It Takes A Delicate Constitution: Victorian Feminists and The Occult - Bonus Episode

A late October check in bonus episode with a spooky theme. Well, that is if you thinking chit chatting with the dead is spooky. Lots of Victorian people thought it wasn't spooky but important. Serious. There was a huge surge of interest in spiritualism in the 19th century. We thought maybe we should see if any of our Victorian feminists that we've been reading were also into the occult.  It has opened up a can of worms.  

Won't you join us?

Discussed in this episode:

Ms Magazine - excerpt of WAKING THE WITCH: Reflections on Women, Magic and Power by Pam Grossman
https://msmagazine.com/2019/10/29/waking-the-witch-the-feminist-history-of-spiritualism/

The Burned Over District
https://nyheritage.org/exhibits/two-hundred-years-erie-canal/burned-over-district

Religion and Reform in the "Burned Over District"
https://youtu.be/fKxEOmAZCd8?si=2KMMGF_Y8p6baMHV

The rise and fall of Harmonia, a Spiritualist utopia and home to Sojourner Truth  https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/life/2019/01/16/rise-and-fall-harmonia-battle-creeks-spiritualist-utopia/2214809002/

Victoria Woodhull, the Original ‘Nasty Woman’
https://www.villagepreservation.org/2018/04/02/victoria-woodhull-the-original-nasty-woman/

Lilydale Spiritualist Community
https://www.lilydaleassembly.org/community 

Anne Braude https://www.hds.harvard.edu/people/ann-d-braude

The First Woman to Run For President Was a Spiritualist, Wall Street Broker, and Free-Love Advocate https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/first-woman-run-president-was-clairvoyant-free-love-advocate

This episode recorded remotely at Bob's Basement Studio

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Credits

Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kathleen ML Rogers

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Chapters

• 0:00 Cold Open And Solo Setup
• 0:47 Show Update And Future Plans
• 3:41 Season Ideas And Listener Input
• 4:31 Halloween Mood And Thin Veil
• 4:47 Why Victorian Spiritualism Mattered
• 7:27 Excerpt: Fox Sisters And The Boom
• 9:22 Women As Mediums And Leaders
• 12:08 Reform Crossroads: Abolition And Suffrage
• 14:05 Stanton, Anthony, Truth, And Lily Dale
• 16:56 Victoria Woodhull’s Wild Firsts
• 19:33 Spiritualism As Confidence Engine
• 21:04 Modern Parallels And Organizing
• 22:23 Book And Podcast Recs
• 23:16 Appendix Tease And CTA
• 23:46 Farewell And Samhain Blessing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

We did the mash. We did the monster mash the monster mash. It was a grave, y'all. Smash. Alright, I'm about to smash this solo episode all by my dang self. It's the podcast that seductive serpent warned you about. Welcome to Biting All the Apples, where two gals discuss one radical book. And other radical things that I'll tell you about after this brief musical interlude. Hi, I'm Sarah Kay. Looks like I'll be doing all the apple biting solo today. My cohort, my yoke fellow, my confrere, Joanna V, is in like super busy parent teacher conference fall teacher educator mode. I think that's the official title for it. Um, and yes, I did want her to mic up so we could do a segment called The Apple Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree. Sassy kids, sassy parents. But she has like professional ethics. And um, that's also why we won't ever get to the top of the podcast charts. But here we are. And it's been a few weeks since our last episode. When we finished the final chapter of our beloved book, The Women's Bible, by Elizabeth Katie Stanton and her Victorian feminist Confrères, we teased y'all with promises of an episode or two about the intriguing and extensive appendix. And rest assured, we will make good on that. It's just that we're trying out like a whole slow promise keeping thing, like in the vein of like slow travel and slow eating and slow snacking. Why not, you know, be poke on the promises? No, we really are getting to that. It just the fall, it has been nuts. I mean, this month so far has just been chock full of so much stuff. And you can't convince me that someone didn't crank up the earth-turning motor and speed up time. Seriously, because these past few weeks were actually only two days in like 1990s time. Not sure if I have the equation and maths right on that, but shoot us a message if that's your thing. But um, yeah, we're working on some appendix. Appendix is some we're we're working on getting our appendix removed. We're working on some appendix stuff for you and a website that's gonna store not just all the episodes, but the mountains of information we've gathered on our journey through the book. The working title for that section of the website is called like all the rabbit holes plus pictures or step into our holes, dive into this hole. So many holes. I don't know, I'm still working at the title. Send me um suggestions if you have them. But we're doing that and we're thinking about our next season. I don't know if we're really like running seasons. Again, there's like no rules because we're a small, low budget, indie rebel outfit. DIY. Okay, no boss, and we're gonna keep taking advantage of that. We're gonna shake it up. We'll be bringing you interviews, more recommendations, maybe a couple field trips, analysis, spontaneous singing, and some radio plays. I'm sure you've listened and thought these two gals have got to be professional performers, not just podcasters, historians, and geniuses. I know. I get it. What we'd really love is to hear what you think, what's fascinating you right now. What gap can we fill in your feminist podcast listening life? What's the weirdest thing you can think of? I'm not kidding. Think of it and text it to us. Again, that info's in the show notes. Um, what radical book from the past should we bring into the harsh LED light of today? What would make for a cool on location recording? I already have a few in mind, especially the little excerpt I'm gonna read you. Ooh, it sparked some grand ideas. Um, yeah, should we go to a historic site? What should we investigate? Who should we talk to? And maybe the real question is if we could contact anyone from the dead, who should we reach out to? The time is ripe. Like I said, anything goes. We can make a budget for a proper medium or even an almost proper one. And I, you know, this is where my head's at. I can't help it. It's the end of October. It's that time of year. The time, the end of October, as they say, the veil between the worlds is thin, right? The worlds, the realms. You can reach out, you can touch your ancestors. And since my head is still in Victorian times from being so deep in the women's Bible, I was pondering the role of feminism in the Victorian spiritualism craze. Joanna and I have talked before about how the women's Bible was made possible because of the culture at the time, in, you know, the 19th century. Things were popping off then. We all got industrialized. That sparked new individual independence and opportunity, kind of rearranged how we thought of things and objects and money and purchasing and labor, and huge changes were afoot. Inventors were inventing, Darwin was Darwining, science was sciencing, right? And the Civil War broke the country wide open, and loss makes people question things. Authority, religion, institutions, personal agency makes you question everything. And women are questioning everything. But, you know, women, they still had a prescribed rule. Sure, high flutin gals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton were going out and about and writing and speaking their mind and rallying the masses, but most women were still very much bound by strict gender rules and hindered by stuff like the inability to get an education, a decent job, open a bank account, buy a home, control their own uterus, wear pants, or vote. Women have always had to work around the edges and find entry points that others would deem too feminine. But we're smart. We're like, we can make that work. We see women in 2025 modern times carving out careers in what you know they're calling it like the wellness space, which bleeds into the spiritual space, the coaching space. I don't know why people call things spaces, but yeah, you know what I'm talking about with the spiritual space. Like you totally know because an Etsy witch was just on national news like last month. But so that got me thinking about Victorian women in the days of wild private parlor seances. I wondered if any of those feminists, the ones we've been reading, were like part of that scene. And just if there was any crossover between the feminist movement and the rise, like in the popularity of the occult. And wouldn't you know it? I did my wondering online and Ms. Magazine delivered. In October of 2019, they published an excerpt from a new book called Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic and Power by Pam Grossman. And the excerpt they chose, yeah, it's from the Victorian era, and I've totally gotta read it to you. The first part of the excerpt is about Kate and Margaret Fox, two young sisters from Hydesville, New York, and around the mid-1800s, like smack jab in the middle, like 1848, they became extremely popular for their ability to communicate with the dead. Like they would hear them like knocking, and they'd be like, It's old man George trying to contact you, and people just freak out, and they'd want them to travel around and come to their house and be like, Can you hear any ghosts knocking at my door? It was wild. But it isn't like there weren't people kind of like that before. Like Joanne and I have read in the women's Bible the different soothsayers and witches and sorcerers and stuff like that. But this in particular had a new kind of like surge in popularity. People went crazy. But the question really is like, could they communicate with the dead? Was it a real thing? But I think that hardly matters as much as how desperately people wanted it to be true, maybe even needed it to be true. So here's the rest of what Pam Grosman writes. The time was ripe for it. Certainly people had long attempted to speak to the dead, but mid-19th century America was a hotbed of alternative spirituality, especially throughout what came to be called the burned over district of upstate New York. Some groups sought to reject the Calvinist idea that all souls were damned from the start and that only the most pious people could be saved. A faction of radical Quakers was particularly invested in the idea that all human beings were equal, regardless of race or gender, a sentiment that was beginning to catch on in more open-minded circles. As I'm telling you, Victorian Times, y'all, communication with the other side seemed to confirm that bodies were mere shells and that the spirit was what truly mattered. People throughout the US and Europe began holding stances in their parlors and using methods such as trance, automatic writing, and eventually spirit photography to try to make contact with their dearly departed. This is in parentheses, these spiritualist practices would then spread to Latin countries under the name Spiritism or Spiritismo, largely due to the books of a Frenchman who wrote under the name Alan Kardeck, though it's important to note that his ideas were incorporated into already existing practices of ancestor worship in those regions. Spiritualism was a social phenomenon. Because it was informally organized with no single governing body, estimates of the number of spiritualists during its peak in the 1850s and 1860s vary widely, from 45,000 to 11 million in the US alone. But what is clear is that it was driven in large part by women. During this period, high death rates of young children and Civil War soldiers alike cast many mothers and wives into a state of perpetual bereavement. Grief became more public, thanks in part to Queen Victoria, who famously wore black during the 40 years after her husband Albert passed away in 1861. When Willie, the favorite son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, died of typhoid fever in 1862, Mary began holding seances in the White House to contact him. Spiritualism offered comfort to the living and consolation that their beloved family members were still with them and able to be reached, heard from, and seen in ghostly photographs. Not only were many women followers of this faith, they were leaders of it. The majority of mediums were female, and largely due to this fact, spiritualism was a profoundly unique and socially progressive movement. Hello. As Anne Brody states in her landmark book Radical Spirits, quote, in mediumship, women's religious leadership became normative for the first time in American history, unquote. Spirit mediumship became one of a very small set of professions available to women. It gave them the ability to make money and have public influence, no matter their economic background. Unlike in church, one did not have to be ordained to be a medium, one merely had to have the gift. On its surface, spiritualism also didn't present a huge threat to the patriarchy, because the very features possessed by the so-called weaker sex, nervousness, heightened sensitivity, and a delicate constitution were what supposedly made them the best candidates for mediumship in the first place. Furthermore, as passive channels, mediums were not responsible for the words that flowed through them. It was often remarked that their spiritual transmissions came in the form of unhalting, eloquent speeches. The vocabulary and delivery that were used in trance were considered far too sophisticated to possibly have come directly from the medium herself. Regardless of who authored the utterances, these ghost-hosting women found themselves in the rarefied position of getting to transmit meaningful messages to large groups of people. Because of this, spiritualism was deeply interlaced with various social justice movements, from abolition to children's rights to feminism. Brody writes, Spiritualism became a major, if not the major, vehicle for the spread of women's rights ideas in mid-19th century America. While not all feminists were spiritualists, all spiritualists advocated women's rights. Ooh. By the way, I believe it's pronounced Brody. B-R-A-U-D-E. I should probably know that author. Check the show notes. See what happens when I don't have Joanna? Large spiritualist gatherings became one of the primary ways that these radical ideas got disseminated. Both through the mediums who would deliver messages from the spirit world about the importance of the liberation of all people and via the conversation among mingling spectators. Likewise, spiritualists would sometimes speak at women's rights gatherings. Though it's often left out of history books, the significant overlap in the Venn diagram of spiritualists, abolitionists, and suffragists was a critical component of such revolutionary American milestones as the outlawing of slavery and the legalization of women's right to vote. Yeah, they did not have that in my 1980s public school books. You know what I mean? Some of the biggest names in equal rights reform brushed up against spiritualism, if they weren't adherents themselves. The parlor table, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott drafted their declaration of sentiments for the Seneca Falls Convention had also reportedly received raps from the spirits. Oh my goodness. Here's the, and this is in uh parentheses, it belonged to two radical Quakers and spiritualists to be, Thomas and Mary Ann McClintock. I wonder if that's a relation to Jessica McClintock, the great floral dress designer. Susan B. Anthony was agnostic about spiritualism, but she did write the following to Stanton in 1855. Oh dear, dear, if the spirits would only just make me a trance medium and put the right thing into my mouth. You can't think how earnestly I've prayed to be made a speaking medium for a whole week if they would only come to me thus. I'd give them a hearty welcome. Despite her reputation for being a strong orator, Anthony was nervous about public speaking, and she envied the medium's ability to let words pour out of them extemporaneously. She would later go on to speak at the spiritualist community of Lilydale in the summers of the 1890s during their annual Women's Suffrage Day, as did many other women's rights luminaries, including birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. When abolitionist and social justice activist Sojourner Truth first encountered spiritualism, she was skeptical. In 1851, when she attended her first seance in Rochester, New York, I kind of love that. They're like, when was your first seance? Like everybody went. She reportedly brought her signature irreverence to the experience, calling out, Come spirit, hop up here on the table and see if you can't make a louder noise. But she came to embrace spiritualism, eventually moving herself and her family to a Michigan Quaker spiritualist community called Harmonia in 1857. Hello, fellow Michiganders, we gotta go look that up. She was attracted to this group for their values of open-mindedness, pacifism, and inclusivity, if not their proclivities for interaction with the afterlife. However, Nell Irving Painter writes that with time she did grow less suspicious of spirits, even coming to see her father's spirit as a protector. When harmonia began to falter a few years later, she chose to stay in the area, moving to nearby Battle Creek, where she lived the last 16 years of her life. Victoria Woodall was a medium and carnival show clairvoyant, and she contended that spirits protected and guided her throughout her life. Perhaps it was their support that allowed her to achieve so many firsts. She started the first women-owned Wall Street brokerage house with her sister, founded the first women-owned newspaper in the U.S., and was the first woman to address a congressional committee when she petitioned them to give women the right to vote. But she is perhaps best known as America's first woman to run for president, which she did under the Cosmo Political Party in 1872. Okay, wait a minute. Okay, I swear I read this before reading this out loud to you, but I still am like Cosmo Political Party. So into that. I'm thinking Cosmo in the sky, maybe not Cosmo like sex quiz cosmo, but we'll look into that. So she did that under the Cosmo political party in 1872. She chose Frederick Douglass as her running mate, though this was more of a symbolic act than anything else, as by all accounts he didn't know about it until after it was announced. That sounds a little niche. But you know, what do you expect from a carnival show clairvoyant? Her championing of free love, her beliefs that marriage was institutionalized slavery, and that sex should always be consensual, her insistence that women wear less restrictive clothing, and her support of paid sex work were just a few of the far out views that earned her the soberquay Miss Satan. Actually it says Mrs. Satan. Okay, that is like delicious. I didn't even know that she was called Mrs. Satan. This is in parentheses, her track record of various dubious practices in both the spiritual and political arenas probably helped too. Suffragettes and socialists alike would come to renounce Woodall, considering her too controversial and attention hungry. But the American Association of Spiritualists continued to support her until its demise in 1875. She was a complicated, even contradictory individual. She was anti-abortion, and when she got older, she would rail against promiscuity and expose certain spiritualists as frauds. But the fact remains that she was a pioneer in so many areas of women's liberation and light years ahead of her time. Throughout much of her life, she insisted that her convictions and actions were directed by her guides in the spirit world. Who's going to prove her wrong, really? As her biographer, Barbara Goldsmith writes, Victoria's belief in her spirit guidance empowered her and her followers to challenge the law, the church, and the entrenched male establishment. Let your spirits guide you. Contact with the spiritual world was not just a hopeful pastime of the bereaved then. Spiritualism may have been a soothing source of consolation when it began, but it morphed into an ethereal engine of confidence for many of the women who practiced it. The messages of self-worth and female independence missing in their mundane lives were found in the voices of the discarnate. Now isn't that some food for thinking? I just had to share that with you all. It makes one curious about how like nowadays, I say these times nowadays, as in like 2025, and then just our political and social climate. I'm curious like how women will capitalize on or even create social gathering trends to like educate and organize each other. If there's one thing history has taught us, it's that broads and have always successfully created niches to thrive in and found a way to communicate and bring people together. You know what I mean? They're like, y'all can't talk like this, and you can't have to be quiet here. Women have always been like, that's cool. We'll just get together and quilt. Wink wink. Do you know what I'm saying? We're gonna find a way to make it work. And you know what? If we have to stick with cornering the market on talking to the spirits, so be it. So, um, yeah, and it's obvious we gotta get our hands on that book. The title, again, if you enjoyed that excerpt, is Waking the Witch Reflections on Women, Magic and Power. Other super cool thing is the author, Pam Grossman, is the host of a podcast. Hello. It's called The Witch Wave, and she is known as the Terry Gross of Witches. So you can check out more of her work if you're interested. Like, I totally want to go check out the Terry Gross of Witches. And I like to think of Joanna and I as like the click and clack brothers from Car Talk. Like, we're click and clack of Victorian biblical analysis by feminists. That's like, that's what like a lot of people say about us, right? I'll have to run that by her when I see her. But I will be seeing her next week. And we'll be back with our women's Bible appendix wrap-up episode soon. Very soon. Early November. Keep your ear to the ground. In the meantime, this is your chance to catch up on all the episodes and encourage your friends, family, clergy members, coworkers, Amazon delivery people, whoever, to do the same. Take the time to shoot us a message and let us know what you're thinking literally about anything. But yeah, if the excerpt I read sparked some ideas, or maybe you have special knowledge about that type of stuff, let us know. If you have book recommendations, maybe we'll mix it up. Well, we are mixing it up. We're always mixing it up. I just mixed it up for a good half hour right there for you. Anyways, let us know what you're thinking. You can find all of that contact info in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to Little Old Me today. And whether you are with your living or discarnate people this week, I wish you a deep thinking, ancestral, contacting, dark, and lovely Sawin. See you on one side or the other.