Transcript

Speaker Transcripts
> Ann Braude
> Allen Weinstein
> David Hufford
> Phyllis Tickle

American Women’s Legal and Social Status in the Nineteenth Century
by Ann Braude

Ann Braude is director of the Women’s Studies in Religion program and senior lecturer on American religious history at Harvard Divinity School.

Women’s legal status changed a lot over the course of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, women’s status in the young nation of the United States reflected the ideas of British common law. In British common law, the concept of women’s legal status was called the femme couverte “covered woman.” This was the idea of—it really sounds funny to use this language today—the idea of the legal death of women on their marriage. The law said that the husband and wife were one, and that “one” was the man.

This law meant that the man had the legal possession of all of his wife’s property, that her wages legally belonged to him, and that she couldn’t enter into a contract. She had no independent legal existence. She didn’t even have custody rights of her children. Nineteenth century American women had no legal expectation that they could gain custody of their children, even if they went to court to do so. That was part of the legal nonexistence of women: You couldn’t be a custodian unless you existed. Child-custody rights thus fell to fathers or any adult male who was de facto assumed to have legal rights.

The legal situation began to change over the nineteenth century. And one of the things that you see, throughout that century, is the democratic impulse of the new country pulling in one direction, and traditions about women’s roles pulling in another.

The other thing that is important in thinking about change in the nineteenth century, and in the course of Mary Baker Eddy’s lifetime, is the emergence of a new notion regarding social roles: the notion that men and women are destined to inhabit separate spheres of existence. This notion is exacerbated by the developing market economy, in which women—who were part of the productive group of the family in an agrarian economy—now are viewed as consumers, who stay home, while men go out into public. Woman’s sphere became that of the home and of morality. Women were to remain pure, to provide a pristine domestic environment that men who get dirty in the business world can come home to.

“Women’s History Is American Religious History”
One might well think that religious history is a “guy thing.” The religious figures that we learn about are men: Luther, Calvin, Wesley, the popes. In fact, I’m often challenged with this view of religious history when I say my field is the religious history of American women. People say, “Oh, that’s such a tiny specialty. First you’re focusing on religion, which is so small and inconsequential. And then, you’re just going to look at the women, the most powerless and insignificant within that group.”

But men are not the only people who are involved or who have an instrumental role in religion. It is true that for most of Western history, religious leadership and power have been limited to men. It is true that women have been excluded from the offices, from the ordained leadership through which most churches were controlled. It is true that women were excluded from theological education. It is true that women were excluded even from lay leadership in most Christian denominations until quite recently. At the same time, throughout American history, women have always formed the majority of the laity.

This membership majority goes back to right after they got off the boat in Massachusetts. For example, to become a member of the Puritan church, believers had to have an experience of God’s grace in their lives and then proclaim that experience before their church congregation. Very, very quickly women showed themselves to be more frequently called by God to proclaim such an experience of grace. And today, while you no longer have to make a public proclamation to join a Christian church, it is still women who form the vast majority of the laity of every church.

In the black church tradition, there’s the expression that women form the “backbone” of the church. And that really sums up the story: Women hold up the church by their work, by the bake sales and teaching in the Sunday Schools, and by inculcating faith into the next generation. That’s what keeps the church alive: women standing in the back, behind the male figures of power.

It is also true that throughout American history, and even before that, women have felt called by the spirit to assume powerful religious roles and to communicate their spiritual experiences to others. In the medieval period, female mystics and saints were very well known. And this spiritual calling continues into American history. For example, in the Puritan period, you get occasional figures like Ann Hutchinson, who was kicked out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for expressing her spiritual views. This story of women being called by God to speak on religion repeats itself. In the eighteenth century, we have Quaker women preachers; in the nineteenth century, we have Evangelical women.

One figure who illustrates the power of the spirit to overcome social limitations is Jarena Lee, an African-American woman who lived during the period of slavery. She lived in the North, so she, herself, was not enslaved, but she was a servant in a white household, as were most of her family members and peers. She lived in a period when civil society told her that she was not even a human being. Her experience of God calling her and choosing her to be a voice enabled her to come out from the view of not even thinking of herself as a human being, to thinking of herself as the voice of the spirit who could communicate spiritual matters. She preached to black and white audiences—empowered to do so by the spirit.

All of the women that we know of in early American history who broke through gender roles did so with spiritual empowerment.

Theological and Social Roadblocks Facing Women and Religion
In the late nineteenth-century, few varieties of religious leadership were available to a woman who felt impelled to speak out on moral and spiritual issues, and who found that people were attracted to the message. You have to remember, and I don’t mean to be inflammatory here, but you have to remember that the largest religious groups in this country today still do not view women as being equal to men in their ability to be religious teachers and leaders. But we do see, with the women’s rights movement in the middle of the nineteenth century, some women starting to assert their right to engage in theological education. In 1853, we have the first woman ordained in a prominent Protestant denomination, Antoinette Blackwell.

But things were still very, very limited. And this goes back to the idea that woman’s sphere is the private sphere. And the public sphere is men’s sphere. The idea that a woman would speak in public made her subject to all kinds of questions about her character. In fact, the term “public woman” in the nineteenth century referred to a prostitute. That gives you an idea of what it meant for a woman to step out in public, to speak with a moral message.

The theological and biblical roadblocks were also significant. The notion that women should not speak in public comes from the letters of Paul in the Bible. The Pauline letters say that if a woman would learn religion, let her ask her husband at home, that it is a shame for a woman to speak in a church.

What that tells you is that the cutting edge for women’s rights is biblical interpretation. Any woman who wants to move from a very restricted framework must encounter the Bible and must come to terms herself with the beliefs that she has internalized about what the Bible means—and what her society understands it to mean.

All the women whom we’ve spoken about today—and all the women throughout American religious history whom I would have loved to have told you about—in each case, those women did not know about their predecessors. Each time that a woman stood up in the pulpit, she believed, and the congregation in front of whom she spoke believed, that she was the first one ever to do that. The stories of her precedents were not available; it really wasn’t clear whether it was possible for women to speak in public. And so, every time a woman wanted to make that leap, she had to start from scratch. It’s my hope that with the existence of this Library that won’t happen again.

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Lesley Pitts on the Library’s Collection

Mary Baker Eddy started keeping copybooks in the 1840s and kept them close for the rest of her life. Now, copybooks need a bit of explanation. Just imagine you were living in a day before photocopiers. There’s no way to reference things. You’ve got to copy items out by hand, and put them in a book.

Mary Baker Eddy’s copybooks contain original journal entries, hand-copied poetry, as well as her own articles and poems. She read and edited the items in these books throughout her life, probably using them as late as 1910 for her book of poems, published shortly before her passing.

I took images from two of these books because they help to paint a picture of how she truly felt about losing custody of her son. This links with what Ann talked about in regard to custody issues for women in the nineteenth century, and how poorly Mrs. Eddy was portrayed in biographies and in newspaper stories. This part of Mrs. Eddy’s life is reported very harshly. She was characterized as cold, almost inhuman, and definitely not motherly.

I have two versions of a poem that I feel is a very good representation of how she felt, one from each copybook. It’s difficult to tell which was written first. The poem in Copybook 1 begins:

Go little voyager o’er life’s rough sea
Born in a tempest. Make his life more bright,
Oh Love divine his father ever be.
Thy word his compass, and steer him into light.

You can see that these lines are superimposed on a previous version.

In the other copybook, we see the same poem, a much cleaner copy, but sounding like an earlier version.

I think it’s significant that although Mary Baker Eddy did not publish this poem in its entirety, these two books stayed close to her over the years. In fact, she obviously continued to cherish the poem in her own way, by the very act of editing it at different stages of her life. The subject matter must have meant a lot to her. And of course this isn’t the only item in the collection that can attest to her maternal feeling.

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Century of Change
by Allen Weinstein

Allen Weinstein is president and CEO of The Center for Democracy.

Before I begin, let’s look at the nineteenth century the way that historians do. In many ways, the nineteenth century as a political and cultural century does not begin until 1815, when we become, in effect, nationalistic. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 we move away from being essentially an Eastern seaboard nation. With the War of 1812 and the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, we begin to focus internally as opposed to back toward Europe. And we began moving southward and westward with the acquisition of Florida, the acquisition of Texas, the acquisition of California, the acquisition of Oregon. We stopped thinking about Europe as being central to American culture.

Historians use two basic targets in putting an end to the nineteenth century. One is 1900, the end of the Spanish-American war. We’ve conquered territories; we’ve acquired imperial territories. That’s one way of looking at it: We’re back in the global game. The other date is the beginning of World War I. I prefer the beginning of World War I, which restored the American role as a major player in global affairs. So to me, the historical nineteenth century lasted from 1815 to 1914—dates not far removed from the years of Mary Baker Eddy’s life, 1821-1910.

Immigration and the Growth of the American City
Alongside the quintupling in geographical size and the formation of national identity during the nineteenth century, we experienced staggering increases in population. The population increase transforms the landscape of the United States from being agrarian to urban. Until the 1860s, the country still had a predominantly agrarian cast to it. In the South, of course, we have large plantations as well as small farms. In the North, mainly small farms. In the Middle West, increasingly larger farms. That changes dramatically in the second half of the century.

Immigration plays a huge role and a complicated role in our population growth. The first major groups of immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century—the 1840s and 1850s—are largely Germans, Irish, Scandinavians. Many of these people do not go to the cities; they go to the farms, particularly the Scandinavians and the Germans. But by the 1860s and the end of the Civil War, immigration has become almost exclusively urban. And in the late nineteenth century, it’s a “factory worker” immigration.

The extraordinary immigration of this period affected the formation of our national landscape in other ways. After the Civil War, it’s largely a non-English-speaking immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. And a large proportion of these immigrants are not Protestant—as were the original settlers—but Catholic. For example, in 1830, there were 300,000 Catholics in the United States. But by 1860 that figure had increased to 3 million and had ignited the nativism, the anti-Catholicism, of so many of the political movements of the 1840s and 1850s.

The development of the towns and cities and the factory system makes for an interesting story in terms of the changing identity of Americans. For example, here in New England, for the most part, in the 1830s and 1840s, people would plant their crops, then they’d go into the nearby towns where there was a textile factory, or some other kind of factory, silk factories, or whatever. They would work in the factories; they’d go back to the farm for the harvest season. And so they still counted themselves, psychologically and culturally, as farmers. They did not consider themselves as workers embedded in the factory system. The growth of cities in the 1850s and 1860s changes that dramatically and significantly.

Look at how many towns Mrs. Eddy lived in. Look at how many places were increasingly options for her to settle, as she moved forward. It’s rather stunning to an historian to realize how many different parts of American life she moved through. She was in the South, as a small contractor’s wife. She lived on a farm; grew up on a farm. She lived in the towns, and she watched the growth of Boston as one of the great megacities of the United States.

Technology and the Spread of Ideas
Technology was increasing the velocity of life in terms of transportation and communication. As an example, let’s look at the growth of the railroads and the growth of the telegraph. In 1831, one of the great slave revolts in American history takes place, the Nat Turner revolt in Virginia. There was no telegraph; there was no railroad. Communications on the revolt proceeded locally, and by horse, or canal transportation, and they proceeded slowly, so that for most people, even in Virginia, it took days to learn what was happening.

For that reason alone, this slave revolt, which could have stirred up a huge amount of panic, did not become a national event. It was handled locally. Now, flash forward with me, to 1859 and John Brown’s raid. John Brown’s raid was an attempted slave insurrection in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now, West Virginia). It was nationalized from virtually the moment it began. The news provoked panic throughout the South, where Southerners feared that John Brown would be multiplied by a hundred John Browns in the next few months. The news helped make the South very passionate in its desire to leave the Union. At the same time, in the North, news of the insurrection stirred up tremendous excitement because of the nature of the revolt. But it’s put down rather quickly. Why was it put down rather quickly? Because you could send in federal troops quickly. You could send in federal troops quickly because of the railroads.

Developing technology affected Mrs. Eddy as well. Without the technology of book publishing, without the technology of cable communication, without her ability to use the railroads, could she have communicated her message as effectively? The answer is no, she could not. It would have been a much more difficult haul had she been communicating two decades earlier.

A New Nation Emerges Following the Civil War
The Civil War was the first modern war. Civilians were targeted on both sides. As a result of its victory in the war, the North became industrially, politically, and culturally dominant. It was not until 1913 that the South, in the form of President Woodrow Wilson, returns to a measure of national power. So that’s a fifty-year period in which the South loses all control of the national government.

At the same time, the country became more unified after the war. Usage of the name “the United States of America” is a wonderful example here. When you wrote to somebody as late as 1859 or 1860, you would use a plural verb: “The United States of America are.” By 1865, you switched to the singular verb: “The United States of America is.” So, what you’re looking at is a profound measure of nationalization as a result of the war.

The Civil War—or the struggle before and during the Civil War among the abolitionists for control of national politics, and after the war with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments and the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau—produced a cadre of African-American leaders, many of whom were women. Sojourner Truth, for example, next to Frederick Douglass, was the most well-known African American of her age.

Finally, the Civil War increased the scale of activity, North and South, and increased the velocity of change. In the midst of the Civil War, John Sherman wrote to his brother General William Tecumseh Sherman that factories were springing up all over the place. It was a century of change.

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Lesley Pitts on the Library’s Collection

Mary Baker Eddy lived through the many technological, geographical, and industrial advances that characterized the nineteenth century. She kept scrapbooks; thirty-three are in the collections. Like copybooks, scrapbooks were a way of compiling and saving information. And as Allen says, Mrs. Eddy had this desire to understand what was going on all around her. Not just in Bow, New Hampshire, or in Sanborton Bridge, but in New England, in America, in the world. From an early age she was clipping newspaper articles and poetry. She was a keen observer of her times.

Now, I have time to share only one image out of one scrapbook with you. But look how rich it is, just that one image, that one page. From the formal handwritten inscription inside this book, we know it was originally a cashbook belonging to her first husband, George Washington Glover, and it’s dated 1839. On this particular page you can see a clipping about the properties of metals. It’s headed “Metals,” and it’s comparing metals in one century to another. It has kind of a metaphysical theme to it. Lower down on the same page, you see a regular Gleason’s Pictorial feature called “Daily Record of the Past,” which lists historical facts. You see this same item fairly often in the scrapbooks; she must be clipping them every time she gets Gleason’s Pictorial. She’s looking at the historical facts, and marking those that she’s particularly interested in.

On the right side of the page, you see an article called “On Protoplasm.” It’s an interesting piece on organic and inorganic matter. And in it, Professor Huxley from England sets forth a proposal that there are certain chemical facts that produce life, motion, and feeling thought. The author points out that critics will say this theory denies the existence of spirit. So, just on this one page of a scrapbook you have writing on geology, metaphysics, history, chemistry, and biology. It really shows the breadth of her interests, and the kinds of things that she’s interacting with in her life.

On that same page, if you look very closely at the top, you’ll see some handwriting, poking out. And when you peel back the clippings, you find a note in Mrs. Eddy’s handwriting. It says that it was written in May 1857. And it’s a very poignant reminder of Mrs. Eddy’s circumstances at that time. Just a year before, her son had been taken by the Cheney family to Minnesota. And now she’s bedridden; she’s living in North Groton, with her husband Daniel Patterson, with very little money to spare. And she writes this: “I slept very little last night, in consequence of memory and wounded feelings. My spine is so weak and inflammatory that the least mental emotion gives me suffering that language cannot depict. Then the debility which follows seems nearly as distressing. Oh! How long must I bear this burden life? This long and lingering passage through darkness and dull decay, uncheered by many of life’s last solaces, even till now.” These comments capture the loneliness of that period of her life, the time of searching—the despair that she’s feeling at that particular moment.

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Science in the Nineteenth Century
by David Hufford

David Hufford is director of the Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine, Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine.

To understand the views that the nineteenth-century scientist had, it helps to think of their precursors. There are a number of precursors, obviously, but the most important for our purposes, I think, would be the teachings and writings of Reni Descartes, in the early 1600s. Descartes was the fellow who famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” This phrase marks the beginnings of a particular kind of skepticism. And from that thought, Descartes developed the argument that spirit and matter are created of entirely different substances: Spirit would be the topic of religion, and matter would be the topic of science, and they would be studied separately.

This thinking, this path of scientific dualism, made for many kinds of changes in intellectual life. By the time you come to the nineteenth century, you find science meaning the systematic observation, explanation, and prediction of nature. Nature means all things material; religion means all things spiritual.

Now, along with that understanding of science, technology, as Allen has pointed out, is really taking off. You’ve got locomotives; you’ve got the cotton gin; you’ve got all kinds of technological developments that are based on understandings coming out of the physical sciences. These developments give the reputation of science a huge boost. And they further influence thinking. Through the nineteenth century, you have increasingly a move to reduce all of the understanding of the world, in a scientific way, to matter.

Of course, at the end of the nineteenth century, some people are beginning to struggle against this emphasis on—this reduction to—matter, perhaps no one more specifically than Mary Baker Eddy, who reduces everything in the opposite direction, basing the entire understanding of the universe on spirit instead.

The Dilemma of the Scientist Who Has Faith
The nineteenth-century scientist who was a believer faced great tensions, certainly, on this topic. Many scientists in the nineteenth century were religious, but they were finding a real push-pull around the issues that I just touched on.

Charles Darwin was probably the most influential scientist of the nineteenth century. Darwin’s theory of evolution, in combination with the early astronomical discoveries (that the Earth revolved around the sun—rather than the universe going around the Earth) and developments in geology (which suggested that the Earth’s time spans were much longer than that of the Bible) had the effect of decentering humanity. People had thought of humans as being the very center of the universe. It was harder to think that, given the context of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This decentering also negated the idea of purpose. That is, up until the nineteenth century, scientists had thought the universe was created for purposes and was moving toward a goal. Darwin says, oh, no, even life is not that. It’s the product of random forces, random natural forces, material forces. Thus, the idea was developing that it is simply the interaction of material things rather than spirit that leads to life.

There were various kinds of responses to this idea. Many intellectuals in the nineteenth century actually take evolution and make of it an entire philosophy. Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, proposed that cultures move through an evolution that begins in a primitive state with belief in God. These cultures move up through philosophy, and then ultimately to what Comte thought he was about to see happen, what he called the “positive stage,” in which science and mathematics would become the religion of the society.

At the same time as these developments, human senses are being shown not to be adequate for the observations required for science. You need telescopes, stethoscopes, microscopes. And so, ordinary people’s observations stop counting in terms of what life really means. And that really gives science a push in terms of, well, almost a religious kind of position in society.

Religion and the Language of Science
Science comes to be seen in the context of humanity’s progress, as a source of a kind of salvation. Common expressions of the time reflect the view of science as salvation from primitive understanding, primitive states of life, to a kind of progress that people had a sort of religious faith in. Progress was seen as material improvement that many people thought would lead to a sort of heaven on earth. In the same context, the idea of miracle, which used to mean divine intervention, comes to be used to describe extraordinary scientific accomplishments: “the miracles of science.”

Darwinism certainly forms a central dogma of scientific thinking. And from that dogma, a kind of morality developed—social Darwinism—that put ruthless competition as the proper basis of society. And this all advanced with a sort of zeal or fervor that was justified in terms of the public good. Again, there was this expectation that these changes would bring a new utopian standard to life.

Scientific Thought and Medicine
Through much of the nineteenth century, you would not have been able to say that any particular approach to healing was American medicine. There were all kinds of approaches: homeopathy, chiropractic, and magnetic healing, etc.

Medical schools were really diploma mills through much of the nineteenth century. They were very inferior schools, with rather poor students until the 1870s when Johns Hopkins Hospital (and then University and School of Medicine) imports the German scientific medical model for training physicians. This was really the beginning of a huge reform of allopathic medicine, which attaches itself explicitly to the natural sciences. We’re training in laboratories; and basically training in the sciences. Medicine is separated from its historical religious and spiritual connections. The alternatives in the nineteenth century, homeopathy and so forth, were in some cases overtly spiritual, but even where not, they were quite open to a spiritual understanding. Modern medicine moved away from that, in a very dramatic way. And, at that same time offered a sort of implicit promise of the eradication of disease through this scientific shift.

Twentieth-Century Review of Nineteenth-Century Promises
Change continued in the twentieth century, a great deal of change that I think we all think of as progress. And yet, heaven has not arrived on earth. We still do have problems. Disease is not eradicated. We have some new diseases. We’re developing new problems with old diseases. And at the same time, perhaps, because of the growing recognition of the limits and the costs of technology and science, there’s a growing kind of skepticism about science. Not a negation of science, but a drawing back from the idea that what natural science gives is Truth, with a capital T. That definitely is one of those changes.

Strikingly, historically, at the end of the twentieth century, given what people expected at the end of the nineteenth century, you have both a resurgence of all of the alternatives to medicine that were popular in the nineteenth century that didn’t go away and are gaining ground rapidly. And you have a great spiritual awakening. We’ve had spiritual awakenings consistently through the modern era, through the past couple of centuries. Now, we find ourselves in the midst of what may very well be the greatest of those awakenings worldwide, and certainly in American society. It’s not a complete reversal, but it certainly is not the change that the people at the end of the nineteenth century thought they were going to see.

Considering Spirit as the Prime Mover
A number of scientists in the late nineteenth century tried to reincorporate spirit and science and come up with a theory that retained spirit as the great prime mover. None of them that I can think of accomplished, actually, anything that had lasting power. But Mary Baker Eddy did exactly that. And, as I understand it, this is why Christian Science is called Christian Science. It was to be a scientific spirituality that would have, at its core, research and experiment: doing things, seeing how they work. Her history was filled with that kind of investigation, searching for findings that would be verifiable and replicable. Also, there’s her work to develop a clear language—which is a hallmark of science — a language that would allow people to communicate on these topics across cultural boundaries, across religious boundaries. Christian Science was to have practical results, because in the nineteenth century what gave science, natural sciences, a huge boost, was the practical benefits. Scientific spirituality in that sense would also be something that would have not just metaphysical conclusions but practical results in life.

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Lesley Pitts on the Collection

To examine Mary Baker Eddy as a scientist, I’ve chosen a couple of pages from her notes on the book of Genesis. This manuscript shows Mrs. Eddy at a crossroads. Her recovery from a fall on the ice in 1866 had brought her to a new place in the dialogue between matter and spirit. She’d obviously already been thinking about this very deeply. But it had come to a crisis point here. She really couldn’t articulate how the transformation of her body had occurred, but she was impelled to try to capture it in written form.

She started with what she knew, and that was the Bible. It wasn’t long before she started an exegesis on Genesis, which is actually correctly titled “The Bible in its Spiritual Meaning.” It is really a stepping stone along the way to her understanding of the principle that lay behind her healing. Written between 1866 and 1869, these are her “lab notes.” You really see it, as you look through them. They are over 600 pages in length. She is writing down her theories and testing them, perhaps writing the same passage over and over again. You can see she’s crossed out the first paragraph completely and started again. She’s looking for the underlying principle of healing—that she intuits is repeatable. And the writing is executed very quickly. Just look at the crossed—out words and the blots on the page: You can tell that she’s just racing through here and writing these passages. She’s obviously still figuring out new concepts and developing a new language. In Footprints Fadeless, written nearly thirty-five years later, she calls herself an “honest investigator,” even using the language of a scientist. And she calls her understanding at that point “a wonderful germ.”

The second page of the notes illustrates the points I’ve been making in terms of content. She says here, “And Wisdom said let there be light then it was that the intelligence of the principle God passed over matter to control it.” “And wisdom gave to intelligence a part of itself which was the principle of matter The principle was wisdom and truth.” So she’s very much developing her ideas. This is not what we know today in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, but her ideas are developing. She states, “It was practical evolution.” So no big bang theory in 1866. It was slow but sure, and nearly a decade later these ideas reached the general public in the chapters “Spirit and Matter” and “Creation” in the first edition of Science and Health.

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Publishing in the Nineteenth Century
by Phyllis Tickle

Phyllis Tickle is a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly.

Allen noted that for the historian, the nineteenth century begins in 1815. For the book industry, the nineteenth century begins about 1860. There is a fifty-five-year period, from 1860 to 1915, in which books become—the industry becomes—what we understand now.

You and I are accustomed to thinking of readers here, and of bookstores here that are filled with booksellers and book buyers. And libraries are here, and they’re full of books that you can go and get. And publishers are here, and then somewhere over here there are production people, who do printing and binding. Not in 1850; not in 1860; not in 1875. Those divisions weren’t there. There was a paper industry, if you will, and everything that could be done on paper, one person did. That is to say, a bookseller was often a publisher. Almost every printer was.

The Impetus to Publish
In 1800, every American family owned a Bible, with few exceptions. Whether you could read it was a different question, but you owned it. If you could read it, or even if you could afford the pretension of being able to read it, you also owned Pilgrim’s Progress. Those were the two books that you needed to have in the event that a preacher was anywhere nearby and came for supper. But urbanization made it more necessary to be literate. And that strong influx of immigrants, who needed to mesh into the country, into the culture, needed to be able to read.

Plus it was much easier to get books in the nineteenth century than it had been. Books were cheaper because of technology. By the time the century is two-, three-quarters of the way done, we’ve got a steam press. That makes all the difference in the world. Paper is no longer made by hand. Moreover, as binding became more sophisticated, printers discovered that they could pull just the innards of a book—“innards” is a professional term in my industry; it’s the words—they could pull that part and sell it without a cover. This is the birth of the paperback. Wealthy people bound books in leather, but those who didn’t have the money bought just the innards.

Also you’ve got a public that wants to be informed, entertained. Newspapers multiply like crazy, and sometime around the Civil War, you began to get that sense that there ought to be a place where you can go and read more or less for free, and public libraries are born.

Self-Publishing
Up until the first World War, not only were there no advances, no royalties, and no intellectual property control as we understand those terms, but regardless of whether you sold your manuscript outright, which was your choice, or tried to fund it yourself, you were still charged for your plates. So, today our notion of self-publishing bears a kind of pejorative sense that just did not appertain in the nineteenth century.

Religion publishing was seen as commercially viable, yet was more limited than nonreligion books. You get publishers like Harper, for instance, where a good bit of the list is religion. But it was mainstream and Protestant, which was all that a commercial publisher dared to print.

Several denominational publishers were good. The United Methodist Church has one of the oldest and noblest publishing programs anywhere in any society. But if you weren’t a Methodist, you weren’t going to get published here. Roman Catholic presses were also active. And commercial Protestant publishers like the American Tract Society, which comes out at this time, and Fleming Revel, which is still operative in the business of publication as ministry. But if you’re doing a religion book, and it doesn’t fit one of those categories, you’re in deep trouble.

Mary Baker Eddy and Publishing
Now, when Mrs. Eddy started in 1875 with the first edition of Science and Health, she didn’t have a great deal of money. She also had an unfortunate experience with a couple of printers whose names shall go unremembered, or at least unmentioned. But, by the time she gets to the third edition, by the time she gets to 1881, she meets up with a fellow named John Wilson, who is one of the most remarkable people in the history of my industry. John Wilson was a printer, a publisher, and he was operating at that time a thing called the University Press. He was printing the books of other people we’ve heard of: Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, Everett, Holmes. Mrs. Eddy was dealing with the cream of the crop.

John Wilson becomes enamored of what Mrs. Eddy is trying to do. They form a bond around the technology, if you will, of printing and publishing. They become a working duo. And much of what happens, no exaggeration, much of what happens in my industry, from 1881 on, happens because of the dynamic duo here.

Mrs. Eddy made some important contributions to the industry in how she developed the promotion and sale of Science and Health. She was remarkable, remarkably adept at publishing. She was one of the first to understand the use of endorsements, an important part of marketing that obviously comes over into our time. We call them blurbs, the things that decorate the back cover of books. She was not the first to use blurbs. The first blurb that was ever used in this country was in 1855, on Walt Whitman’s second edition of Leaves of Grass, where he borrowed a section of a letter Ralph Waldo Emerson had written. (Mr. Emerson took it unkindly, but that’s a whole different story.) But Mrs. Eddy came along, understood the importance of blurbs, and immediately began to use them. She also wrote blurbs herself for other books. And the funny story is told that once she blurbed a novel based on Christian Science so beautifully and so well that briefly it outsold Science and Health.

The reading rooms were a stroke of genius. Many a pundit has laughed and said she was the first franchiser in America’s selling industry, and that’s true. But what she did was blend the theory of a public library with the theory of book travelers, because books at that point were carried about the country by book travelers. She opened a space that was public, that was free, and that didn’t depend on whether you lived on the book distributor’s route. It was a brilliant move on her part.

Reception of Science and Health
The only way I know to show Mary Baker Eddy’s success is to compare it with modern measures. For example, in the first 15 years, Mrs. Eddy managed to sell close to 50,000 copies of Science and Health. We’d call that a best seller in my business, right now, any time, hands down. In order to appreciate it, I think you need to throw it against, for instance, Pilgrim’s Progress. The American Tract Society fortunately had some figures of how many had sold by the end of the nineteenth century: less than a half-million. You can compare it also with The Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life, written by Hannah Smith, also in 1875. Hannah Smith was regarded as the el primo, the best seller in inspirational religion fiction. And she sold, in the first ten years, only 35,000. So that gives you some sense of exactly how powerful this market was, and this book.

Also, you can sit here and cynically talk about marketing and all of that, but the truth of it is Mary Baker Eddy wrote a good book. I thought I’d tell you all that!

And it helps if it’s a good book. In 1947, Grolier, which is kind of the dean of information to libraries and supplies to libraries, put together a list of the 100 most influential books printed in the nineteenth century. It had all the usual suspects: Uncle Remus and Little Women, Horatio Alger, those you would expect. It even had the Boston Cooking School Cook Book, which became, of course, our Fanny Farmer. The Montgomery Ward catalog was also listed as being very influential. But the Grolier list also had Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health as being the influential book of the religion field.

Innovations in Book Publishing
Let me tell you a story that matters to my industry, and then I’ll tell how it matters to religion. Mary Baker Eddy had the itch, a real drive, to make Science and Health look like the Bible, physically, so that the two books would be a compatible duo. In order to do that, you had to print Science and Health on thin paper, a paper not used in this country. It was controlled primarily by Oxford University Press, in England, and it’s called the Oxford Bible paper or the Oxford India paper.

She kept insisting and insisting and insisting that she wanted Science and Health to be printed on this paper, and Oxford kept saying no and no and no. And, finally, as she readied to do the eighty-fourth edition, in 1894, she got paper from Oxford University Press shipped in to print the first book that actually looked as if it were a companion to the Bible.

But printing on this special paper wasn’t easy. Our presses couldn’t handle that thin stuff. Moreover, if you think about it, it’s so thin that unless it’s in perfect register on both sides, you see not only the side you’re reading, but the shadow of the other side. So, you’ve got to teach these American publishers how to make two pages in register. It was difficult, but eventually she does print Science and Health on the paper. She—with John Wilson’s University Press—does it so perfectly, that Oxford is persuaded. And that’s the introduction of that paper into this country’s publishing, through her persistence.

We talk now about portable pastors, that books are portable pastors. Again, Mary Baker Eddy is the first person in the history of the American book business who understood that a book can become sacred space; that it’s possible to enter it, that it has value to a widely diffuse population who might not necessarily have easy access to its own clergy, or to its own people. She knew the importance of a consistently rendered message, that the way you did that was to convert the sermon, the spoken word, the heart of the message into a book that was consistent, and that was the same in all of its permutations, and that would allow the follower, or the seeker, to enter into it so that that sacred space could be anywhere.

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Lesley Pitts on the Library’s Collection

We’ve got so much in the collection to support everything that Phyllis has talked about. I can identify with the history of publishing that she describes just by reading Mrs. Eddy’s correspondence. Mrs. Eddy was obviously learning the business as a publisher, and modeling and expanding the methods of other booksellers and publishing houses.

The first illustration is the Christian Science Publishing Society building on Falmouth Street in Boston. (This picture was taken in about 1898; the building no longer exists today.) It’s a typical brownstone, but on the outside you see two large banners. The left banner establishes its function as a publishing house. It reads “Christian Science Publishing Society.” And on the right banner is promotion for a primary product, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. These words are emblazoned on the outside of the building. So, Mary Baker Eddy is using the methods of a publisher to get her message across.

Here we have an order form from Brentano’s bookstore in Chicago. Brentano’s wanted to purchase more copies of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Brentano’s just simply wrote to Mrs. Eddy, in 1886, to ask for twelve more copies of Science and Health. And note the letterhead. It says Brentano Bros. Booksellers, Publishers, Importers, Stationers & Newsdealers. So everything that Phyllis was saying is all rolled into one organization: Brentano’s.

So, we see Mrs. Eddy as an author and publisher, dealing directly with the booksellers, using the methods of the day available to her. In her correspondence, we see this over and over again. It’s not just with Brentan’s. But we see her also setting up little bases around the country, first with her students. They become mini-distributors in cities around America as they become established. And then, of course, we know that she went on to establish a whole network of reading rooms.

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