cover image Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920

Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920

Beryl Satter. University of California Press, $48 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-520-21765-2

Ambitious, engaging and beautifully written, this study of late 19th-century American women's psychological and intellectual relationship to progressive social movements and quasi-religious self-improvement cults is a groundbreaking investigation that overturns established paradigms in which women are buffeted by history rather than agents of it. At the core of Satter's study is the New Thought Movement, a uniquely American ideology that promised material success as well as spiritual salvation through positive thinking and reliance on reason and the Christian scriptures. Its best and most lasting example is Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, but it also exists in modified form today in groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. Satter, a professor of history at Rutgers University, draws on a huge number of obscure but extraordinary texts, novels, tracts and archival records, and expertly teases out their nuances and meanings; her accounts of the women and men who embraced various aspects of New Thought philosophy are wonderfully vivid. The most original aspect of her work is her analysis of how politically disenfranchised white middle-class women used New Thought as a way out of the home and a means to reshape society, including modifying gender roles, curtailing manifestations of public sexuality and pleasure and redefining prevailing concepts of appropriate desires. Satter's conclusion--that 19th and early 20th century women found many effective ways to exert their selfhood and influence the public sphere--has enormous resonance today. (Aug.)