In Seattle there are several prominent historic landmarks that were inspired by Mary Baker Eddy, and whose history is associated with Thanksgiving. 

Originally built as Christian Science churches, these structures now serve a variety of uses. Recently I have been researching some of these buildings, who built them, why, and how. I am learning more about the branches of Mary Baker Eddy’s church, the first of which was built in Boston in 1894.  

In the histories of these building projects, certain dates that are meaningful in Christian Science history tend to come up again and again as significant milestones in the Seattle branch churches: July 4, Independence Day, a day that Mary Baker Eddy chose to first advertise her new healing system back in 1868; October 30, the day Mary Baker Eddy’s book Science and Health was published in 1875, and also the day before Reformation Day, a significant Protestant Christian holiday; and Thanksgiving, a Puritan Christian tradition now an American national holiday that is the only day a special church service is held in Mary Baker Eddy’s church.

As an example, Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, Seattle, announced its formation on July 4, 1909, held its dedication service on the Sunday before July 4, 1937, laid its building corner-stone on October 30, and first began holding services at the building during one phase of the multi-phased project the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Many other Seattle Christian Science churches either held their initial services around Thanksgiving or their dedication services. After such a focused effort by so many members over the many years, or even decades, it took to build these churches, and the astronomical costs they were able to afford, they certainly had much to be thankful for.

The church that Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, Seattle, built a century ago is now taking on new life as a venue for civics and cultural activities called Town Hall Seattle. The building is currently undergoing a multi-million-dollar restoration and remodel that will ensure it continues to stand and serve a vital purpose while other buildings around it are torn down and replaced with high-rise buildings. This is certainly a lasting tribute to Mary Baker Eddy’s legacy, and something to be grateful for this Thanksgiving weekend. 

Cindy Safronoff is the author of Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage which is available on Amazon, by special order from your favorite local bookstore, or through public libraries, including Seattle Public Library. 

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I was not expecting the show to be so impactful. I was moved, and I got the sense that the whole audience was too. There was no question of the deep respect the audience expressed in their engagement with Kilmer during the Q&A, and also the deep respect Kilmer expressed for both Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy.    

Besides being a wonderfully colorful way to portray the ever colorful Mark Twain, the creative inclusion of Mary Baker Eddy in the broad mix of topics in was especially interesting to me. I had seen a glimpse of Kilmer’s earliest historical work on “Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy,” scenes of which he did as a staged theatrical reading through a video broadcast from the Mary Baker Eddy Library. I realized watching CINEMA TWAIN how much Kilmer has blazed a new trail for creative approaches to biography of Eddy, a trail which I have followed with CROSSING SWORDS. He opened my thought to possibilities.  

But more than this, he has opened the thought of Mary Baker Eddy fans everywhere to the idea of creative biography about her life, and her relationships with other famous Americans. I say this because when I first began to circulate CROSSING SWORDS as a manuscript among Mary Baker Eddy fans (who as a group take how she is represented to the public very seriously), despite the edgy topic (marriage and sexuality) and the new territory of literary nonfiction drama, I was consistently pleasantly surprised at the positive and open-minded response I received from Eddy fans. In conversations, I could refer to Kilmer’s work, and I would be met with knowing nods. The Red Sea parted, and I could pass through untouched.      

I do hope that someday Kilmer succeeds in producing his “Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy” movie. But CINEMA TWAIN, besides being a big step in that direction, is in itself a triumph, a complete idea, a work of art. 

Cheers to you, Val! And thank you for leading the way. 

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff is available on Amazon, by special order from your favorite local bookstore, or through a growing number of public libraries, including Seattle Public Library. 

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Mary Baker Eddy claimed her book Science and Health to be “hopelessly original.” She was always careful about copyright issues in her work as an author, and it took her many decades of effort before her ideas became popular and her book a bestseller. So why has there been any questioning at all during the past century and a half over whether Eddy came up with the ideas she promoted throughout her career? It’s a long story. So long, in fact, that author Keith McNeil has devoted 1,500 pages to the telling, in meticulous detail, of this history of claims and counterclaims in his monumental work A Story Untold: A History of the Quimby-Eddy Debate. And this is only part 1! There’s much more to this story remaining to be told in a future part 2, according to McNeil.

At issue is the extent to which Eddy was influenced by her early mentor Phineas P. Quimby, and the extent to which Eddy influenced Quimby. They both were well known for their non-medical healing work during their own lifetimes, and they both continue to be well known today. But the reputation, credibility, and historical significance of each is tied to some degree to the questions over how they each did or did not influence the other. The debate has been going on for more than a century. As McNeil points out in his Introduction, in the past 25 years alone, about 30 books have been published which have included some discussion on this topic. 

McNeil has spent more than 10 years researching this issue with laser-like focus in an attempt to finally answer these questions. A year ago, 150 years after the death of Quimby, he released his extensive research on the internet. Just recently he has released an updated Second Edition of this “part 1.”  

McNeil’s A Story Untold can be read on his PPQuimby-MBEddyDebate.com website, or downloaded as PDF at no cost. Eventually McNeil plans to publish the 1,500-page book (or an abridged version) in a paper form. Perhaps, as McNeil’s work becomes known, studied, and considered by those with interest in Quimby or Eddy or both, this century-and-a-half Quimby-Eddy debate will finally be put to rest.

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Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria Woodhull discussion at Daystar Retirement Village

Today Cindy Safronoff held a book talk for Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage at Daystar Retirement Village in West Seattle. It was an intimate audience of about 9 people — a mix of residents, staff, and visitors — in the homey atmosphere of a meeting room with the feel of a living room.  

With Election Day looming large this coming Tuesday, Safronoff’s began her introduction by holding up her very own mail-in ballot.  She explained that when state legislatures first started giving women the right to vote in the 1870s it trigger an American marriage debate. What would happen to the institution of marriage if women were given full civil rights (including the right to vote)? Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria Woodhull had very different views on this question. Woodhull wanted to abolish legal marriage, and Eddy believed giving women full civil rights would improve legal marriage.

Safronoff selected readings featuring Victoria Woodhull’s November 20, 1871 launch of her Presidential campaign lecture tour at Steinway Hall in New York City when, going off-script, she spontaneously made her most famous statement:

Yes, I am a free lover! I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love everyday I please! And with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have further the right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.

Safronoff read a section that showed how Mary Baker Eddy focused on women’s rights to serve in the holy profession of the Christian ministry — in short, the right to the job title “Reverend.” Eddy completely disagreed with Woodhull’s views and figuratively crossed swords with her in the civic dialog. But even so, around the time of Woodhull’s second Presidential run for the 1892 election, Eddy made one of her most famous statements:  

In natural law and in religion the right of woman to fill the highest measure of enlightened understanding and the highest places in government, is inalienable, and these rights are ably vindicated by the noblest of both sexes. This is woman’s hour, with all its sweet amenities and its moral and religious reforms.

Both Victoria Woodhull and Mary Baker Eddy were far in advance of their day. As to whether woman’s hour is come for the United States Presidency, we will find out this coming Tuesday.

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff is available on Amazon, by special order from your favorite local bookstore, or through a growing number of public libraries, including Seattle Public Library. 

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Admittedly taking artistic liberties with historical facts and characters, the three main male characters in the story, although initially fascinated with Woodhull and sexually attracted to her, are determined to destroy her career, with the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher chief among them. In this story the men succeed in 1872 in that Woodhull found herself in jail on election day, but Woodhull’s dream of “a world where all are free” would eventually win out through today’s women.  

The live opera performance and the live-stream broadcast begin at 8:00PM Eastern Time.  

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Daystar Retirement Village in West Seattle will host author Cindy Safronoff on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, 2:30PM as part of a history and civics-related event series leading up to the election. Safronoff will discuss her award-winning historical biography CROSSING SWORDS: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage recently featured in the Boston Globe. Daystar Seattle residents, guests, and visitors are all welcome to attend the event in the Activities Room.  Copies of the book will be available at the event.

Daystar Retirement Village is located at 2615 SW Barton Street, just across the street from Westwood Village shopping center in West Seattle. To attend the event, please RSVP to Daystar at 206-937-6122.

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff is available on Amazon, by special order from your favorite local bookstore, or through a growing number of public libraries, including Seattle Public Library. 

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Harvard Book Store is offering it at 20% this week. They take phone orders (617-661-1515) and will ship anywhere in the USA. 

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The Tuesday August 2, 2016, in-store event, which included reading, discussion, and book signing, was part of Harvard Book Store’s well-known author events at the landmark independent book store in Cambridge, just across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard University campus.

Harvard Book Store event staff introduced Cindy Safronoff to the audience as the author of Climbing Mount Rainier with the Chicks and as having a professional certificate in Genealogy & Family History from the University of Washington. Crossing Swords was introduced as an award-winning book, having won first place in Regional Literature from New England Book Festival and in Religious Nonfiction from Next Generation Indie Book Awards, among other awards.

Safronoff selected readings that showed a variety of pundits responding to Eddy’s and Woodhull’s career activities, making waves and making headlines in nineteenth-century America. Safronoff explained that these sections were added to the book after early manuscript readers found it hard to believe that Eddy and/or Woodhull were among America’s most famous and influential women. The readings included commendation and criticism about Eddy’s religious career by humorist Mark Twain, women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony, and journalist Author Brisbane, and attack’s on Woodhull’s political career by author Harriet Beecher Stowe, political cartoonist Thomas Nast, and others.

In addition to the 50 or more people packed into the event room seating area at the store, staff throughout the store and shoppers browsing the book aisles could see and hear Safronoff’s  presentation through the in-store video broadcast system.

Harvard Book Store offered paperback copies of Crossing Swords at a special 20% discount for the event. More than 30 copies of the book sold at the Aug. 2 event. In addition, more copies sold in the days leading up to the event in the store or by phone order.

After the book talk, Safronoff met with people individually and signed copies of books. Later Harvard Book Store asked Safronoff to sign copies of books for people who were unable to attend the event but ordered book by phone to be picked up in the store or shipped. 

The several remaining copies purchased by the store for the event will be sold in the store as autographed copies. So run, don’t walk to Harvard Book Store to pick up one of the last autographed copies of Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff.

Thank you Harvard Book Store for a wonderful event!

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The Boston Globe coincidentally was founded in 1872, the year of Victoria Woodhull’s famous run for US President and the year of her famous “free love” campaign. It is also the year Mary Baker Eddy began writing her most famous book Science and Health, including a chapter called “Marriage,” which included a response to the ideas about sexuality that Woodhull advocated.

The focus of the article is the book’s tag line, “The untold story of America’s nineteenth-century culture war,” as a description for the marriage debate within the early women’s rights movement, which Cindy Safronoff discovered and is bringing forward with the book Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage. This historical biography about this history of the institution of marriage in America has won 10 book awards in 7 contests, in categories ranging from women’s issues, to US history, to nonfiction drama.

The Boston Globe feature is also excellent timing, as Safronoff will be doing an author event at Harvard Book Store on Tuesday August 2 at 7PM. This extra exposure should help draw more people from the Boston area to the event.  

Thank you Kate Tuttle, and thank you Boston Globe!

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