| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 249 words from this article are provided below; about 409 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875–1915. By Catherine Tumber. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. xii, 203 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8476-9748-7. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8476-9749-5.)

American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality extends the connection between first-wave feminism and the emergence of spiritualism by discerning a movement whose white, middle-class female adherents "wed their peculiar new theology, as well as their psychotherapeutics, to a new vision of society, what I will call gnostic feminism" (p. 8). Catherine Tumber's search for the genealogies of this "radically world-denying" (p. 8) feminism unearths a number of interesting connections: to the familiar New Thought of Mary Baker Eddy and Madame Blavatsky, for example, as well as to the lesser-known figures of Myrtle Fillmore, Lilian Whiting, and Flora Parris Howard; to Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) as well as to Abby Morton Diaz, who tried to implement Bellamy's program in the troubled era of the late nineteenth century. Tumber's discussion of the Greenacre Summer School and its cultural work in nurturing a syncretic religious vision crucial to many leaders in the feminist movement is particularly interesting. In a clear and accessible voice, Tumber 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.

. . .

There are about 409 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.