were achieved in many fields traditionally dominated by men. Her achievements as author, publisher, healer, teacher, public speaker, spiritual discoverer, and religious founder were so remarkable that at the time of her passing in 1910 she was one of the best-known women in the United States.

Science and Health—including the healing system it outlines—has touched the lives of both men and women ever since its first printing. Yet it remains an unchangeable fact that this book was penned by a woman, and that she saw the essential contribution of womanhood in opposing materialism, which she understood to be the primary cause of sin and suffering. In Science and Health she writes: “Materialistic hypotheses challenge metaphysics to meet in final combat. In this revolutionary period, like the shepherd-boy with his sling, woman goes forth to battle with Goliath” (Science and Health, p. 268).

The author of Science and Health says of the ideas within her book, “God had been graciously preparing me during many years for the reception of this final revelation of the absolute divine Principle of scientific mental healing” (Science and Health, p. 107). Is it possible that this gracious preparation included the lessons learned by the author through her trials as a nineteenth-century woman? These trials included having limited access to formal schooling; being a single mother (a widow) in an era when women lacked civil rights; having her child taken away from her against her will because she was in poor health and had very little say about what was to be done with him; and having to depend on the goodwill of family members for a home. She also experienced many periods of sickness throughout the first half of her life.

When human support systems fail … leaning wholeheartedly on God for help remains an option, and Mrs. Eddy proved it to be the most viable option of all.

When human support systems fail—as they did for Mary Baker Eddy as a woman in nineteenth-century America—leaning wholeheartedly on God for help remains an option, and Mrs. Eddy proved it to be the most viable option of all. At one point, through inspiration gained from reading the Bible, she was quickly healed of the effects of a near-fatal accident; she had glimpsed something new about ultimate reality. She had always read and loved the Scriptures, but her healing took her well beyond the paradigm of the commonly preached view of the Bible, and enabled her to grasp, prove, and teach its underlying spiritual meaning and healing power.

In her subsequent desire to share what she had discovered, Mrs. Eddy had to overcome the obstacles she faced as a woman in what was, outwardly at least, a man’s world. Yet she was convinced that the demand to make known the efficacy of her discovery, Christian Science, to the world came from God and that the strength to do so lay in understanding and proving more of her own (and everyone’s) true relation to God. With this conviction, she overcame one limitation after another. She lectured publicly, authored and published Science and Health, taught Christian Science to classes that included prominent businessmen, judges, and ministers, edited and published magazines, and founded a world-class newspaper.

In these and other ways Mrs. Eddy proved that womanhood could be rightly viewed and experienced as including complete freedom. She also encouraged other women to prove the same thing for themselves. At one time a student she had appointed to lecture on Christian Science reported that she was meeting with little success because she wasn’t a man. Mrs. Eddy rebuked the student’s resignation to the situation and said she should “rise to the altitude of true womanhood” (see We Knew Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1979), pp. 82–83). Then the requests to lecture would flow in for her, as they had for Mrs. Eddy. And they did. The student, Annie Knott, became a successful lecturer in what previously had been assumed to be a male preserve.

She had no reservations about calling God ‘Father,’ yet she insisted God was also to be adored and understood as Mother.

The concept of “true womanhood”—spiritual and perfect, as is true manhood—is one of the great healing insights Mrs. Eddy brought to the attention of the theological world and to humanity as a whole. She had no reservations about calling God “Father,” yet she insisted God was also to be adored and understood as Mother. She wrote in Science and Health, “In divine Science, we have not as much authority for considering God masculine, as we have for considering Him feminine, for Love imparts the clearest idea of Deity” (Science and Health, p. 517). From this vantage point of discerning God’s motherhood as divine Life and Love, Mrs. Eddy recognized the stature of true, spiritual womanhood. She said, “The ideal woman corresponds to Life and to Love” (Science and Health, p. 517).

Mrs. Eddy accomplished all that she did at the time when women suffragettes were most actively striving to free public thought and policies from their previous status quo. She was in her twenties when the first women’s rights convention in the United States took place in Seneca Falls, New York, and she lived to see women win the vote in parts of her own country and in other countries. Ten years after her passing, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was adopted, and the women of the United States were finally enfranchised.

Through her own spiritually based activism, Mary Baker Eddy provided many women an example, and the means, to implement some of the practical freedoms demanded by the suffragettes. Catherine Albanese, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describing Mary Baker Eddy in America Religions and Religion, writes, “A gifted woman with strong leadership potential at a time when a woman’s place was confined to marriage and family, she created through her church a stage on which she and the others who followed her could aspire to act forcefully and effectively” (American Religions and Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992), p. 239).

The “others who followed her” included a large proportion of women. She established The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, in a way that allowed women access to its highest posts. These roles have been regularly filled by women, as well as by men, during this century. And though making money was not the motive of those who became public healers, their practice of Christian Science enabled women to earn a wage independently at a time when this was otherwise difficult for them to do. A majority of the early practitioners of Christian Science were women—as they still are today—and without reference to gender, Mrs. Eddy wrote, “Christian Science practitioners should make their charges for treatment equal to those of reputable physicians in their respective localities” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 237).

Christian Science also provided a means to freedoms that couldn’t be won politically.

Christian Science also provided a means to freedoms that couldn’t be won politically, such as freedom from physical ailments associated with womanhood. The “Fruitage” chapter of Science and Health includes an account of painless childbirth. Testimonies of such healings can still be found in weekly and monthly Christian Science magazines today, as can accounts of freedom won from menstrual cramps and symptoms associated with menopause. In articles and testimonies, women have credited their practice of Christian Science with removing “glass ceilings” in the workplace, improving marital relationships, defusing sexual harassment, and giving them the strength to challenge oppressive stereotypes.

As a realist, Mary Baker Eddy advocated justice for women. She wrote in Science and Health, “If a dissolute husband deserts his wife, certainly the wronged, and perchance impoverished, woman should be allowed to collect her own wages, enter into business agreements, hold real estate, deposit funds, and own her children free from interference” (Science and Health, p. 63).

As a spiritual idealist, Mrs. Eddy worked for nothing less than the freedom of all people, not only from oppressive laws but from the oppression of the material, constricting worldview she saw as being at the heart of all of humanity’s problems. She saw liberty as a divine right for all, derived directly from each individual’s eternal relation to God, divine Truth. She wrote, “Truth brings the elements of liberty” (Science and Health, p. 224).

In pioneering the practical proof of Truth’s liberating power, Mrs. Eddy demonstrated her own freedom to achieve all that God impelled her to do. She thereby proved the unlimited potential of true womanhood.