Denting Their Dainty Domes: Women and Metaphysical Religions in California, 1900-1925

“Denting Their Dainty Domes” examines California women in metaphysical religions, their empowerment, and repercussions they faced from their communities and from the media. Focusing on San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, this thesis argues that California women who joined empowering metaphysical religions often faced criticism, particularly from the media, as they challenged acceptable gender roles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thesis’s scope covers metaphysical religions in California at their peak during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Three metaphysical religions—Theosophy, Christian Science, and New Thought—drew their membership mainly from middle-class women, as they offered opportunities for participation and leadership not offered in mainstream religions. But by utilizing these religious movements as a means to circumvent the control of male-dominated mainstream religions, these women were exposed to scrutiny and censure in both their public and personal lives. Newspapers criticized and often ridiculed them for their beliefs, and sometimes their husbands divorced them, citing their beliefs as the cause of the separation, a fact that some California newspapers were eager to expose. This was a dual critique of metaphysical women, as their husbands rejected them as acceptable wives, and the newspapers compounded the social stigma of divorce by highlighting their marital shame for everyone to read. They did not simply escape from male-dominated religion, but continually faced challenges to the empowerment they discovered in metaphysical religions. Even while facing private and public criticism for their beliefs and practices, these women persisted in cultivating an empowering spirituality and helped to embed American metaphysical religions into the larger pattern of American religious life.