The rights and equality of women have received a powerful impetus in the past hundred years. Society has moved a long way from the time when women nearly everywhere lacked even the right to vote, though it is still far from eradicating the tendency to subordinate and abuse women.
With a blend of utter seriousness and a characteristic touch of wry humor, Mrs. Eddy once observed: "The conclusion cannot now be pushed, that women have no rights that man is bound to respect. This is woman's hour, in all the good tendencies, charities, and reforms of to-day. It is difficult to say which may be most mischievous to the human heart, the praise or the dispraise of men." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 245.
As an uncompromising Christian, she was following Christ Jesus as her Saviour and Exemplar wherever he led. Through the discovery of Christian Science she had learned of the pure Science of Christianity that Jesus lived—the laws of God's total goodness which supersede the suppositional laws of material life. She wrote: "To one 'born of the flesh,' however, divine Science must be a discovery. Woman must give it birth. It must be begotten of spirituality, since none but the pure in heart can see God,—the Principle of all things pure; and none but the 'poor in spirit' could first state this Principle, could know yet more of the nothingness of matter and the allness of Spirit, could utilize Truth, and absolutely reduce the demonstration of being, in Science, to the apprehension of the age." Retrospection and Introspection, p. 26.
