Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Womens Rights in 19th Century America

Traces the development of Spiritualism during the nineteenth century, and explains how leading Spiritualists became involved in the women's rights movement

Braude explores America's spiritualist movement in the context of 19th-century social, denominational, and political history. Spiritualism claimed, through contact with the dead, to be a scientific investigation into the immortality of the soul. The movement was associated with free speech and the abolition of slavery. Because it maintained that divine truth was accessible to any individual, female or male, and thus was accessible outside the male hierarchies of family, church, and politics, it became associated with feminism as well; many early women leaders in all three movements were also spiritualists. A fascinating, well-researched, and scholarly work on a peripheral aspect of the rise of the American feminist movement.
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.