The Mary Baker Eddy Library, home of the ever-popular Mapparium giant globe exhibit, is adding a new historical biography by Cindy Safronoff to its collection — Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage (This One Thing, July 4, 2015).

This nonfiction drama that sets Mary Baker Eddy’s statements on marriage into historical context has a new home in the Research and Reference Section alongside well-known classics relating to Mary Baker Eddy’s life work, including:

The Story of Christian Science Wartime Activities
The Ultimate Freedom, by John H. Wyndham
Hazel Buck Ewing, by Karen Griep Heilbrun
As the Sowing, by Edwin S. Leonard
Education at the Principia, by Mary Kimball Morgan

The Research and Reference Services room is on the fourth floor of the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity in the Christian Science Publishing Society building at 200 Massachusetts Ave in Boston. Manuscripts, letters, personal papers, photographs, and sermons of Mary Baker Eddy are available there too, along with reminiscences from people who knew her personally and other primary sources available for in-depth study of the life and work of Eddy, who was a pioneer in the fields of religion, business, education, and publishing.

The new Crossing Swords biography focuses on Eddy’s views on marriage and how they fit within the historical context of the early women’s rights movement. Eddy’s life, career, and views on marriage are compared and contrasted with those of Victoria Woodhull, whose United States Presidential campaign was in the national news while Eddy was writing the first edition of her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Woodhull was best know for her political platform that included a call to abolish legal marriage — a goal of the “free-love” movement. By exploring the American civil dialogue and cultural trends in the early 1870s, Crossing Swords provides new insights into Eddy’s chapters “Marriage” and “Christian Science versus Spiritualism.”

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff is available for purchase on Amazon, or by special order from most local bookstores.

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In the year 1876, soon-to-be-famous Mary Baker Eddy “crossed swords” with Victoria Woodhull in the newspaper columns of the Lynn Transcript. At the time, Eddy lived here in this historic house in Lynn, Massachusetts.

To promote herself as a candidate for President of the United States, Woodhull had been traveling the country for several years giving lectures on a counter-culture philosophy she called “social freedom.” She had publicly declared war on marriage, and she advocated repealing all laws restricting sexuality, including legal marriage. Instead, she would have society adopt an anything-goes culture for relationships called “Free Love.”

When Woodhull came to lecture in Eddy’s hometown, Eddy and Woodhull ended up having a public exchange of hostile words that makes today’s civic dialogue seem tame. The irreconcilably conflicting viewpoints of Eddy and Woodhull, expressed so vehemently in those letters to the editor, are explored in-depth in a comparative biography by Cindy Safronoff called Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage (This One Thing, July 4, 2015). Eddy and Woodhull both publicly advocated for women’s rights, but they held polar opposite political positions on how empowering women should impact the institution of marriage.

At the time of this exchange, Eddy had finally gotten settled in to a home of her own at 8 Broad Street in Lynn, a historic village turned industrial-hub near Boston. After years of instability, moving around from one boarding house to another, she had accumulated enough money from teaching and her work as a healer to purchase the house. A year prior in 1875, she had published the first edition of her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which she completed at her small writing desk under the skylight in the attic room of this home. She very likely wrote her letter to the editor harshly condemning Victoria Woodhull’s free-love campaign here too, on the very same desk.

Eddy wrote her book to explain her successful system of healing the sick without medicine, which she called Christian Science. The book included a chapter called “Marriage” in which she explained her Puritan-influenced views on the topic. Throughout the book she emphasized how sexual conduct relates to the ability to heal the sick through prayer. Woodhull’s war against marriage was in the news and a topic of social discussions throughout the nation during the years that Eddy was writing the first edition of Science and Health. Eddy’s chapter Marriage had to have been written at least in part as a response to Woodhull’s infamous free-love campaign.  

The 8 Broad Street, Lynn, historic house, owned, managed, and recently lovingly restored by Longyear Museum of Chestnut Hill, MA, is well known to have been the place where Mary Baker Eddy completed and published her first book, launched her educational institution for her spiritual teachings, and founded the organizational structure that eventually became the Christian Science church center at the heart of Boston’s Back Bay.

This Lynn historic house is only now becoming known as the place where Eddy crossed swords with Victoria Woodhull over “free-love” in the year 1876. 

Read all about this little-known piece of Eddy’s history — the untold story of American’s nineteenth-century culture war — in the new award-winning nonfiction drama Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff.

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It is widely known that Susan B. Anthony was arrested for trying to vote in the 1872 election. Less known is that Anthony and many other women went to polling places that year following the leadership of Victoria Woodhull, who promoted an activist legal interpretation that no law prevented women from voting. Woodhull had made a similar attempt to vote the year before. But Woodhull herself was not able to join Anthony and the others for the 1872 activist stunt, because Woodhull had already been arrested and jailed for her efforts to emancipate women from marriage–promoting what she called “social freedom” but others called “free love”–through an attack on the reputation of America’s most respected Christian leader.   

Learn more about the tumult within the early woman’s rights movement over “the marriage question” in the forthcoming book Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff.  Pre-order copies on Kickstarter, now through December 4, 2014.    

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