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 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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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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Located at 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, the landmark Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore hosts frequent events in the store with authors, many of whom have published bestsellers and won awards for their books. Safronoff has won ten book awards for Crossing Swords in categories ranging from Nonfiction Drama to U.S. History, most recently in Women’s Issues from Independent Publisher Book Awards and Next Generation Indie Book Awards, plus first in Regional Literature from New England Book Festival in addition to awards from Readers’ Favorite, USA Best Book, National Indie Excellence, and Illumination Book Awards.

Crossing Swords will be on the Women’s Studies shelf at Harvard Book Store by the second week of July through the Aug 2 event, which will include a book signing. For anyone unable to attend the event, autographed copies can be ordered through the Harvard.com website or by calling the bookstore at (617) 661-1515 and then picked up at the store or shipped anywhere in the USA.

Harvard Book Store is an independent bookstore, but is adjacent to Harvard University, which was originally founded in 1636 shortly after the arrival of the first Puritan settlers. This has special significance to Safronoff’s book, since the culture of these early settlements is described in Safronoff’s book Crossing Swords as it relates to the history of the institution of marriage in America.

Crossing Swords has additional relevance to the Boston area because both Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria Woodhull have their historical archrives in Boston — Eddy at the Mary Baker Eddy Library at the Christian Science Center, and Woodhull in Special Collections at the Central Library of the Boston Public Library.  This is what brings Cindy Safronoff to Boston — research for a Crossing Swords sequel. Consequently, readers in the Boston area have the opportunity to hear her speak, ask questions, and have her sign their books on Tuesday, Aug 2, 2016, at 7:00PM at Harvard Book Store.      

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The newly restored St. Louis Central Library

Originally founded in 1865, the St. Louis Public Library built the marble palace called the Central Library after receiving a substantial gift from Andrew Carnegie in 1901, including the magnificent historic art inspired by artists of the Italian Renaissance period.

Today the St. Louis Public Library downtown Central library, where Crossing Swords will reside, is the region’s premier library for research and general library services–a newly revitalized building, artfully blending what was state-of-the art a century ago (but is now a stately historical landmark), with the latest modern innovation. 

The perfect place for Crossing Swords, which likewise artfully revitalizes the story of two of the most dynamic female pioneers of the nineteenth century.  

Local relevance of Crossing Swords

This copy of Crossing Swords just acquired will not be in circulation for check-out. Instead, the book will be kept in pristine condition, available for reading only to visitors to the Central Library. It is being archived in the Rare Books and Special Collection department because of its relevance to St. Louis local history.   

The two leading ladies of Crossing Swords, Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria Woodhull, both have connections to St. Louis. Likewise does the author Cindy Safronoff, who has made St. Louis County her primary home for the past ten years. St. Louis County Public Library, St. Louis Public Library, as well as other St. Louis area libraries were used for most of the research for Crossing Swords.   

Woodhull’s connections to Spiritualism in St. Louis

Victoria Woodhull lived and worked as Spiritualist medium in St. Louis for several years around the time of the Civil War. There she married her second husband, Colonel James Harvey Blood, a Civil War hero who had just been elected as Auditor for the City of St. Louis, a prominent and well-paid public office. Woodhull and Blood met through their mutual interest in Spiritualism. Years later Woodhull returned to lecture in St. Louis when she became the first woman to run for US President and her husband helped run her national campaign. All of these St. Louis events are mentioned in Crossing Swords.

Séances, Ouija boards, and other Spiritualist communications with the Spirit World were very popular in the mid-nineteenth century, with strong interest by millions of Americans. Today Spiritualism is no longer such a major American religious movement, but it quietly persists. St. Louis is still an active organizational center for Spiritualism, with a Spiritualist church located on South Kingshighway Boulevard.

Eddy’s connections to Christian Science in St. Louis

Although Mary Baker Eddy never visited St. Louis, she also has significant historical connections. On the other side of Kingshighway Boulevard, on a section of North Kingshighway nicknamed “Holy Ground” due to the concentration of historic Christian churches, is one of the first branches of the Church of Christ, Scientist, Eddy founded in Boston that eventually became a world-wide organization.

This St. Louis church, founded in 1894, is still active today. A letter Eddy wrote to the St. Louis church when it was newly formed is included in one of her primary published books, Prose Works.

Today there are many Christian Science churches in the St. Louis metro area. In fact, St. Louis is a hub for Eddy’s denomination, primarily because The Principia, a private school for pre-school through college Christian Science children, attracts students and visitors from all over the world. The school was originally in St. Louis city and now is in St. Louis County with a second campus in nearby Elsah, Illinois.

Eddy vs. Woodhull: The Battle for the Soul of Marriage

There is some spiritual and religious content in Crossing Swords, highlighting the different and in some ways opposite theological beliefs of Eddy and Woodhull, but the book is cataloged as primarily being on the history of marriage in America and secondarily as a book about cultural conflict in America, as well as biographical for Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria C. Woodhull. If the book were available for check-out, it would have a call number under Dewey decimal system of 306.8109.

Eddy and Woodhull were both among the most famous women in America during the early women’s rights movement, and they took polar opposite political positions on how empowering women should impact the institution of marriage in America. This American values conflict, spiritual and political, this nineteenth-century culture war, hints at the influences of Eddy and Woodhull in creating present American culture.  

Historic Restoration

Both Eddy and Woodhull were front page news in their day, blazing trails in the mid-nineteenth century that are impressive even by today’s standards. They were far ahead of their time. Yet somehow over the course of the past century, both Eddy and Woodhull have been essentially left out of the telling of American history. Crossing Swords sets them both into historic context of the American civic dialog, and shows their place in history and their relevance to today’s culture, and even our divisive social issues. How appropriate then, for St. Louis Public Library to include their story in its extensive collection of top quality books at its newly revitalized St. Louis Central Library. 

Next time you are in downtown St. Louis, be sure to take a tour of the St. Louis Central Library. And while you are there, go up the stairs up to the Third Floor, past the magnificent stain glass windows, to the Rare Books and Special Collections room to take a look at 400-year old rare books, and a recently published literary nonfiction drama called Crossing Swords by Cindy Safronoff.

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 St. Louis Public Library. 

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Sesquicentennial of a monumental event in Lynn, MA  

At the corner of Oxford and Market streets in Lynn, Massachusetts, a monument commemorates an event that happened at that very spot 150 years ago. On the evening of February 1, 1866, Mary Baker Eddy took such a bad fall on the ice that it knocked her unconscious from internal injuries. Two days later the Lynn newspaper reported her to be in “very critical condition.” But this fall ultimately led to the rise of the remarkable career of Mary Baker Eddy, a female pioneer in religion, business, and media. 

As the plaque at the location succinctly explains it, “Prayer and faith led to her healing, her writings, and the advent of Christian Science.” Instead of the accident causing a sudden end to her life, it spurred the start of her mission to “reestablish primitive Christianity with its lost art of healing.” Eddy went on to found the Christian Science church organization in Boston that eventually included her own publishing company, newspaper, and religious educational system.

Mary Baker Eddy led the way for other women

Not only did Eddy reach great heights in her own career as a Christian minister, she paved the way for other women to go and do likewise–within her own organization and beyond. At the end of Eddy’s career in 1910 in her organization, women held the most prominent ministry role at the church services in 60% of the 11,000 congregations in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Nearly 90% of the 4,800 Christian Science Practitioners worldwide were women. Women also traveled the world as lecturers, representing her organization.

Although were already some women in the Christian ministry prior to Mary Baker Eddy, it was quite unusual throughout the nineteenth century. Today it is common for women to serve in all roles and levels of organization and ministry throughout Protestant Christianity–increasingly, throughout the world.

For all the contributions women have made to religion and spirituality in the past century and a half, honor is due to all the early pioneers. Yet, these trailblazing women have not always been recognized in the telling of our history. The plaque at Oxford and Market streets in Lynn, installed a few years ago, is a landmark commemoration of one such female trailblazer. That monumental day 150 years ago, when Mary Baker Eddy took the first step of her new career was a giant leap for womankind.

More on the place of Mary Baker Eddy in the history of women’s rights can be found in the award-winning book, Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff. Available on Amazon or by special order from your favorite local bookstore. 

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In addition to people from the University of Washington and residents from the University District neighborhood of Seattle, people came from as far away as Burien, Bellevue, Bainbridge Island, and even Bellingham to hear about Safronoff’s book. One person even came from Grass Valley, California, to attend the event.

Safronoff’s talk focused on Eddy and Woodhull as nineteenth-century examples of female public figures, as well as their disagreement over how women’s rights should impact the institution of marriage–the battle for the soul of marriage, or woman’s climb to new heights and the genesis of modern marriage issues. The readings highlighted how American pundits responded to the influence of these extraordinarily accomplished trailblazing women. Some of the better-known commentators quoted in the readings included Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

After the readings, audience members showed their interest in the topic through their many questions for the author. The Q&A portion completely filled the remainder of the hour-long “Reading Allowed” event. Then attendees kept Safronoff busy signing books for the next twenty minutes.

Nineteen copies of the book were sold during the event. The bookstore staff seemed to consider the event a success. It was an especially good turnout considering it was the middle of a three-day national holiday weekend in a town that loves its weekend getaways, and the Seahawks, the local professional football team, was in a playoff game the same day.

University Book Store is an independent bookstore founded in 1900 by University of Washington students. The prominent multi-level bookstore, where UW students continue to purchase their text books today, is located near the main campus on University Way.

University Book Store has some coincidental associations to the career legacies of Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria Woodhull, the two leading ladies of the story told in Crossing Swords.

The present-day parking lot for the bookstore was formerly the site of a building part of Eddy’s religious organization. When the University Book Store needed the parking lot, the Christian Science Organization for UW college students sold the property and built their present building two blocks to the south on University Way. 

Also, University Book Store author events too large for the second-floor event room are held at Town Hall downtown, a public auditorium originally built as a branch of Eddy’s church. The auditorium-style building design was influenced by a church architectural style developed in the mid-nineteenth century by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Victoria Woodhull’s nemesis in Crossing Swords. 

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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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Library patrons at Seattle Public Library can now check out the e-book edition of Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff (This One Thing, July 4, 2015). This literary nonfiction drama on the early women’s rights movement is in the Indie Washington anthology assembled by the new SELF-e program for public library systems in Washington state. Visitors to the Seattle Public Library website can discover Crossing Swords along with titles by other local authors in the BiblioBoard SELF-e Indie Washington section of the e-book catalog (scroll down the “Getting Started with e-Books” webpage).

This Seattle Public Library effort to connect library patrons with new independently published authors is a joint effort of BiblioLabs, a company founded by Mitchell Davis, the innovator behind Amazon’s CreateSpace, and Library Journal, a book review organization originally founded by Melvil Dewey, the innovator behind the Dewey Decimal system for library catalogs. Just launched this summer, the SELF-e program will be rolling out to more and more library systems all over the world, offering a new way for independent authors to be discovered.

Being available through the Seattle Public Library makes Crossing Swords discoverable to thousands of potential readers in the hometown of its author. This is yet one more way to build buzz, readership, and even book sales, launching this book to greater heights. 

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, and is available in e-book form for checkout through Seattle Public Library in the Indie Washington anthology.

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