Quotes from Nancy Rubin Stuart

Illness was thus considered not so much a condition of the human body as a reflection of a doubting or ailing spirit.

Penwoman to Posterity.

Spiritualism, born out of the same discontent with social restrictions and punitive theologies as the suffrage movement, ended up even sharing the same table. The subsequent meeting, at the Seneca Falls Universalist Wesleyan Church on July 19-20 would ignite the woman's suffrage movement, setting the stage for a seventy-two year battle that resulted in the 1920 passage of the Twenty-First Amendment.

For the next quarters of a century, spiritualism, with its benevolent view of the soul and advocacy of social reform, was a serious concern for many suffragists.

Strange surroundings make youngsters cling to habits that represent earlier securities.

Like the threads of finely woven linen, the warp and woof of friendship uniting the Warrens and Adams through successive generations was once again seamlessly bound.

She had difficulty accepting adultery despite its prevalence among high-born men of the era.

The aborigines were a source of wonder and amusement to be alternately fed, clothed, teased, educated, and petted.

The Moslem people had brought an extraordinarily rich mixture of knowledge, beauty, and bloodshed to the Iberian peninsula; in the process Spain had been permanently transformed.

While trances had long been associated with biblical figures and medieval saints, American audiences of this era had become familiar with a new type of dream state, the mesmeric or hypnotic trance first noted by the eighteenth century Austrian doctor Friedrich Anton Mesmer.

Determination, the benign cousin of defiance, drove Lucy to continue enlarging her family to compensate for her lost children.

The accused were considered guilty unless proven innocent.

Slippery as was Knox's land grab of the entire Waldo Patent, nepotism and patronage were common in those days.

Critics would tar feminism and spiritualism with the same brush, branding both movements as absurd flights of fancy an worse, contributors to the erosion of home and hearth.

Punishments were severe, their harshness underscored by the fact that they were written in blood. At the very least, petty thieves were beaten with whips. Those convicted of stealing property...routinely lost an army or a leg. the most serious offenders were tied to a post, where, as it was stipulated, 'his body shall be taken as a target,' with arrows.

Today Lucy would probably be considered a victim of an obsessive-compulsive behavior disorder, a psychological means of reducing anxieties through the numbing repetition of an activity.

The great suburban mansions and modest tract homes are often silent all day, mausoleums to a dream, the streets hushed until the schoolchildren return home.

All disease, she {Mary Baker Eddy}, asserted in her 1876 first edition of 'Science and Health,' the bible of her new faith, was a fiction of the soul. Neither disease nor matter existed. Both were creations of the soul which symbolized the universal mind, of Jesus Christ, at work.

To some "housewife" has become a dirty word.

The former Philadelphia belle's evolution from the fragile, compliant bride fo the American traitor to a restrained wife was remarkable enough, but what followed was even more surprising: a revelation of strengths Peggy long held in reserve. Her transition was born of necessity.

As was done at the time of Maggie's death, scientists and individuals today are still pondering the possibility, if not the certainty, of the eternal life of the human soul. like death itself, this remains one of our greatest mysteries.

The former Philadelphia belle's evolution from the fragile, compliant bride of the American traitor to a restrained wife was remarkable enough, but what followed was even more surprising: a revelation of strengths Peggy long held in reserve. Her transition was born of necessity.

Yet the tranquil image of suburbias of the past remains, and continues to influence us, as do traditional concepts of femininity....

To most Americans, Peggy remains an enigmatic and nearly forgotten figure. Early historians depicted the former Philadelphia belle as a Loyalist whose fondness for British officer John Andre led her to corrupt Arnold's political views. By the early twentieth century, members of her family attempted to correct that view.