Chapter three discusses Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel The Secret Garden (1911) and her lesser-known work, The Dawn of a To-morrow (1906), as feminist, Christian Scientist responses to the rest cure. This cure, which was invented by Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell in the 1870s, involved bed rest, isolation, and force feeding. Burnett herself underwent at least three modified rest cures during her lifetime, but lasting relief of her symptoms eluded her. In The Secret Garden, child protagonist Mary Lennox stands in for charismatic leader Mary Baker Eddy, who died shortly after the serial version of The Secret Garden began its run in The American Magazine in November 1910. Mary Lennox heals her bedridden cousin Colin Craven by convincing him to abandon a regimen of enforced bed rest and social isolation. Colin’s father, Archibald Craven, is likewise healed of his depression when he sees the changes Mary has wrought in his son. By showing a young girl curing hysterical males, Burnett inverted the gender politics of the rest cure and contradicted its key principles.

Chapter five examines the work of American writer, lecturer, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. While not a children’s author per se, Gilman foregrounded motherhood and childcare in her polemical works and her fiction. She also included unexpected borrowings from New Thought in her novels and life writing. For instance, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), which appeared serially in her self-published Forerunner Magazine (1909–1916), resonates with Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875). Gilman's all-female utopia, in which parthenogenesis has replaced sexual reproduction, resembles Eddy's imagined future in which “there will be no more marrying nor giving in marriage” and women and men will increasingly resemble one another in body and mind. The Herlanders’ worship of a loving “Mother Spirit,” their reverence for maternity, and their practice of communal child-rearing likewise mirror Eddy's androgynous “Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” and her emphasis on maternal feeling. Herland thus fulfills Eddy's millennial predictions as well as Gilman's feminist ideals.