Carol Norton

Carol Norton served as an American Christian Science lecturer, teacher, and writer during the movement’s formative years. Although the name is sometimes mistaken for a woman’s, Norton was a man who studied with Mary Baker Eddy and became one of the first five members of the Christian Science Board of Lectureship. His writing joined institutional advocacy with arguments about women’s religious and civic standing. Woman’s Cause appeared through the Christian Science Publishing Society in 1895 as a thirty-two-page address connecting women’s rights with Christian thought. The Christian Science Movement followed near the end of the decade and presented the history and principles of the denomination for a general audience. Norton also contributed articles and poems to Christian Science periodicals between 1892 and 1904. His work belongs to religious debate of the late 1800s, when lecture circuits, pamphlets, and denominational journals carried new movements well beyond their local congregations. These two publications preserve both his public role and his reform-minded interests.