Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920

Beryl Satter is a historian, and this University of California Press book is her scholarly study of the American New Thought movement between 1875 and 1920, focusing specifically on how its metaphysical teachings about mind and healing intersected with the era's women led movement for sexual purity reform. Its strength is that intersection: Satter reads New Thought's doctrine of mental self mastery directly against the gender politics of the period rather than treating the movement's ideas in isolation from the social reform activity many of its women adherents were also engaged in. Its limit is chronological and thematic focus, it covers this specific historical window and this specific strand of New Thought, so a claim about the movement's later twentieth century development needs a different, broader source.