Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Ann Braude is a historian of American religion and gender, and this Beacon Press book is her scholarly study of the Spiritualist movement's connection to nineteenth century women's rights activism in America. Its strength is the specific social-historical argument it develops well, that Spiritualist practices such as trance speaking and automatic writing gave women a legitimate public voice at a time when direct public speaking by women was widely resisted, an accessibility that helps explain the movement's disproportionately female mediumship. Its limit is that its focus is the American movement and its relationship to the women's rights cause specifically, so a claim about the truth of the phenomena Spiritualist mediums reported, rather than their social function, needs a source that addresses that separate question.