"The time for thinkers has come...."

In 19th-century United States, a woman was nearly always defined by her role as wife and mother. Her thoughts beyond the doors of domestic duties and child rearing were largely ignored or discounted. Few women dared to open those doors and to assert themselves as thinkers, authors, and leaders.

Certain interpretations of the Bible justified this limited role for women. So, it made sense that a new light on the Scriptures would open new views of womanhood and of women as thinkers. Women longed to prove that their claim to equality was God-ordained. To do this, they had to reckon with the second chapter of Genesis, where Eve originated from Adam and then lived solely to keep him company and bear children.

While many wrangled with Adam and Eve, Mary Baker Eddy and Elizabeth Cady Stanton shifted focus from the second chapter of Genesis to the first, where God "....created man in his own image....male and female...." In 1866, Mary Baker Eddy began writing explanations of Genesis that affirmed the equal worth of male and female: "Let them have dominion." Commentary on Genesis constitutes half of her Key to the Scriptures. Thirty years later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would echo many of these ideas in The Woman's Bible.

The events at Seneca Falls pried open the door of public thought to important ideas from the hearts and minds of American women. Many of these ideas related to justice and equality. But others began to challenge conventional thinking in theology, medicine, and science.

Mary Baker Eddy was a major contributor to this new source of ideas. She and her sister reformers, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, helped to establish for woman a new role and vocation: that of thinker.

Eddy's ideas were sought and published in many of the periodicals of her time. They are published and in active circulation today in books, magazines, a daily newspaper, and even in dictionary definitions. Her writings continue to open the doors of thought on a variety of subjects.