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

Rating:
Summary: New Thought and Gender Construction
Review: Beryl Satter's fascinating book, Each Mind a Kingdom, is the first new work on the New Thought movement in more than twenty-five years. This little-known religious healing system taught believers that, because of divine immanence humans had the power to effect change, healing and creation with their minds. Mary Baker Eddy's belief in physical healing through thought transference is perhaps the best-known example of the movement; it was out of New Thought that she developed Christian Science. Over time, the movement's focus on mental healing gradually shifted to an emphasis on creative thinking for material gain which led the earliest scholarship on the movement to condemn it as a get-rich-quick scheme. Scholars of the 60s and 70s such as Gail Thain Parker and Donald Meyer interpreted the movement as a mechanism that allowed turn of the century Americans a way to reconcile their conflicting feelings toward wealth and morality in an era of unbridled consumerism. Satter however has brilliantly resituated the movement within the turn of the century debate on race evolution and given new meaning to previously near-incomprehensible New Thought texts. Each Mind a Kingdom responds to Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization, an exploration of the crisis of masculinity that took place when ideals of manhood were re-examined in the wake of economic changes and developments in evolutionary theory, and anthropology at the end of the 19th century. As Satter explains, white masculinity was retooled into a unique combination of primitive drive contained by morality, rationality and intellectualism. Middle-class urban white men took to demonstrating their physical virility through body-building, shooting and camping. This ideology with its "low impulses," was distinct from previous norms of white manhood based on rationality and intellect alone. Not everyone was prepared to embrace these new standards however; instead some women and men "argued that pure, selfless women rather than aggressive, desirous men were the best hope for civilization, the republic, and the (Anglo-Saxon) 'race.'" (39) With her link between mind and heart, free of primitive drives, white womanhood was believed by some to be the highest expression of race perfection. This group, known as social purists or reform Darwinists, asserted that motherhood was "the soul-energizing of the race" and that white men's lustful nature was leading to devolution of the race because the sexual activity they often forced on women produced deficient children. It was out of this cultural debate that the New Thought movement grew. Influenced by mesmerism, hypnotism and the writings of Phineas Quimby, early New Thought advocates such as Mary Baker Eddy, Warren Felt Evans and Emma Curtis Hopkins posited a religious healing system that would allow the mind to control the body. New Thought tenets held that human minds, being the creation of God and therefore divine, had the power to similarly create. It was this understanding of the mind's ability that inspired Mary Baker Eddy to posit that sickness existed only in people who did not negate its existence. Adepts also fervently believed that hunches, intuition and "gut feelings" were in fact a form of communication from God, who was also known as the All-Supply, the All Mind, the Divine Spirit, or "the Christ." The bulk of Each Mind a Kingdom is concerned with the interpretation of New Thought texts in the context Satter has explained. She argues that without knowledge of the cultural debate in which they are enmeshed the texts are virtually indecipherable. In their religious texts and fiction, male and female practitioners explored questions of gender using metaphors of matter, spirit, desire and heart. "When female New Thought authors spoke of desire, they referred to material and sexual desires, but more broadly to their fundamental cravings for the right to think, feel, and act for themselves. They were talking, in short, about subjectivity." (15) Of particular interest is Satter's interpretation of "desirelessness" as a means of escaping unwanted sexual advances and compulsory heterosexuality. Her study of New Thought fiction illustrates that women adepts used New Thought as a means of justifying their physical withdrawal from their husbands. As the opposite of men's savage nature, desirelessness was considered an expression of women's superiority. In addition to the discourse on race, Satter also examines the movement's influence on the progressive movement and pop psychology of the 1920s. This work is a groundbreaking study which has breathed new life into a previously poorly-understood movement. A new understanding of New Thought is particularly important as Satter and others have explained because New Thought beliefs, though detached from the movement, remain present in American culture. Strands of New Thought can be found in the12-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the "possibility thinking" of minister Robert Schuller (of Crystal Cathedral fame). Satter also detects elements of the movement in network television writing, "Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey dispenses her New Thought philosophy daily on a show watched by millions." (7) This work, clearly written and persuasively argued, is certain to become a standard in cultural history syllabi.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and controversial survey and time
Review: When I began to read "Each Mind a Kingdom", I soon realized that it was that dreaded genre--the doctoral dissertation made flesh.
I expected the worst sort of academic exercise, in both senses of the word, and read on only because the book had a great cover and I am fascinated with New Thought ideas.

But "Each Mind a Kingdom" is anything but a dry academic tome.
It's as alive as a novel, and full of ideas and opinions. It's rather like going to a movie like "My Dinner with Andre", in which the author sets up ideas with scenarios, and then allows the ideas to subtly hover.

I'm not saying that I found everything in "Each Mind a Kingdom" to be a plethora of positions with which I agreed. Indeed, in many cases, I felt that Dr. Satter over-eggs the pudding, and draws conclusions beyond her citations, and, in some cases, dismisses as "ambiguous" or "unclear" those authorities which do not fit her premise. I found the omission of Elizabeth Delvine King's work, whose "purity new thought" ideas would not fit the author's "chronology" of the rise and fall of the "purity" movement, to be puzzling, and the near-dismissal of the Unity School and Religious Science to be curious in light of the far greater mainstream impact each movement had upon the culture than many of the people whom the author covers in detail.

Still, this book merits reading because it is a narrative voice making important points from fascinating subject matter. She introduced me to thinkers with whose work I was less familiar. More importantly, she tackles the gender rhetoric of early New Thought writings, particularly that by women, and examines the impact of the competing ways of looking at things on the broad culture.

Dr. Satter has three to five books of material in this work, and it is in some senses a shame that she tries to do so much.
Her conclusory points about Freud and modern self-help,each interesting, appear to be "toss ins" to try to "add relevance" to a work which needs no such effort.

But this is a fundamentally satisfying work, even though it is not free of flaws, because it has a rich sweep of ideas and characters better suited to a wonderful set of novels than to a single tome about gender imagery in New Thought. One might wish (as I do) that Dr. Satter adopted a style a little less quick to jump to conclusions and a little more willing to consider the rhetorical and metaphoric value of gender terminology (rather than the more mechanical, if fascinating,angle she takes).
But nonetheless, the work simply fascinates--it's a good read, with many troubling and promising lines of analysis.

Dr. Satter's explorations all prove quite interesting, and well worth reading, although some of her conclusions are notions with which I could not disagree more. This is perhaps a mark of a good book, though--you can dissent from the author's point of view, and yet still like the work.

I encourage anyone who wishes to understand the turn of the 20th Century to read this work, which offers ideas which will be both controversial, sometimes perhaps even unacceptable, but always fascinating. Well done. I wish that every dissertation read so well.