Dubinsky, Karen

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 217vernacular memory over the imposition of official memory; it is the reverse inNoras conception. Moreover, this artificial dichotomy would enshrine a canonwhose existence Nora will later deny.Nora is fond of such diadic formulations. In The Era of Commemoration, hebuilds another dichotomy between two models for contemporary commemoration.This time, they can be either generation or centennials. Again, the split is between theself-evident and the creative: centennials are obvious commemorations, but genera-tion is an existential unit that gives shape and meaning to time as it is actually expe-rienced (p. 613). Their combination, merging the bland, chronological counting ofthe years and the emotion of people living out their past experiences, has reshapedcommemoration. It has subverted the old, national commemoration and its canon,replacing it with one more subject to perpetual revision. (One wonders if that canonwas imposed or constructed; if the latter, was it not also subject to revision during itsgeneration?) Somehow this explains the weakness of the national model, which hasbeen overturned by a memorial model that places importance not on the past, but onwhat we bring to it. Memory has replaced history; our recollections have subvertedthe imposed, official canon. With this canon gone, the capriciousness of popular pol-itics has replaced the old national unity of France. Thus, Nora can claim that only inmemory is France whole. Certainly, this quick overview does not do justice to thecomplete argument, but it suggests the problem. Noras dichotomies strike me as arti-ficial. He wants to claim a fundamental rupture, but his collection documents similarpatterns in Frances past. Michel Pastoureaus story of the Gallic Cock reveals howthe French rooster changed its meaning and its allegiances, from a Roman pun,through a Capetian emblem, to the Fifth Republic and the mascot of Mondial 98. Ateach stage, the symbol was generated, imposed, and contested, not according to self-evident meanings, but according to the meanings that people brought to the past. Thegeneral thrust of Realms of Memory is contradicted by its director.Alan GordonQueen’s UniversityBeryl Satter  Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity and theNew Thought Movement, 1875–1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 382.This is an intellectual history of the New Thought movement in turn-of-the-cen-tury America. The term movement is a bit of a convenience for the historian, for itis an umbrella category that links people who actually would have refused suchcompany in their own time. Beryl Satter groups the most famous of the ChristianScientists  especially Mary Baker Eddy  with those Eddy considered false lec-turers and teachers, a host of former students and others who became her rivalsand, after her death, inheritors. Yet Satters sees more similarities than differenceshere. All of her subjects believed that the mental or spiritual world was the truereality while the material world was a secondary creation of the mind. They also218 Histoire sociale / Social Historybelieved that people had god-like powers: the power to create their own worldsthrough their thought (p. 3). More importantly, the entire movement was dedicatedto hashing out one of the main cultural debates of the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries: the nature of gendered selfhood. Which qualities constituted idealmanhood and womanhood? Was the nation in need of male rationality, or femalespirituality? Were the keys to progress, civilization and race perfection maledesire, or female virtue? Who deserved cultural emancipation, the desirous, com-petitive and rational white man, or the desireless, spiritual and altruistic whitewoman (pp. 910)?The notion that thought has the power to alter circumstance lives on, of course, ina host of New Age philosophies, in the creed of groups such as Alcoholics Anony-mous, and daily on television, from Oprah to the evangelists. Yet, far from seeingthe New Thought movement as a movement of quacks, a crude religion of suc-cess, as historians have tended to view it, Satter insists that, by viewing these phi-losophies through the lens of gender and race, we can learn much about both themovement itself and American culture in general. As she explains, when the popu-larity of New Thought was at its height  and Christian Science membership alonejumped from 26 in 1879 to over 200,000 in 1926  the majority of its adherentswere not young businessmen or self-indulgent consumers, but white middle-classwomen. It was especially popular among middle-class reformers of the day, bothmale and female. Early progressives such as suffrage activists, journalists, socialpurity campaigners, and Christian socialists saw New Thought philosophies as com-patible with the world they were attempting to build, one which would bring abouta new era in the development of the race  (p. 8).On the whole, Satters goal  to rescue the New Thought movement from thecultural margins and establish its importance to several generations of socialreformers  is well met. This is an ambitious book, and, like many works of intel-lectual history, it cannot meet all of its claims. Satter occasionally tries too hard,introducing too many themes, making too many claims, and seeing too much in theworld views of a handful of novelists, social reformers, and theologians. The linksSatter sees between New Thought theology and virtually all social concerns of theera are sometimes forced and too schematic, and she has a tendency to cram far toomuch into her own categories. For example, was a wish to reform selfhood bymoderating desire really the heart of the woman movement of the nineteenthcentury?Satters main  and double-barrelled  goal is to put women back into NewThought and also to recover New Thought discourses on gender. Yet she has madean equally valuable contribution to the history of race. Satter joins a growing num-ber of historians, including Vron Ware, Antoinette Burton, and Gail Bederman, whoare intent on exploring how white women have made their claims for advancementbased on definition of racial progress they shared with white men. As Satter argues,white women did not challenge the idea that civilization was a racial trait ofwhites; rather, they argued that pure, selfless women, rather than aggressive desir-ous men were the best hope for civilization (p. 39). The chapters on The Era ofWomen and the Problem of Desire and New Thought and Early ProgressivismComptes rendus / Book Reviews 219explain this particularly well. This is a thorough and integrated analysis of the intel-lectual history of race and gender, free of defensiveness or apology.Satter ends her tale, as many historians do, with a brief nod to the present.Reflecting on the popularity of self-help and New Age culture, she suggests that,rather than condemning such ideas as narcissist and simplistic, we could interpretthe concerns of New Age and self help authors in the context of the broader culturalforces they seem to invoke. Future historians, she suggests, might find in todaysself-help authors the clues to how gendered selfhood was renegotiated in the clos-ing years of the twentieth century (pp. 253254). It might seem a bit disconcertingthat Deepak Chopra, Oprah Winfrey, or Anthony Robbins might stand as culturalrepresentatives of our day, their words and writings pored over by historians. Thisbook, however, makes a convincing case that the words of popular though long-for-gotten spiritual thinkers can offer enormous insight into the social and cultural con-cerns of past generations.Karen DubinskyQueen’s University

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

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

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)