In Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America, Molly McGarry argues that Spiritualism was not simply an historical footnote, but “actively engaged in a politics of the body and the body politic, Spiritualism encompassed a set of utopian practices and imaginings that, when understood together, uniquely linked many of the disparate political movements of the day” (pg. 4). McGarry draws extensively upon the cultural history theories of Karen Halttunen and the gender and power theories of Michel Foucault. She presents Spiritualism as a cultural bridge, writing, “Spiritualism denied the warfare between science and religion, disavowed the divide between fact and fantasy, and, most important, refused the idea of the past as irretrievable and the future as the inevitable result of calcified sociopolitical structures” (pg. 14). Furthermore, McGarry argues that the belief “posed a counterdiscourse to both an aging Calvinism and a growing materialism” (pg. 17-19).
The majority of McGarry’s monograph focuses on issues of gender. She writes of the unique gender dynamics of Spiritualism, “Although Spiritualism offered a world in which young women could craft unique forms of autonomy, many depended on their spirits, who were often male and socially powerful” (pg. 35). Despite these masculine spirits, “The privileging of female mediums, however, radically challenged the binary notions of the private and public sphere, the personal and the political, the religious and the secular. This new religion’s renegotiation of gender was so radical and pervasive that it is inseparable from the movement’s other, multiple concerns” (pg. 41). In a direct counter to nineteenth century gender norms, “Spiritualists appropriated the characteristics that had been used to deem women unfit for public life – piety, passivity, and purity – and transformed them into ideals of spirituality” (pg. 44). McGarry concludes, “Spiritualism, then, developed in a context where speakers could find receptive audiences for radical ideas about the relationship of gender to spirituality and the proper place of women in religion” (pg. 46).
McGarry argues that Spiritualism closely intertwined with the histories of both censorship in the United States and early psychology. Of the former, she writes, “The histories of Spiritualism and Comstockery are mutually entangled in the fascination and fright produced by the new presence of sexualized bodies – such as that of the notorious free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull – stalking the public sphere, as well as a new flow of texts and images into the private home through the U.S. mail… Restoring Spiritualism to the history of censorship illuminates the complicated workings of this formative moral panic, arguably America’s first sex war” (pg. 95). As to psychology, McGarry writes, “Constructed through dominant notions of female frailty and hyperreceptivity, hysteria and mediumship might be seen as distinct yet parallel responses to the limited options for female expression and subjectivity in Western society” (pg. 126). In both of these, McGarry returns to gender. She argues, “In offering new forms of embodiment, Spiritualism held enormous appeal for women and men who inhabited gender and sexuality in transgressive ways” (pg. 154). Incorporating elements of queer theory, McGarry writes, “For some Spiritualists, gender transposition was more central to the phenomenon of mediumship” (pg. 163). ( )