19th Century American History - Religious Aspects, History, Religious, Women's Rights, 19th Century American History - Social Aspects, Women's History - 19th Century, Religion - United States, Women's History - U.S. - General & Miscellaneous

Radical Spirits

Name: Radical Spirits
Author: Ann Braude
ISBN: 9780807075005

by Ann Braude

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Overview

Braude has discovered a crucial link between the early feminists & the spiritualists who so captured the American imagination during the middle of the last century. 150 years ago, trance mediums . . . changed the social fabric of America radically & permanently . . . Ann Braude says that when Spiritualism tore across America in the 1850s . . . it freed women to speak in public & helped end slavery. A fascinating, well researched work. Radical Spirits is a terrific book — well conceived, superbly researched, unusually well-written. No other book tells us so much about both women & religion in America as this one. Continually rewarding.

About the Author, Ann Braude

Ann Braude teaches at the Harvard Divinity School and is co-editor of Roots of Bitterness: Documents in the Social History of American Women.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

According to Braude, many 19th-century women allayed fears of death through spiritualist beliefs; the comfort that spiritualism brought increased their confidence, allowing them to support women's rights and advance an array of causes from the abolition of slavery to women's suffrage and marriage reform. no pw review (May)

Library Journal

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.