American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875-1915Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 - 203 pages Based largely on research in popular journals, self-help manuals, newspaper accounts, and archival collections, American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality demonstrates that the New Age movement first flourished more than a century ago during the Gilded Age under the mantle of 'New Thought'. Tumber 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, and questions the value of the new age movement--then and now--to the pursuit of women's rights and democratic renewal. Visit our website for sample chapters! |
Contents
The Moral Revolution of Metaphysics | 19 |
New Thought and the Cosmic Sphere of Women | 43 |
The Metaphysics of Nationalism | 69 |
Cultural Experimentation in the New Age | 109 |
Everyday Psychics Gnostic Theology and the Bohemian Manners of Mass Culture | 139 |
The Empowered Self and Gnostic Spiritual Flight | 169 |
| 177 | |
| 191 | |
About the Author | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Abby Morton Diaz Arendt argued Bellamy's Blavatsky's bohemian Books Boston Cambridge Campbell century Chicago Christian Science Church Civil claims cosmic critical 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 Greenacreites Hannah Arendt Henry higher History 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 in Transition Ursula Gestefeld Victorian virtue Wilcox William woman women women's movement World Beautiful wrote York
Popular passages
Page 14 - Metaphysical Healing," or other forms of spiritual philosophy, who are so numerous among us to-day. The ideas here are healthyminded and optimistic; and it is quite obvious that a wave of religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American world.
Page 16 - Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). On pollution beliefs in New Guinea, see Shirley Lindenbaum, "A Wife is the Hand of Man," in Man and Woman in the New Guinea Highlands, ed.