"Let's Go, Ghouls!": Spiritualism And The Advancement Of Women Through Mediumship Within The United States

A historical gender norm that has continued to undergird the gender system in the United States is that a woman is to be below a man in all matters. The two essays bound to this thesis dissect the relationship between U.S. American women and the Spiritualism movement that began in the mid-nineteenth century. This movement created opportunities for some who participated within it to become economically and socially independent. The first essay, “Spirituality Sold: How Women Took Advantage of Spiritualism Within the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” examines how women utilized their roles in the Spiritualism movement in order to garner economic success as well as a public presence when prescriptive norms dictated they were to be confined to their homes. For many within Western countries during this period, the ideal role for a respectable woman was (and unfortunately still is in some instances) to tend to her husband and his children. In my thesis I argue that Spiritualism, or the belief that humans could commune with the dead, was the “soul sister” to the women’s rights movement that emerged in nineteenth century U.S. America. Within Spiritualism, practitioners and mediums exalted femininity. Some women used their ability (or claim thereof) to talk to the spirits of deceased loved ones to make not only a name for themselves and carve a place within the economic sphere of the United States. The most well-known of these women were respected not only as renowned psychic mediums but also free thinkers and speakers on important social issues, earthly and other-worldly. Such women knew what they were doing with mediumship, and for that, they must be commended However, the belief that psychic mediums were and still are true, authentic communicators with the “other side” was fairly short-lived during and became a subject of critique and intense scrutiny with many (especially men) attempting to debunk these women’s practices and self-proclaimed abilities. The second essay, “From Spiritualists to Swindlers: The Contradictory Transformation of Support for Spiritualism and Female Psychic Mediums in the United States Beginning in the Twentieth Century,” interrogates the scientific technologies and psychological break-throughs that prompted many within the American spiritual counter public to increasingly doubt the veracity and authenticity of female psychic mediums. Drawing on examples from the first essay, the second portion of this thesis aims to examine why mediumship has been called into question since the nineteenth century and why, despite these notions of falsehoods amongst self-proclaimed “mediums” and “psychics,” many people then and today still choose to seek out psychic help. No matter if one were to view Spiritualism today or yesterday, one question raises itself into consideration for this particular body of research: why do people even seek out communing with the deceased and/or answering questions about themselves from others?