A Movement Run by Women

Blavatsky founded it; Besant led it for twenty-six years; Katherine Tingley led the American body. Women held doctrinal and executive authority at a time when almost no other transnational religious or intellectual organisation permitted it.

Not a footnote — a structural fact with consequences. Theosophical lodges were among the very few nineteenth-century public spaces where a woman could speak on cosmology with authority and be listened to, and the suffrage, vegetarian, anti-vivisection and Indian nationalist movements all drew organisers out of them.