How Spiritualism Sparked American Feminism
Séances are as common in horror as the unwitting purchase of a haunted house. Fans and auteurs alike enjoy the frisson of a spirit speaking through a medium to nervous and skeptical séance attendees. Those familiar with séances might recall they were a common practice in Victorian times as part of the Spiritualist movement. But many might not be aware of the profound impact that Spiritualism has had on women’s rights over the last 200 years.
Spiritualism and Its Roots
Still practiced today, Spiritualism is a religion that teaches the living can communicate with spirits of the dead through a person known as a medium. The Spiritualist movement started in March of 1848 in Hydesville, New York. At that time, fifteen-year-old Maggie Fox and her twelve-year-old sister Kate claimed the dead “spoke” to them through knocking sounds in the house. After a number of sensational demonstrations, the girls became local celebrities.1
Throughout the 1850s, the sisters astounded New York City audiences with their feats of spirit communications, igniting a séance craze. But it was the American Civil War that really launched the movement. From 1861 to 1865, around 620,000 people died in the conflict. Spiritualism found fertile ground in the grief of the nation’s bereaved with the promise that they could talk to those lost loved ones.
Victorian Women Find a Voice
Because Victorian women were considered more naturally sensitive and receptive to all things spiritual than men, they were considered to be the most effective mediums. Today’s stereotypes about Victorian women’s lives were true and then some. They were consigned to wearing ridiculously restrictive clothing. They were expected to be monogamous while their husbands had complete sexual freedom. And they weren’t allowed to speak in public.
Female mediums, however, were allowed to speak wherever and whenever they wished. And because they were channeling “the dead,” they could say whatever they wanted to say. In his paper, “When Women Channeled the Dead to be Heard,” Dr. Grant Shreve states: “By allowing ‘the dead’ to speak through them, women were able to slip the yoke of Victorian mores and speak their minds in ways that they were never allowed to before.”2
New-Found Female Independence
Writer and historian Emily Midorikawa notes in her book Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice that female mediums could support themselves and have social status without marriage.3 This led to a new class of single, independent women with both social status and financial means.
Victoria Woodhull was one of the most successful and public examples of this new independence. After making a fortune as a medium, she took on Wall Street, forming a brokerage firm with the support of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had originally sought her services as a medium. (Some could argue that the fruitful financial advice she gave to him in séances came from her own financial savvy, not the spirits.) As her wealth and influence grew, so did her ambition. In 1872, she became the first female candidate for the US presidency and took Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
But as Woodhull began to speak her own mind rather than using the voice of “the dead,” she immediately encountered obstacles to her ideas. For example, when Woodhull was in a trance, she extolled the virtues of “free love” in the voice of an ancient Greek orator named Demosthenes4. Her statements under trances on the matter rarely provoked notice. But later, when her financial growth allowed her to own and operate a newspaper, she started publishing these ideas in her own voice:
“I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”
Needless to say, this statement and her exposé of the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher as an adulterer, tanked her presidential campaign. She was arrested for sending “obscenity” through the mail and spent election day in jail. 5
Radical Spirits
In mediumship, women became religious leaders for the first time in American history. Using their gifts of oration and emboldened by their political influence, women began to transform the world. Dr. Ann Braude is the Director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. In her book Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America6, she describes how spiritualism intersected with a number of radical political movements, such as abolitionists and women’s suffrage. These were important progressive movements that furthered women’s rights.
Let’s look at a few female activists who were also Spiritualists.
Amy Kirby Post
Born in 1802, Post was a major abolitionist and equal rights activist who started as a Quaker but later became a deeply devout Spiritualist. She and her husband Isaac were two of the original five people to investigate the “Rochester Rappings” at the home of the Fox Sisters in 1848.7 Even before that, Post’s home was the Rochester station on the Underground Railroad.
Post worked alongside Sojourner Truth in support of universal suffrage for both African Americans and women. She was also the mother of “lifestyle politics,” an activist who saw social change was possible when activists embraced a spectrum of issues rather than just one.
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was already a prominent lecturer on abolitionism and suffragism before she became one of Spiritualism’s best-known practitioners. In 1851, she first delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio. In that speech, she argued passionately for racial and gender equal rights. During that time, she lived in a Spiritualist community for over a decade in the Village of Harmonia of Battle Creek, a place that nurtured equality between men and women. (Not to mention “free love.”) 8
Truth devoted her life to efforts that ensconced desegregation and civil rights. In the 1860s, nearly a century before Rosa Parks would sit in the front of the bus, Truth boarded a streetcar against the will of the conductor who violently attempted to block her. She had him arrested and won the ensuing legal case.9
Harriet “Hattie” E. Wilson
Born a free person of color in 1825, Harriet Wilson went on in 1859 to write and publish the first novel by an African American woman in the United States10. Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was lost until 1982 when it was discovered by the Yale professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as he was browsing a Manhattan used bookstore.11 Dr. Gates believes the novel was never embraced because it described racism in the North. It has since received international acclaim.
After writing her book, Wilson later became involved with the Spiritualist movement. As a spiritualist and trance reader, Wilson made a name for herself as a public speaker and medium. She traveled throughout New England, often speaking before large gatherings.
Laura de Force Gordon
In 1860, eighteen-year-old de Force Gordon began speaking in the Spiritualist movement, traveling the East Coast to promote women’s rights. In 1868, she gave the first speech in San Francisco about suffrage. It launched the suffrage movement in that city and set the stage for its progressivism12. She eventually ushered the passage of laws allowing women to become lawyers. In 1885, de Force Gordon became the second woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar, and the first woman lawyer to address a jury.13
The Confession
In 1888, Kate and Maggie Fox confessed that their knocking sounds had been a hoax. They demonstrated to thousands of people how they made the sounds by clicking the bones in their toe joints. The two became anti-spiritualism activists, creating a rift between Spiritualism and feminist organizations. Many feminists no longer wanted to be associated with Spiritualism as they felt it delegitimized their efforts and aims.
Kate and Maggie spent the last years of their life gripped in the disease of alcoholism, trying to regain a sense of self-worth. But what they failed to realize is that their deceptions had inadvertently opened a door that no one can ever close. Women today openly speak their minds and divulge the needs of their hearts and bodies. We vote, protest, and write whatever we wish. We lead not just religious movements but also entire countries.
We still have a way to go, but we are now free spirits, indeed.
1. Little, Becky, “How a Hoax by Two Sisters Helped Spark the Spiritualism Craze,” October 12, 2022, History.com, https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sisters
2. Shreve, Grant, “When Women Channeled the Dead to be Heard,” February 2, 2018, JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/when-women-channeled-the-dead-to-be-heard/
3. Midorikawa, Emily, Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, May 11, 2021, Counterpoint Press.
4. Melton, J. Gordon, “Victoria Woodhull,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victoria-Woodhull
5. Richman, Joe and Freemark, Samara, “150 years ago, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president,” November 7, 2022, NPR’s All Things Considered, https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1134895387/150-years-ago-victoria-woodhull-became-the-first-woman-to-run-for-president
6. Braude, Anne, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Second Edition, November 1, 2001, Indiana University Press.
7. Anonymous, “About Amy and Isaac Post,” The Post Family Papers Project, 2012, University of Rochester Libraries, https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/exhibits/show/post-family-papers/about-the-post-project
8. Insko, Jeffrey, “Sojourner Truth, Harmonia Cemetery,” New Territory Magazine, undated, https://newterritorymag.com/literary-landscapes/sojourner-truth-battle-creek-michigan/
9. Michals, Debra, “Sojourner Truth,” National Women’s History Museum, 2015, https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sojourner-truth
10. Anonymous, “Harriet E. Wilson Biography,” The Harriet Wilson Project, undated, http://www.harrietwilsonproject.net/harriet-wilson-.html
11. Bennetts, Leslie, “An 1859 Black Literary Landmark Is Uncovered,” The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/08/books/an-1859-black-literary-landmark-is-uncovered.html
12. Elliott, LisaRuth, “Suffrage and Spiritualism,” 2011, Found SF: the San Francisco Digital Archive, https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Suffrage_and_Spiritualism
13. Anonymous, “Overlooked No More: Laura de Force Gordon, Suffragist, Journalist and Lawyer,” Jan. 9, 2019, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/obituaries/laura-de-force-gordon-overlooked.html
