NY Times, May 11, 2021
The Victorian Women Who Pierced Glass Ceilings by Speaking to the Dead
By Christine Leigh Heyrman
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice
By Emily Midorikawa
Illustrated. 332 pp. Counterpoint. $27.
Small groups gathered for séances, some in ornately furnished parlors,
others in humbler settings. They held hands or placed their palms on a
table, then fell silent or uttered a prayer or sang a hymn. They tried
to include equal numbers of men and women, among them, ideally, someone
scarcely out of girlhood. Young women, they believed, were most
receptive to messages from another realm, and some might even discover
that they were mediums who could decipher knocking noises or speak in
the voices of the dead or write as those spirits directed.
For many Victorians in both the United States and Britain, those parlor
gatherings were a passing diversion, but for others, efforts to commune
with the dead proved more sustained and far more serious. Spiritualism —
the belief that the living could communicate with the dead — gave
comfort to the bereaved, assurance of an afterlife to the anxious and
support for faltering Christian faith. But some among a select group of
mediums discovered in Spiritualism the chance to perform, to profit and
to emerge, in the words of Emily Midorikawa’s title, “Out of the
Shadows” and have a public voice.
Modern Spiritualism started in the Finger Lakes region of New York, for
years a crucible of evangelical revivalism, new religions and reform
movements. Early in 1848, members of the Fox family began to hear
mysterious rapping sounds in their Hydesville home, a sign, they
suspected, that a ghost was reaching out to them. When the adolescent
Fox daughters, Maggie and Kate, revealed that they could commune with
this spirit, their elder sister, Leah Fox Fish, monetized the girls’
claims, staging public performances and scheduling private readings.
Although they inspired many imitators, the Fox sisters did not number
among those mediums who subsequently developed Spiritualism as an
organized movement in both the United States and Britain. Their ranks
included Emma Hardinge Britten, who wrote its history and traveled the
public lecture circuit as a trance medium in the late 1850s, delivering
opinions about the issues of the day as dictated by the spirits. By
contrast, Victoria Woodhull had cut her ties to Spiritualist groups when
her claim to clairvoyant powers persuaded the tycoon Cornelius
Vanderbilt to back her in founding the first female brokerage firm on
Wall Street. But shortly thereafter she managed to recruit both
Spiritualist and women’s rights organizations to support her bid for the
presidency in 1872. Meanwhile in Britain, Georgina Weldon — not a medium
herself but a stage-struck Spiritualist — fought the efforts of her
husband and his squad of doctors to commit her to an asylum. She
challenged Britain’s lunacy laws with more than a decade of agitation,
which included parading sandwich-board men as pickets, scattering
leaflets from a hot-air balloon, giving theatrical performances and
offering antic testimony in court.
Midorikawa’s chosen Spiritualists are a colorful bunch, and her lively
writing makes their careers fun to follow. But why bring them together
in a book? The author ventures that these six women acquired a “voice
within a patriarchal society” and, as such, belong in our accounts of
“the journey toward female empowerment.” True, every one of those
visionaries knew how to draw a crowd. It’s true, too, that Spiritualists
as a group played a major role in spreading the message about women’s
rights throughout the 19th century and that merely by standing up and
speaking in public they were defying Victorian gender norms. Yet the
goal of advancing feminism played little role in prompting the careers
of the women described by Midorikawa.
Leah Fox Fish, a single mother deserted by her husband, needed the means
to support herself and her daughter, and once a third marriage
guaranteed her economic security, she retired. Neither she nor her
sisters lent their support to any women’s rights organization. Emma
Hardinge Britten — who from youth supported her widowed mother — turned
to mediumship when her star as an actress faded on Broadway. Women’s
rights numbered among her many lecture subjects, but Britten’s most
consistent aim was to seize on any topic that would grab the attention
of a paying audience. It’s hard to say what causes, if any, Victoria
Woodhull took to heart because ghostwriters — especially her very
corporeal second husband, Col. James Harvey Blood — wrote her speeches
and articles. She latched onto the Spiritualist movement to gather
support for her presidential campaign when business reversals and
personal scandals threatened to derail her ambitions and remove her from
the public eye. Many Spiritualist and feminist leaders condemned her
opportunism and ultimately both movements ended their connection with
her. As for Georgina Weldon, although she excelled at confounding her
male adversaries, her main goal was basking in the limelight, and she
vied for it ferociously — even with other women.
Other Spiritualists would have made a much better fit as feminists, but
Midorikawa’s ensemble do belong together in a different book — one that
explores the making of popular entertainments in the 19th century and
the origins of celebrity. Kate and Maggie, Leah and Emma, Victoria and
Georgina: Victorian Kardashians all. They were pioneers in show business
strategies, media manipulation and advertising techniques, and their
spirits still lurk among the many people intent on making a spectacle of
themselves.
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