Spiritualism and the suffrage platform (1848–1900)

American spiritualism began in 1848, when the Fox sisters — Margaret, Kate, and Leah — reported the "Hydesville rappings" at their family home in upstate New York. Within two decades spiritualism had become one of the fastest-growing new religious movements in nineteenth-century America, with an estimated one to two million adherents by the mid-1860s.

The overlap with the women's-rights movement was structural. Spiritualist practice made women the principal channels of communication with the spirit world, and mediumship gave women the first culturally-sanctioned platform for public speaking in a period when women were otherwise excluded from lecterns and pulpits. Cora L. V. Hatch delivered trance lectures across the north-east in the 1850s and 1860s to audiences of hundreds. Emma Hardinge Britten became one of the most prominent spiritualist orators and organisers of the mid-century. Achsa W. Sprague and others lectured on suffrage, abolition, and spirit communication interchangeably.

The first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in July 1848 met three months after the Hydesville rappings. Ann Braude's Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Beacon Press, 1989) is the standard scholarly treatment; Braude documents that of the American women who signed the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, a substantial fraction were subsequently identified as spiritualists.

The connection was reciprocal. Spiritualism required a platform for women's speech and provided it. The women's-rights movement required visible women in public advocacy and inherited the platform. Susan B. Anthony, though not herself a spiritualist, corresponded with spiritualist mediums and attended sittings. Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew explicitly on spiritualist critiques of clerical authority. Matilda Joslyn Gage — one of the three principal authors of the History of Woman Suffrage — was directly involved with spiritualist circles and would in 1893 publish Woman, Church and State, arguing that Christianity had been the primary institutional agent of women's subjugation. That book is the bridge to the next section.