Mediums, Healers, and Rioters: Subversive Motherhoods in Nineteenth-century Spiritualist Culture

This article proposes an examination of non-normative redefinitions of motherhood in nineteenth-century spiritualist women’s writing. It focuses on naturopathic manuals published by female healers connected to the period’s Occult revival, observing the discussion of pregnancy, childbearing, contraception, and other culturally silenced subjects. Although spiritualist healing practices have already been explored within the field of Victorian studies by feminist historians, such investigations concentrate more on the socio-cultural aspects of spiritualist political activism, rather than commenting on the literary evidence of female participation in occultist obstetrics and natural gynecology. However, a comparative analysis of several spiritualist texts written by healing mediums would grant insight into the history of reproductive rights in nineteenth-century Britain and America. In order to do so, this study will first provide an overview of attitudes to voluntary motherhood in spiritualist culture, concentrating on debates about sexual consent and birth control in the period’s occultist press. This section is followed by an introduction to conflicts between female healers and male-dominated medical institutions, which often imposed patriarchal standards on gynecology and perinatal care. Such observations provide contextualization for the main section of this article, which deals with emancipatory reconsiderations of maternal experience in literary texts by three spiritualist mediums, noting how the authors used their esoteric beliefs as strategies of resistance against the male pathologization of pregnancy and childbirth in Victorian medicine. As this analysis intends to prove, spiritualist literature contributed to the improvement of maternal conditions, providing accessible and informed counseling regarding women’s sexual and reproductive health.