One Simple Idea by Mitch Horowitz Page A

The main sanctuary in Boston was termed the Mother Church. Eddy spoke of a “Father-Mother God.” The cover of each issue of Eddy’s
Christian Science Sentinel
featured two classically robed female figures bearing lamps and gazing at one another from the margins of the page. Beneath each figure were two lines by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
    A lady with a lamp shall stand
    In the great history of the land
,
    A noble type of good
,
    Heroic womanhood
.
    Nor was Eddy indifferent to the social dimensions of her work. “Civil law,” she wrote in
Science and Health
, “establishes very unfair differences between the rights of the two sexes” but “Christian Science furnishes no precedent for such injustice.”
    “Eddy’s very life,” wrote religion scholar Gage William Chapel, “stood as an example of the emancipated woman.” Yet, for all of the church’s feminine imagery, it would be a mistake to conclude that Eddy’s congregation directly espoused an emancipatory or suffragist outlook. Eddy viewed social equality as a just value but not as a parallel cause or campaign. “Christian Science promoted the exclusive authority of one woman,” noted historian Ann Braude, “rather than promoting women’s leadership as a principle.”
    Hopkins, however, was more explicit in devising her movement as an emancipatory vehicle. Still relying upon Eddy’s vernacular, Hopkins in 1888 founded her Chicago-based Christian Science Theological Seminary. When Hopkins’s first class of seminarians graduated on January 10, 1889, the class comprised twenty-two students—of whom twenty were women. To some early feminists, it was a signature moment.
    Louisa Southworth, a literary collaborator to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke at the graduation ceremony on Chicago’s South Side. Southworth proclaimed the day “the Ceremony of the New Era, the ordaining of women by a woman, and the sending forth to do both moral and physical healing by the power of the Spirit.”
    The graduation ceremony’s main speaker was Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, a suffragist and the women’s editor of the
Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean
. Harbert declared it previously unimaginable to stand before a class of female seminarians. Before that day, Harbert said, “it seemed impossible that our desire to preach (or secure for women the recognized right to tell the unhappy and ignorant of the wonderful love of the Creator)could ever be fulfilled”—but now “woman goes forth to proclaim the radiant realities of the Good.”
    The most stirring oratory belonged to Hopkins—a woman who little more than three years earlier was without home, family, or resources. Hopkins described the students assembled before her in terms she might have once used for herself:
    Their hearts being moved with compassion, have strengthened their judgment till they cry out with one voice against the old dispensation and with one voice declare for a new and a true, where the poor may be taught and befriended, women walk fearless and glad, and childhood be safe and free.
    The same month, Hopkins wrote in her magazine
Christian Science
(again, taking her title from Eddy) that a new era of spirit was dawning—a time when “woman’s hour has come,” and all would “see how woman, the silent sufferer and meek yoke-bearer of the world is stepping quite out of her old character or role, and with a startling rebound from her long passivity is hurling herself against the age with such force and bold decision as to make even her friends stand aghast!”
    Hopkins allied her movement with political causes. The previous fall she placed her student association in coalition with the Women’s Federal Labor Union to campaign for improved labor conditions for Chicago’s maids and working girls. Several of Hopkins’s female students—who had a strong knowledge of the Bible and a passion for social equity—became editorial collaborators to Elizabeth Cady Stanton on
The Women’s Bible
, the feminist