A Movement Born in the Gilded Age

The doctrine took its developed, organized form in the United States between roughly 1875 and 1920, a period during which New Thought grew largely through the sustained leadership and published writing of women, at a time when few other American religious movements offered women comparable institutional authority of their own. Historians studying the period have traced a close working link between New Thought's teaching of mental self mastery, the claim that disciplined thought governs one's own personal condition, and the era's broader women led movement for sexual purity reform, since both rested on the very same underlying premise that individual will, rightly and consistently directed, could reshape circumstances usually treated as lying well beyond personal control. That documented overlap helps explain why New Thought spread so rapidly through existing networks of women's reform organizations rather than through any single centralized institution, producing over time the cluster of related but administratively separate denominations the wider movement includes today. Myrtle Fillmore, whose own recovery from chronic illness through affirmative prayer led her and her husband Charles to found Unity in Kansas City in 1889, is among the individual women whose personal healing narrative became a founding story for one of the movement's largest and most enduring denominations.