Feminist Spirits

In the late eighteenth century, peace loving Quaker intellectuals kicked off the abolitionist movement in what would become the United States, asking the rather pertinent question that if they were going to go with the whole all men are created equal thing, wasn’t it kind of being a dick still owning slaves.  As a result, most of the northern states outlawed the practice by the start of the nineteenth century.  Spurred on by such enlightened thought, many women began asking similar questions regarding their own station in life, to which these same Quaker men responded by mumbling an answer about the designs of god and quickly changing the subject.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and the United States became seized by a massive religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, largely spurred on by people anxious about the rapid changes taking place in the world around them.  The result was numerous new religions, which quickly came to prominence.  Surprising for the time, women outnumbered men as converts to these new religions, which probably had nothing to do with the fact that it gave them the ability to get out of the house and tell their husbands to fuck off, because in the grand scheme of things God most definitely outranked some random dick toter.  Women became the primary drivers of many new prayer groups as well as missionary and reform societies.  As a result, the ministers of the time, not being complete idiots, began playing to their audience, highlighting women as having an important role as the primary educators of their families regarding religion and ethics.  For the first time since perhaps the early days of Christendom, women were viewed as spiritual beings with a role in achieving salvation every bit as important as that held by men.  However, they most certainly were not allowed to be ministers, because you know, who would take the word of God seriously if it came via a voice an octave or two higher than what people were used to.

Anyways, shifting gears a bit, in 1848, two teenagers in New York named Catherine and Maggie Fox began playing a prank on their parents involving pretending to talk to spirits via various clever tricks that made it appear that an invisible force was communicating via rapping on the walls and tables of the house.  As pranks often do, this one quickly got out of hand, with neighbors being called in and eventually an innocent man getting arrested for the murder of somebody who most certainly never existed.  Feeling somewhat guilty about this turn of events, the girls admitted the hoax to their older sister Leah, who rather than telling them to come clean, instead convinced them to double down on the whole thing with her added to the mix.  Within a year, the Fox sisters were touring the country, exhibiting their ability to talk to spirits to sold out crowds. Such was born the Spiritualist movement, with countless copycats appearing with new innovative ways to bilk people out of their money via seances, where the so-called mediums went into trances and spoke for the dead.  In a time when countless loved ones often died untimely deaths, hundreds of thousands of people found comfort in the idea that they could speak to those who had already passed.

Now for whatever reason, the majority of these spiritualist mediums were women, which probably had nothing to do with the fact that it was one of the few ways they could speak up and actually be listened to at the time.  It probably also didn’t hurt that thanks to the Second Great Awakening women were viewed as just being naturally more spiritual than men.  Whatever the reason, numerous women found themselves able to speak up for themselves for the first time, albeit through the supposed words of some dead guy, and it didn’t take them long to start peppering their seances with messages regarding the so-called gentler sex not getting the shit end of the stick all the time.  With millions of adherents, Spiritualism became the primary driver of new feminist ideas in the nineteenth century.  People who otherwise might have been resistant to such ideas, both women and men, found themselves reconsidering given the majority of the spiritual world seemed to be fully onboard.  Though many decried the mediums as frauds, ironically them being women was used as proof that their powers were real.  After all, everyone knew that women were too delicate to lie, and their brains too silly to string along the long eloquent speeches spewing forth from the mouths of the mediums.  Nope, it definitely had to be spirits.

By the late nineteenth century, the idea of Spiritualism began to wane, giving way to the scientific method and people actually thinking about shit, though it continued as a mainstream movement into the twentieth century.  However, the feminist ideas spread by the Spiritualists continued to propagate and grow, flowering into the first wave feminist movement, many of the leaders of which were Spiritualists, which led to a great shift in the early twentieth century regarding the rights of women, culminating with women being granted the right to vote in 1920.