Of Ether and Colloidal Gold - Esoterica - Michigan State University

The truth is that in England and the United States, the
areas I deal with in this article, the position of upper and middle
class women improved significantly in the nineteenth century,
and esoteric currents of thought played an important role in
this improvement. The Married Women’s Property Acts passed
in England in 1870 and 1882 marked a significant step in the
direction of women’s financial independence and the recognition of
a wife as separate from her husband. Birth control was spreading
and with it the ability of women to have far greater control over
their bodies and lives than ever before. 4 The birth rate in the United
States declined from 7.04 at the beginning of the century to 3.56
at the end. 5 For the first time women gained access to higher
education and were admitted to medical school. 6 William Acton’s
contention that women neither experienced nor desired sexual
pleasure in marriage 7 was repudiated by the female physician
Elizabeth Blackwell in her book, The Human Sexual Element in
Sex (1884), while another female physician, Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson, rejected Henry Maudsley’s claim that for purely medical
reasons females could not undertake the rigors of higher education
if they expected to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers.
In 1884, the British Parliament abolished the penalty of
imprisonment for denying conjugal rights to spouses, a response in
large part to women’s insistence that they should have control over
their own sexuality in the interest of their health and the health
of their offspring. By the 1890s, many thousands of women had
already entered the public sphere through jobs in local government,
business, and commerce. By 1914, almost three quarters of all
elementary school teachers in England and Wales were women,
and there were some 166,000 female clerical workers. 8 It was
improvements like these that were responsible for the backlash
against women and the increasingly strong reactions against female
sexuality that I will come back to in the second part of this paper.
But before we get to the backlash, we must investigate the ways in
which esotericism fostered women’s rights and freedom.
It may seem a paradox, but the privatization of religion
described by Douglas did, in fact, provide women with access to
the public sphere. In situations where religious authority is derived
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