Theosophy and the women's movement (1875–1930)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York in September 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge. Blavatsky was born in the Russian Empire in 1831 to the aristocracy; she left her husband a few months into her marriage in 1849 and spent the next twenty-five years travelling, principally in Egypt, India, and — on her own account — Tibet. Her Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) established Theosophy as the leading Western esoteric current of the late nineteenth century.

Blavatsky's own position on gender was distinctive. She dressed and spoke in ways her contemporaries described as masculine, smoked heavily, and rejected the deferential feminine social register expected of Russian noblewomen of her class. Her writings advanced the concept of the primordial androgyne — the original human before the sexual division — as spiritually superior to either male or female alone, and argued that the future evolution of the human spiritual condition would return to that androgynous state.

Annie Besant succeeded Olcott as president of the Theosophical Society in 1907 and led it until her death in 1933. Her career before Theosophy was extensive. She was Charles Bradlaugh's co-editor at the freethought National Reformer, was tried alongside him in 1877 for reprinting Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy (a contraceptive-instruction pamphlet), lost custody of her daughter as a result, joined the Fabian Society in 1885, organised the 1888 London matchgirls' strike, and served as a Fabian delegate to the London School Board. Her move to Theosophy in 1889 did not end this work. In India — where she moved permanently in 1893 — she added Indian independence to her portfolio, founding the Home Rule League in 1916 and, the following year, being elected the first woman president of the Indian National Congress.

The Theosophical Society's international leadership was, throughout Besant's presidency, disproportionately female. Katherine Tingley led the American Theosophical branch from Point Loma; Alice Bailey, initially a Besant protégée, founded the Arcane School in 1923 and produced the twenty-four-volume Bailey corpus that shaped much of the mid-twentieth-century occult publishing scene. The direct organisational continuity from the Theosophical Society through the twentieth-century New Age movement and modern women's spirituality is documented in Catherine Wessinger's Annie Besant and Progressive Messianism (Edwin Mellen Press, 1988) and in Bruce Campbell's Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (University of California Press, 1980).