When We Spoke to the Dead: How Ghosts Gave American Women Their Voice

Historian Carter (The Red Menace) offers an insightful examination of the political legacy of the spiritualism movement. Reeling from the loss of her father to Covid, Carter is struck by parallels between the present and the circumstances that gave rise to the spiritualism movement in the 19th century, a time of “huge losses of life and the need for radical social change.” With men dying in droves in the Civil War, spiritualism gave mourners solace—“particularly women,” she argues—though it began as “something of a joke.” In 1848, two young women, the Fox Sisters, brought observers to hear the knocking noises that “rocked” their room at night. “It may not sound like much now,” Carter writes, but in “rural Western New York,” a region itself rocked by waves of progressive political sentiment, “it was a revelation.” As a new generation of activists declared women’s equality at the nearby Seneca Falls Convention, the Fox sisters became emblematic of “a time and place fraught with possibilities.” Spiritualism began to “attach itself to progressive causes” like abolition, women’s suffrage, and temperance, with the Fox sisters championed by progressive newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Critics, meanwhile, used spiritualism as a means to attack progressivism. Carter concludes by drawing numerous through lines and parallels, from Mike Huckabee calling the 2016 Women’s March a “religious cult” to Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop. It’s a savvy take on women and spirituality in American politics. (Sept.)