Book

Satter, Beryl, 1959-

Each mind a kingdom : American women, sexual purity, and the New Thought movement, 1875-1920 / Beryl Satter.

Berkeley : University of California Press, ©1999.

xii, 382 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

"Each Mind a Kingdom offers the first in-depth history of the enormously popular turn-of-the-century New Thought movement. Most historians have characterized New Thought as the popular ideology of twentieth-century capitalism, but this account reanimates the movement's complex early history." "This revisionist history demonstrates the centrality of New Thought to the social and political transformations that reshaped American culture at the turn of the century. It explains how a spiritual discourse that combined rigid Victorian gender norms, middle-class reformism, race ideology, and proto-psychology gave rise to wildly popular twentieth-century cults of success. In so doing, it suggests new ways of interpreting the self-help, New Age movements of our own fin de siecle."--Jacket.

Eddy, Mary Baker, 1821-1910.

New Thought -- History.

Women -- Religious life -- United States.

Christian Science -- United States -- History.

Twelve-step programs -- History.

Sex role -- United States -- History.

Feminism -- United States -- History.

Sex customs -- United States -- History.

United States -- Church history.

United States -- Civilization -- 1865-1918.

United States -- Intellectual life -- 1865-1918.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 333-357) and index.

Introduction: New Thought in late-Victorian America -- The era of woman and the problem of desire -- The mother or the warrior: mind, matter, selfhood, and desire in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and Warren Felt Evans -- Emma Curtis Hopkins and the spread of New Thought, 1885-1905 -- Sex and desirelessness: the New Thought novels of Helen Van-Anderson, Ursula Gestefeld, and Alice Bunker Stockham -- Money and desire: Helen Wilmans and the reorientations of New Thought -- New thought and early progressivism -- New Thought and popular psychology, 1905-1920 -- Conclusion: New Thought in American culture after 1920.

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9780520217652

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289.98 Satter