Emma Curtis Hopkins was in her mid thirties, married and living in Connecticut, when she took a course in Christian Science and impressed Mary Baker Eddy enough to be made editor of the Christian Science Journal in 1884. The appointment lasted about a year. She was reading and citing sources outside Eddy's authorised material, including work by other mental healers, and she was dismissed.
She went to Chicago, and within a few years had made it the second capital of metaphysical religion in America. Her seminary taught in intensive classes, and the roll of students is the reason her name matters: Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded Unity; Ernest Holmes, who founded Religious Science; Annie Rix Militz of the Home of Truth; and a long series of others who founded churches, magazines and training schools across the country and abroad. Almost no branch of surviving New Thought fails to pass through that classroom within two generations.
She also did something almost no religious body of the 1880s was doing: she ordained women, in numbers, and sent them out as ministers. The movement that resulted is unusual among American religions in having had female leadership from the beginning rather than as a later reform, and that is traceable directly to her.