American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875-1915 0216th Edition
Author(s): Catherine Tumber (Author)
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Publication Date: 1 Sept. 2002
Edition: 0216th
Language: English
Print length: 216 pages
ISBN-10: 0847697487
ISBN-13: 9780847697489
Book Description
Contrary to popular thought, New Age spirituality did not suddenly appear in American life in the 1970s and ’80s. In American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality, Catherine Tumber demonstrates that the New Age movement first flourished more than a century ago during the Gilded Age under the mantle of ‘New Thought.’ Based largely on research in popular journals, self-help manuals, newspaper accounts, and archival collections, American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality explores the contours of the New Thought movement. Through the lives of well-known figures such as Mary Baker Eddy, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Edward Bellamy as well as through more obscure, but more representative ‘New Thoughters’ such as Abby Morton Diaz, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Ursula Gestefeld, Lilian Whiting, Sarah Farmer, and Elizabeth Towne, Tumber examines the historical conditions that gave rise to New Thought. She pays close attention to the ways in which feminism became grafted, with varying degrees of success, to emergent forms of liberal culture in the late nineteenth century-progressive politics, the Social Gospel, humanist psychotherapy, bohemian subculture, and mass market journalism. American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality questions the value of the new age movement-then and now-to the pursuit of women’s rights and democratic renewal.
Editorial Reviews
Review
An important addition to the literature, engaging, and scholarly.
Catherine Tumber’s lucidly written and forcefully argued book rescues New Thought from its genteel backwater and places it at the center of a depressing story of a feminist contribution to the decline of public life. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch, historical analysis becomes cultural criticism. This is a provoking book.
Here is a book that shows, in fresh detail, how what Harold Bloom has called ‘the American religion’ has been emptying our politics and our private lives of meaning, in favor of tired fantasies of vacuous well-being. Of course this ‘new age spirituality’ will not prove unique to the United States, but Catherine Tumber helps us see why it is being pioneered here, fungus like, out of our uncontrolled capitalism. Tumber’s mentor, Christopher Lasch, would be proud. The rest of us can be warned.
In a clear and accessible voice, Tuber credits gnosticism’s radical turn away from the world not only with facilitating women’s discovery of their higher moral and spiritual selves but also with bequeathing them crucial theological resources that ironically enabled them to transform the very world they were attempting to escape.
About the Author
Catherine Tumber is a staff editor for the Boston Phoenix. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Rochester.
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