Mary Baker Eddy

July 16, 1821-December 3,1910
Mary Baker Eddy was born and raised near Concord, New Hampshire, in the U.S.  Because of restrictions on women's education in nineteenth century America, and because of many bouts of illness, she received much of her education at home, sometimes with the help her brother Albert, a student at Dartmouth College.

Though lesser known today than her contemporaries in the 19th-century women’s-rights movement, Mary Baker Eddy was as much a pioneer as Susan B. Anthony, who never met Ms. Eddy but who wrote a letter of admiration after hearing her speak.

Upon her death at age 89 in 1910, Ms. Eddy was one of the most famous women in the world, drawing both admiration and criticism. New York publisher Joseph Pulitzer attacked her and tried, unsuccessfully, to expose her as a fraud, questioning her religious practices.

Ms. Eddy, in fact, forged an amazing life for herself in an era when, women tended not to do much other than stay home and raise their families.  She married three times, lived with a fourth man and nearly married a fifth. When she died, she was worth several million dollars.

What Ms. Eddy achieved was as remarkable as what she overcame. In her day, many women were invalids as a consequence of stuffy houses, poor medical care and tight corsets that restricted breathing.

She experienced some difficult years as a young woman.  She was widowed (and pregnant) six months into her first marriage. An impoverished widow she was forced to give up her son to a foster family and was not reunited with him until he was an adult.  Hoping to regain a stable home life for herself and her son, she married again, but her second marriage eventually ended in divorce.  In poor health during much of this time, she experimented with allopathic medicine and alternative therapies, particularly with homeopathy. She was seeking an understanding of the relationship between mind and body. Simultaneously, she continued a life-long study of the Bible searching to uncover its promise of spiritual healing.

Ms. Eddy’s persistent sickliness worsened in 1866, when, at age 45, she slipped on an icy street and suffered internal  injuries.  Feeling that the end was near, she began reading New Testament stories of how Jesus healed the sick. Attempting to do likewise, Ms. Eddy not only healed herself but began to practice her principles on others.

Ms. Eddy called her practices “Christian Science” and denied that they were based on miracles or the supernatural, insisting, rather, that illness could be conquered by anyone through prayer and spirituality.

“In 1865, she first published Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures, which has been translated into 16 languages and is still in print. Two years before she died, she founded the Christian Science Monitor, an alternative to the yellow journalism of the era The newspaper’s mission, Eddy said, was “to injure no man but to bless all mankind.”

Ms. Eddy defied not only political and cultural conventions but the sexist traditions of religion.

She broke that stranglehold of patriarchy on Christianity. She spoke of God as both father and mother, and her church’s lay ministry was built on principles of sexual equality.