It is also on the “Women’s, Queer, and Gender Studies” shelf. Copies can be put on hold now, and if paid on Aug 2 the 20% discount will apply. Anyone can purchase a copy by calling the store at 617-661-1515 and they will ship anywhere in the USA.

At the HBS event on August 2, 2016, just one week after Hillary Clinton was officially nominated for President, Safronoff will speak about Victoria Woodhull’s 1872 run for President, Mary Baker Eddy’s take on of woman’s right to hold the highest office of the land, and how American pundits responded two these two women making waves and making headlines in America — as well as an American marriage debate in the 1870s during the early women’s rights movement.

Safronoff will also answer questions and be available afterwards to meet people and sign books.   

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Cindy Safronoff’s historical biography has been judged one of the best Christian books of the year. Results for the 2016 Illumination Book Awards contest have been announced, and in the category of “Christian Thought” judges gave a bronze award (3rd place) to Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage. This award category is in the Enduring Light Metals section of the contest, described as for books deemed to have an enduring message. The other winners in “Christian Thought” are A More Christlike God, by Bradley Jersak (Gold), and The Divine Progression of Grace: Blazing a Trail to Fruitful Living, by Bob Santos (Silver).

Best Christian Books

With the motto “Shining a light on exemplary Christian books,” the Illumination Book Award honors the best books published in the past year with a Christian worldview and “shines a light” on them.  Winners came from 27 different states, plus Canada and New Zealand. Winning books were published by long-established publishing companies, small presses, and self-published authors.

Christian Battle Themes

Crossing Swords was not the only award winning book using a battle theme to explore Christian concepts. Robert Vera won silver for A Warrior’s Faith, a book about wounded Navy Seal Ryan Job. Living Sword Publishing won gold for a Christian fiction book by Jaye L. Night called Resistance, which has the image of a sword on its cover. Tony Jones won gold for Did God Kill Jesus? The press release announcing the 2016 Illumination Book Awards was titled “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Awards Director Jim Barnes explains, “Christian authors use their storytelling and their voices as weapons – weapons of peace.”

The Battle for the Soul of Marriage

Crossing Swords with its “Battle for the Soul of Marriage” certainly fits the 2016 “Christian Soldiers” theme and the awards director’s explanation. This historical biography explores an 1870s marriage debate when America was wrestling the question of with how giving women full civil rights would change the institution of marriage. Despite the provocative book title and its subtitle about nineteenth-century American culture war, Crossing Swords is ultimately a book about peace–finding peace about and within marriage. 

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff (This One Thing, July 4, 2015) is available on Amazon, by special order through your favorite local bookstore (through Ingram), and at a growing list of public libraries.

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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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