There were no subways. No cars. But Mary Baker Eddy, who commuted from her home on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston's Back Bay to her college in the South End, often did what a big-city executive would do today who has to get to work in a hurry—she took a cab. It's just that her cab, like the city omnibus that she sometimes took, was horse drawn.
Take a look at the life of this remarkable woman during the stretch from 1881 to 1899, her sixtieth through her seventy-eighth years—well past an age when many men in her day would have retired—and what emerges is a dynamic portrait of a modern businesswoman on the go. Active? She worked nonstop from morning to night.
The central purpose of Mary Baker Eddy's life was making the healing message contained in Science and Health, first published in 1875, universally and permanently available. During this 18-year period, she established two businesses to achieve this: the Massachusetts Metaphysical College and The Christian Science Publishing Society (the publisher of this magazine). She started the first one, a teaching college chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in 1881. She taught there, organized its curriculum, and arranged details associated with its staffing and operation. The Publishing Society, which began in the early 1880s and went through several morphs before it came under a Deed of Trust in 1898, also received her frequent and careful attention.
