Mary Baker Eddy made few statements about this, but we do know that she valued the efforts of the women’s rights movement of her day. In 1882 she wrote her student Clara Choate: “let us work as the industrious Suffragists are at work who are getting a hearing all over the land.”1 Her secretary’s financial accounts indicate that she was a member of a suffrage association at one point, paying one dollar in “Suffrage dues” in March of 1888.
Eddy’s contacts with the women’s rights leaders of her day were limited. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s name appeared in Eddy’s address book from the early 1870s. Eddy also had a brief correspondence with Susan B. Anthony. For more information on Anthony and her relationship to Christian Science, please see this article at our website: marybakereddylibrary.org/susanbanthony.
Eddy’s experience certainly shows the challenges that women faced in the nineteenth century and her successes can be attributed in part to the victories of the women’s movement. However, her primary concern was the cause of Christian Science. As Gillian Gill notes,
Mrs. Eddy was no political activist and no worker in the vineyards of female suffrage. Her role, she believed, was to provide with her science a new theoretical and spiritual advocacy for the primary equality of the sexes, and the mother-fatherhood of God.2
Further reading regarding Eddy’s thoughts can be found in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.3 There she discusses the rights of women and her concerns about unfair discrimination.
