American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875-1915Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 - 203 pages Contrary to popular thought, New Age spirituality did not suddenly appear in American life in the 1970s and '80s. In American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality, Catherine Tumber demonstrates that the New Age movement first flourished more than a century ago during the Gilded Age under the mantle of 'New Thought.' Based largely on research in popular journals, self-help manuals, newspaper accounts, and archival collections, American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality explores the contours of the New Thought movement. Through the lives of well-known figures such as Mary Baker Eddy, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Edward Bellamy as well as through more obscure, but more representative 'New Thoughters' such as Abby Morton Diaz, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Ursula Gestefeld, Lilian Whiting, Sarah Farmer, and Elizabeth Towne, Tumber examines the historical conditions that gave rise to New Thought. She pays close attention to the ways in which feminism became grafted, with varying degrees of success, to emergent forms of liberal culture in the late nineteenth century--progressive politics, the Social Gospel, humanist psychotherapy, bohemian subculture, and mass market journalism. American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality questions the value of the new age movement--then and now--to the pursuit of women's rights and democratic renewal. |
Contents
The Moral Revolution of Metaphysics | 19 |
New Thought and the Cosmic Sphere of Women | 43 |
The Metaphysics of Nationalism | 69 |
Copyright | |
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Abby Morton Diaz American argued Baha'i Bellamy's Blavatsky's bohemian Boston Campbell century Chicago Christian Science Church Civil claims cosmic critical culture democratic desire divine early Eddy's Edward Bellamy Elizabeth Towne Ella Wheeler Wilcox Emerson Emma Curtis Hopkins ethic evangelical experience Farmer feminine feminism feminist Frances Willard gnostic feminists gnostic reformers Greenacre Greenacre Voice Greenacreites higher human Ibid ideal individual inner intellectual labor late-nineteenth-century liberal Lilian Whiting Living Looking Backward Madame Blavatsky Mary Baker Eddy mass mental middle-class mind cure modern gnostic moral selfhood mystical Nationalism Nationalist Club nature Nautilus neoplatonic nineteenth-century occult Olcott one's organized peace philosophy political psychic public realm radical readers religion religious republican sense sensibility sexual Social Gospel Society soul spiritualists suffrage syncretism theology Theosophical theosophists therapeutic Thought movement tion tradition Transcendentalists Transcendentalists in Transition University Press Ursula Gestefeld Victorian virtue Wilcox woman women women's movement World Beautiful wrote York