Personally, I am astonished by what I didn't learn in the good old days. Why, for example, didn't anyone ever tell me this stuff about spiritualism? I didn't know that the women's movement and the spiritualist movement both began in 1848. I didn't even know there was a spiritualist movement. I didn't know the enticing syllogism that all spiritualists were feminists but not all feminists were spiritualists. I didn't know that there were women who went onstage in mid-nineteenth century America and, supposedly in trances, spoke about major issues of the day including health care, women's rights, abolition, free love, and principles of individualism including self-sovereignty (woman's right to self ownership).

I didn't know that women--mostly young and attractive--passive, unconscious, and on stage shared wisdom and knowledge as mediums before male and female audiences. I didn't know that before the American Civil War (or as my old Virginian history professor used to call it-The War of Northern Aggression) the only way women could speak in public was if they were unconscious!

A man's power over woman extended to property, home, children, even to ownership of a woman's body itself. Marriage rape was common in the nineteenth century and of course, married women lacked the legal right to control their own bodies. I didn't really think hard about these issues, though, and I guess I didn't care. After all, if it's not in the history book text or in those clever women and minority "sidebars", it isn't important, right?

Then I read Anne Braude's Radical Spirits.

In the early nineteenth century, women did not speak in public. But through spiritualism, the podium became available for these entranced young ladies when not even the pulpit was an option. I didn't realize that early nineteenth century men never saw women in public. Trance speakers provided men with rare opportunities to look unrestrained at unknown women. And how they did look! Braude tells us that in a trance, independent women in the guises of trance speakers enthralled male audiences:

The public display of a colorfully dressed unconscious woman provided potent material for the imaginations of the male audience. Again unlike reform women, the public appearance of mediums did not conflict with the passivity believed to characterize female sexuality because they were understood to be unconscious. Abolitionist women were dismissed by many as traitors to their sex because they dared to stand up in public to espouse radical political views. Derisive observers commented on Susan B. Anthony's broad shoulders and suggested that the practice of women speaking in public would give rise to a third sex. But neither men nor women questioned the feminity [sic]of the beautiful Cora Hatch, ringlets bobbing about her youthful face as she expounded visions of angels. (108)

Feminists of the spiritualist movement critiqued marriage and opposed forced maternity leading to reforms in sex education. I learned that the concept of "free love" existed before Woodstock. I also learned that nineteenth century spiritualist free love (think: "freedom and love") didn't necessarily reject marriage. Free love just raised relationships, whether in or out of marriage, to the level of mutual respect and attraction. Free love opposed marriage laws that discriminated against women. Braude tells us free love is defined as the belief that the "morality of sexual intercourse depends on freely experienced compelling mutual desire, love, not on whether the parties were married actually applying strict tests of morality to all sexual relations, within or without the marriage" (128). Vivian Grey advocated that " sexual slavery in marriage destroyed the health of American women because submitting to sex without love was physically debilitating" (128). I learned that the spiritualist feminists advocated liberal divorce laws to end loveless marriages. That the spiritualist movement formed a "sisterhood of reforms" that included abolition of slavery--sadly, both spiritualists and abolitionists ignore the double disabilities of black women (78) opposition to the appropriation of Indian lands, opposition to capital punishment, opposition to alcohol abuse, advocacy of health reform including diet, dress, exercise.

And then I picked up this little tidbit that makes the book worth the price.

The two poles of opinion about women's bodies had their roots in divergent views of nature that tied sectarian healing to heterodox religion and regular medicine to Protestant orthodoxy. While sectarians looked to nature as an ally in the healing process, regulars viewed nature as presenting problems that must be cured or controlled. Orthodox religion and orthodox medicine reinforced a similar world view in which human beings in their natural state were seen as flawed from birth and in need of assistance from officially sanctioned authority figures trained in a specialized body of knowledge. While orthodox clergy portrayed the human soul as inevitable prone to sin, orthodox physicians portrayed the human body, especially the female body as inherently prone to disease. Just as ministers traditionally found a tendency towards sin in woman's moral anatomy because of Eve's instrumental role in tempting Adam into disobedience in the Garden of Eden, so doctors associated woman's physical anatomy with a tendency toward pathology. The emerging male medical establishment alleged that a disease-prone reproductive system governed woman's physiology, resulting in inevitable physical frailty that dictated a severely restricted sphere of action. Regular doctors joined the clergy in asserting the appropriateness of women remaining within their "sphere ," the clergy basing their arguments on the Bible, the doctors basing theirs on the body. Doctors and ministers agreed that both physical and spiritual ill health in women resulted from disobedience. They prescribed obedience to a male authority figure as a cure for the degenerative tendencies of body and soul." (143-4)

Well, that sure clears up a few things, doesn't it? No wonder I have always despised both organized religion and my male gynecologist.

I learned from spiritualism springs the legacy of radical individualism that proved the groundswell of the women's movements of the nineteenth and later, twentieth centuries. And I learned once again, we have to stop teaching dead white man's history. These women spiritualists were the precursors to modern day female doctors, lawyers, clergy, professors, and politicians. These were the first radical female voices to be heard and listened to in America. For that reason alone, Braude's book is a must have.
Additionally, Radical Spirits gives secondary school teachers a great bibliography of primary and secondary sources to encourage students to do research or I Search papers. This book is profoundly relevant to secondary school teaching. As a teacher of American Literature, I will include Braude's text in supplemental student readings and recommend it to my colleagues in both history and American studies. Students and secondary school teachers need to read Braude's conclusions and study her documentation to broaden their own understandings of the past.

In her own words, Braude is not interested in drawing conclusions about the "reality of spirit communications" (9). The value of this text is to increase "understanding of the relation of comparable religious expressions to their social and historical contexts" (9). When I first finished the book, I was disappointed. I wanted more ghost stories. I wanted to hear more about those crazy Fox sisters who had tables banging and knocking in upstate New York. I wanted more about Annie Denton Cridge who believed she held the spirit of her dead infant son in her arms on a daily basis. Then I realized the true ghost stories of this book. Here are the ghosts of lost, invisible nineteenth century women who struggled to find voice in a world of white domineering males--men who were more interested in listening to the spirits of the dead than to the wisdom and voices of the female living. The voices of nineteenth century women spiritualists are the seminal voices of American feminism; these invisible women who began public lives as passive trance mediums espousing the philosophies of dead spirits.
What Catherine Albanese did for nature religion in America, Ann Braude does for the spiritualism movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Thank you, Dr. Braude. Everything is starting to make sense.

review © 2002 by RSiSS and Jane Morelli Johnson
Jane Morelli Johnson
Punahou
Honolulu, Hawaii