Emily Midorikawa - Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice

Contents

In this fast-paced, engaging book, Emily Midorikawa shows that, for six nineteenth-century women, communicating with the dead was the best way of claiming a public voice. No stereotype of Victorian ladyhood survives. From Wall Street to presidential campaigns, from the courtroom to the stage, these women captivated their audiences and made serious claims about society in the process. Midorikawa tells their stories with sensitivity and grace, moving between the personal, the political, and the phantasmagoric with a sure step and a keen eye for detail.

M O M OULTON , author of The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

I was captivated by Midorikawas vivid portraits of Victorian-era women who used their Spiritualism to rise from obscurity and poverty to astonishing, often dizzying, social and political influence. Out of the Shadows brings to the fore the forgotten histories of these bold, radical, ambitious, and complicated women who campaigned for womens equal rights and suffrage, and even to become Americas first female presidentall while channeling the voices and guidance of the dead. Meticulously researched, engrossing, poignant, and often very humorous, Out of the Shadows does a huge service to feminist history.

S USAN B ARKER , author of The Incarnations

Public speaking was a disreputable occupation for Victorian-era womenunless they were communicating with the dead, a skill that turned out to be much in demand and often quite lucrative. Emily Midorikawas account of six women who were adept at working psychic miracles offers a fascinating new view of fame, belief, and feminism.

L AURA S HAPIRO , author of What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells Their Stories

This book is a treasurea little-known history about forgotten movers and shakers, women who influenced our country in unimaginable and unseen (to say the least) ways. Reader: you need this book! Take it home with you and learn about a potent part of our history that you didnt know you needed to know. Writing with seamless clarity, Midorikawa has produced another true gem. I love this book.

M IRA P TACIN , author of The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna

OUT OF THE SHADOWS

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1871 image from Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, depicting political hopeful and Spiritualist Victoria Woodhull addressing Congress. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

For Erica, another remarkable woman

OUT OF THE SHADOWS

O ne warm spring evening in 1853, Queen Victoria was staying at Osborne House, her opulent holiday residence on the Isle of Wight, just off Britains southern shore. She had arrived three weeks earlier, the era of rail travel allowing her party to journey from Buckingham Palace by royal train and yacht in a single day. Tonight, , the thirty-three-year-old British monarch and her companions were in a relaxed mood. While the distant song of nightingales in the surrounding woodland drifted in on the breeze through the open windows, the group decided to have a go at a wild craze imported from the United States of America and now sweeping Londons high-society drawing rooms.

The queen would record in her diary that her husband, Prince Albert, was the first of the group to place his hands at the rounded edges of an empty-topped table. One by one, the othersincluding senior courtiers and ladies-in-waitingjoined in, forming a circle, resting their hands in a similar fashion. As they did so, a strange thing happened. The table began to rotate, apparently of its own accord. Faster and faster it spun, seemingly rising off the floor. When the queens close friend Lady Ely joined them, the table picked up speed still further, causing its surface to fairly slip away beneath their fingers, leaving the excited group chasing after it as it slid around the room. In Victorias words, it really was a very peculiar sensation. She took issue with the skepticism of two military men present, who claimed that the movement must be caused by nothing more mysterious than the pressure of so many hands. In the queens view, the explanation was much more likely to be electricity or magnetism. She could not believe that so many hundreds, if not thousands,high & low could simply have performed a trick!

The hundreds, if not thousands, referred to by Queen Victoria hailed, indeed, from rich and poor backgrounds. They lived in major cities and tiny villages on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Some were highly educated. Others had known next to no schooling. They included people in lasting positions of power and celebrity, and those whose lives would leave only the lightest traces on written histories of the nineteenth century. Some individuals, like Her Majesty, seem to have regarded table turning and its associated practices, such as spirit rapping and spirit writing, as intriguing yet harmless amusements. Others considered these activities frightening, even the work of the devil. To others still, they could be harnessed for profit, or serve as opportunities to wield otherwise unthinkable levels of political and cultural clout.

Five years earlier, and three thousand miles from the Italianate splendor of Osborne House, commotion gripped the hamlet of Hydesvillea rural community in Wayne County, New York. On March 31, 1848, Mary Redfield, a no-nonsense woman in her thirties, , standing outside. John asked Mary to accompany him back to the small wood-frame house nearest to hers, where hed recently moved with his wife, Margaret, and two young daughters, Margaretta and Catherine. According to John, strange noises had been troubling the family. His visible nervousness caused Mary some amusement.

This wasnt the first she had heard of these sounds. Some days before, Margaretta and Catherineknown as Maggie and had told her a similar tale. Mary had not taken the girls seriously then, and she did not take their father seriously now. Before setting off with him, she declared that if there was, as the family suspected, a ghost next door, she would have a spree with it.

When the two arrived, they were met by Margaret and the girls, who all looked uncommonly pale. Maggie, a , had none of her normal vivaciousness. The eyes of sprite-like eleven-year-old Kate seemed even more intense than usual.

Margaret was , and given to emotional outbursts. Over the three and a half months that the family had been living in Hydesville, she had come to respect her younger neighbors usually unflappable nature. And so, thinking that Mary would surely have something sensible to say, Margaret asked, Mrs. Redfield, what shall we do? They had all been hearing this mysterious knocking for some time, and now it seemed that the ghost was attempting to converse with them. It had started answering all of our questions, and we cannot account for it.

Leading Mary into the room where the whole family slept, Margaret invited her neighbor to sit down beside her on one of the beds. While Kate and Maggie hovered close by, Margaret asked the unseen presence to count to five, and then fifteen, both of which it did with the correct number of raps. More urgently, she implored it, If you are an injured spirit manifest it by .