The Sisters Fox and The Notion of Feminist Spiritualism
Women, girls, and madness(?) exploited in the ghostly limelight.
I think I can speak for a lot of hot, sexy people when I say there are few things that confound me more than the 19th-century Spiritualist movement. Spiritualism is often written as a socio-religious phenomena, a vehicle for scientific theories surrounding souls and material evidence of their existence. There’s also a lot of talk about how the Spiritualist movement got cozy with women’s suffrage and abolitionists, due in part to its Quaker and Shaker affinities.
Apart from those, the Victorian Spiritualist “scene” diverged other established religious denominations of its day. For instance, it lacked a central organization. There were many “societies” and groups which convened to study, discuss, and facilitate seances, sure, but no singular sect institution which governed their operations. This meant that when groups spliced, it wasn’t necessarily a David v. Goliath situation. More like a, well, David and his other friends who were coincidentally-named David.
That didn’t mean that Spiritualism didn’t have its stars. One can hardly walk 2 ft. in either direction (proverbially) without bumping into the Fox Sisters. And why would you? They’re considered by their contemporaries and modern historians alike to be the founders of the movement. It was their alleged encounter with “rappings” in an old barn house that caught attention across time, space, and social class. Theirs would be the years of tours, interviews, investigations, and scrutiny - tumultuous path which would land both sister in poverty.
In 1888, spiteful of Leah and exhausted after years of tumultuous celebrity and alcoholism, Kate and Maggie Fox would confess to it all. The otherworldly rapping sounds were actually their knuckles cracking under the table. Sometimes it was them, other times it was other family members who had been enlisted to aid in their charade. A lot of us know this part well. It was a hoax, of course! How could it not be? Fair enough. Though, we should also know the circumstances under which the sisters came clean. Yes, it did have largely to do with their feud with Leah and their alcohol abuse. Leah’s distrust and disdain only grew from it; their erratic behavior and desperation compromised their abilities to maintain a clean reputation. Unfortunately it was the offer of $1,500 from a New York reporter in exchange for a public demonstration of their fraud that made it all come undone.
…Well, sort of. Due to the destitution their confession exacerbated, Maggie would eventually attempt to take up Spiritualism again before they died. She never was able to fully regain her fame or the trust of her followers. This hadn’t been the first time Maggie, specifically, denounced-then-reclaimed spiritualism. Maggie had converted to Roman Catholicism after her marriage to her husband Elisha Kane in the 1852. Her revitalized piety inspired her feelings of shame for her past as a Spiritualist. However, when Kane passed away in 1871, she returned to practicing.
By the time of their public confession the sisters Fox had been the center of a trans-continental spiritual and cultural movement for ~40 years. Their destinies were swallowed by it. Though they would both have husbands - Kate and Leah having children as well - Maggie and Kate never knew economic security independent of their capacity to defraud thousands of people with their paranormal theatre. Today, we know very little about who they were and the nuances of their lives outside of that.
One thing we do know, or at least are taught, is that part of Spiritualism’s popularity rested on its unparalleled celebration of women as religious leaders. Suffragists like Cady Stanton applauded Spiritualism for recognizing the potential women had to be spiritual figureheads, something which conventions in both Protestantism and Catholicism rebuked. In her provocative work The Women’s Bible she wrote her changing views on religiosity. For her, Christianity was without parallel in its ability to “so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.” In contrast, Spiritualism represented a potential for modern, scientific sensibilities to find connection.
This also explains the Quakers affinity with Spiritualism as a space of philosophical and social rebellion. Abolitionists, too, recognized Spiritualism as something deeply compelling. It provided a kind of resonance with peoples’ desires to bend existential and social rules which had produced a repressive decorum they could no longer abide by.
But the thing is - Spiritualism and Mysticism were still largely “run” by men, at least when it comes to the metrics of legitimacy and scientific authority. Men could conduct seances and experiments just as popularly as women, and they did! All the time!
So, I can’t help but feel ambivalent when I read about how women and girls were pressured to carry so much of the movement’s momentum through the years. In reading about the spread of seances, it struck me that they often involved adults crowding into homes and around a selected young girl who claimed or was claimed as clairvoyant. The Fox sisters, though conducting the majority of their scheme as adults, were nevertheless ingratiated with the opportunity as children. They were ushered into prominence not just by an adoring-though-invasive public, but by their sister - someone who they were conditioned to trust wholeheartedly from birth.
Historians continue to sit Stanton’s view on the progressive appeal of Spiritualism. While some critique its saliency, others just kind of let it…sit there. You know? Like, it is what it is. But is it? How can we rethink the significance of the Spiritualist movement as a movement of substantive contradictions in its social/political doctrine? How can we make sense of claims of Spiritualism’s rebellion against tradition and the at-times incredibly-cringey records of, say, white people performing seances so as to connect with spirits of dead Indigenous people, brokering “peace” and “forgiveness”? Or to use them as extensions of themselves through repeat-appearances and “friendships” across the plane?
There’s also something unnerving about stories of people being committed to asylums given what we know about the visibility of women in Spiritualist circles. I haven’t quite parsed through all of that enough to be able to write extensively or coherently about it. There’s also an…interesting…phenomenon of Spiritualists advocating for voluntary commitment so that they could convert people to the faith. Eventually I want to dig deeper into that history, and about the performance of criminal madness and incarceration. I also feel like it could connect somehow, maybe, perhaps(?) to the criminalization of women’s vagrancy, spiritual entrepreneurship, etc. in cities like New York during the turn-of-the-century. If you haven’t already, pick up LaShawn Harris’s Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy. It blew my mind and broke open so many questions for me to think about.
Anyways, let me stick a pin in that before I get too ahead of myself.
All-in-all, I think it would do some good to think critically about women-as-icons in progressive movements. Spiritualism is but one example, and admittedly, it feels estranged to the current circumstances we find ourselves in. I don’t know if I am fully convinced of that assumption, though, given what we are seeing in discourses surrounding madness, neuro-divergence, and public vs. private demonstrations of them both. I also think it matters how dark tourism, historiography, and folklore can be so deeply devoid of sharp cultural critique to where conversations like these can quickly run dry.
In any case, I feel for the sisters Fox, and the unknown numbers of women and girls that Spiritualism pushed into the deep end. I feel for them in their web of exploitation, abuse, precarity, and paranoia, and the agency that they nevertheless fought for throughout. In many ways I completely understand why they came out so aggressively against Spiritualism, for theirs was a fundamental critique of people, not the hereafter.
And, yes, I think the Spiritualist movement was a lot less inventive than its proponents may have claimed it to be. Yet, I lament that we do not have more messy discussions of women and girls at the heart of these movements: those who were considered extraordinary and yet, still, remained obligated to conventions both visible and invisible. But that’s what happens when you are more-or-less expected to not just be the life of the party, but projectors of a settler-colonial, white supremacist cosmology which nevertheless casts white people as the primary subjects who observe and define all of its wonder.
"I regard Spiritualism as one of the greatest curses that the world has ever known."
– Kate Fox, October 9, 1888.