This study shows that New Age spirituality first flourished in America more than a century ago during the Gilded Age, under the mantle of "New Thought". Catherine Tumber demonstrates that "gnostic feminism" has surfaced during periods of triumphant corporate consolidation.

Based largely on research in popular journals, self-help manuals, newspaper accounts, and archival collections, American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality demonstrates that the New Age movement first flourished more than a century ago during the Gilded Age under the mantle of 'New Thought'. Tumber pays close attention to the ways in which feminism became grafted, with varying degrees of success, to emergent forms of liberal culture in the late nineteenth century, and questions the value of the new age movement - then and now - to the pursuit of women's rights and democratic renewal. Visit our website for sample chapters!

The "moral revolution" of metaphysics
new thought and the "cosmic sphere" of women
the metaphysics of nationalism
cultural radicalism in the New Age
"everyday physics" - gnostic theology and the "Bohemian".