On March 31, 1848, two teen girls, Kate and Margaret Fox, reported hearing “rappings” inside their Hydesville, NY, home. They believed they made contact with a spirit of a murdered peddler whose body was later found in the house. The Fox sisters quickly became a sensation among their radical Quaker friends, and were soon given a platform to share their experiences at a time when it was still taboo for women to exercise their First Amendment right to speak before an assembly. As fate would have it, on July 19 of the same year, the first women’s rights convention was being held just a few miles away at Seneca Falls. Word has it that “raps” also knocked the very table where Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments.
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While newspapers largely ignored the work of early suffragettes, they voraciously covered the new sensation of women publicly sharing their experiences of communion with the dead. These conditions created the perfect storm for the birth of Spiritualism, which provided Americans and Europeans a Western version of ancestor worship. Spiritualism, the belief that the dead exist as non-corporeal spirits and that we have the power to communicate with them, caught on like wildfire during the Civil War, as women lost their husbands, brothers, and children on the battlefield.
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Appealing to middle and upper classes, Spiritualism quickly became a seminal force, influencing 19th century art, science, technology, entertainment, politics, and social reform. Few know that President Abraham Lincoln once held séances with senators and cabinet members in the White House or that Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States, was also a medium. Nobel laureates Pierre and Marie Currie table-tipped while William Butler Yeats used automatic writing in his poetry. But perhaps most fascinating is the convergence of Spiritualism and the Women’s Movement in the town of Lily Dale, New York.
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