BOOK REVIEW : How the Spirits Moved Feminism

Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America by Anne Braude (Beacon Press $24.95, 202 pages)

Finding a vacant corner of a field Rototilled by countless scholars, Braude has discovered a crucial link between the early feminists and the spiritualists who so captured the American imagination during the middle of the last century.

Set in motion by Kate and Margaret Fox, a pair of teen-age sisters living in a small town near Rochester, N.Y., the Spiritualist movement originated with the “raps” produced by the girls in their bedroom. Within an amazingly short time, these phenomena were accepted as signals from the Great Beyond; taken as evidence that ordinary people could communicate with the dead.

Skeptics, clerics, journalists and the merely curious visited the Fox house in droves, coming away convinced that the spirits of their dear departed were answering questions through the supernatural abilities of the Fox children.

Isaac Post, a prominent Quaker abolitionist living in the district, tested the young mediums by devising an alphabet system by which the spirits could actually spell out words instead of merely answering yes or no with raps. The first trials apparently left Post underwhelmed. Asking a spirit for instructions, Post was rewarded with the sentence, “Put on as much molasses as he likes,” a considerably less enlightening message than he had hoped for. Nevertheless, Post was favorably impressed once he had rephrased his questions.

Spiritualism proved particularly attractive to Quakers, who already believed that every individual was infused with the spirit of God, and that the primary conduit for religious truth was this “Inner Light.”

By the middle of the 19th Century, the once-unified Quaker movement had begun to fragment, particularly upon the issue of slavery. On one hand, Quakers were encouraged to speak out according to their individual conscience; on the other, they were expected to defer to the authority of the Establishment. Spiritualism, though patently anti-intellectual, seemed to demonstrate that “the law of God was written in every human soul.” The fact that the Fox sisters were mere children could be taken as a further indication that God made no distinctions among His people. As Braude emphasizes, “Communication with spirits appealed to devout Quaker reformers as an expression of the doctrine of the inner light.” Soon, Quaker congregations throughout the East were deeply involved with the burgeoning Spiritualist sentiment and strongly supportive of its manifestations.

Because the majority of Spiritualist mediums were remarkably articulate women, the nascent Women’s Rights movement welcomed them to their conferences.

Spiritualists were featured at the Seneca Falls Convention, which met in 1848 to consider the “social, civil and religious rights of women” near the town where the Fox girls had first demonstrated their extraordinary talents.

“While not all feminists were spiritualists, all Spiritualists advocated women’s rights,” Braude says, citing the many ways in which the two concurrent trends overlapped.

The powerful appeal of spiritualism, in an age when infant mortality was rampant and life expectancy seldom exceeded early middle age, is easy to understand. A nation full of bereaved parents, devastated not only by the Civil War but by diseases for which there was neither prevention nor cure, was uniquely vulnerable to the seductions of a faith that presented death as another and better stage of life.

To their credit, the Spiritualists advocated many causes dear to the hearts of progressive thinkers--reform of the marriage laws, sensible dress for women, holistic health measures and universal suffrage as well as abolition of slavery. Considered in combination, these enlightened views overcame the misgivings of many doubters, drawing thousands into the Spiritualist fold.

The movement was finally undone by its own success. Emboldened by the example of the charismatic female orators who had been so enthusiastically received by the public, later generations of women were inspired to speak out on their own account, without claiming supernatural guidance. Eager to listen to a woman in a trance, audiences were unwilling to hear the same sentiments from one equally passionate, but wide awake and inspired by nothing but her own convictions.

Eventually, persistent investigators discredited the Fox sisters, casting doubts upon the scores of mediums who had succeeded them. Enfeebled by these revelations, overcome by both the forces of traditional belief and of hard science, Spiritualism lost many of its adherents, surviving now among those unable to accept death as an end, or to settle for only one brief life in the world.