The Lynn papers advertised every sort of cure. “Mrs. S. E. Barry, Medical Clairvoyant, and healer of all diseases that are curable,” nestled next to “African mineral water . . . sworn to cure . . . Neuralgia, paralysis, St. Vitus Dance.” Because of the widespread interest in spiritualism, the Banner of Light from nearby Boston was much read in Lynn, and in a single issue one might find advertisements for a magneto-botanic physician, a trance healer, an electrophrenopathist, an electric physician, and medical treatment by the Nutritive Process.⁵ One ardent Lynn spiritualist, Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham, was soon to achieve a sensational success through the advertising image she was able to create for her homemade nostrum, the mystically virtuous Vegetable Compound.

Women played an increasingly important role in the ferment of the times. The census of 1870 showed fifty thousand more women than men in Massachusetts, and ten years later this figure had increased to seventy-five thousand. Woman’s Journal was launched in Boston in January, 1870, by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and other moderate feminists as a rival to Susan B. Anthony’s more fiery periodical The Revolution. Lectures on woman suffrage, as well as on temperance, spiritualism, and evolution, filled the Lynn halls, as they filled halls throughout the country.

Science and religion shared the popular interest. As one writer on Lynn at this period points out: “Often a didactic sermon on Genesis would be printed by local papers side by side with a report of a lyceum lecture on the geological formation of the earth.”⁶ The Lynn Transcript early in 1871 reported a sermon, “Sunrise of a Scientific Christianity,” by a Congregational minister called Cook, but the phrase was derived from Mrs. Glover. Cook’s courageous though unpopular exposure of moral conditions in the Lynn factories had drawn a letter of commendation from her in the same paper three weeks earlier, in the course of which she had written, “Purity is the baptism of scientific Christianity.”⁷