Mary Baker Eddy made few statements about women’s rights. But we do know that she valued the efforts of the suffrage movement of her day.
In 1882 Eddy 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 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 brief correspondence with Susan B. Anthony. For more information on Anthony and her relationship to Christian Science, please see our website article “Women of History: Susan B. Anthony.”
Eddy’s experience certainly shows the challenges that women faced in the nineteenth century. However, her primary concern was the cause of Christian Science. Along these lines, biographer Gillian Gill noted this:
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 discussed the rights of women, as well as her concerns about unfair discrimination.
