The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America

Abstract

the new professions that he believed had emerged in America in the 1850s. It was not a happy admission for him. The sudden and rapid proliferation of men and women who (for a fee) claimed to provide scientific evidence of an afterlife was in his mind anything but a sign of a spiritual awakening in the United States.' His listing of the medium along with the daguerreotypist, the railroad man and the landscape gardener represented a troubled concession to the realities of a country that already had more than its share of hucksters and humbugs. The leveling ethos of Jacksonian America encouraged all kinds of unlearned people to aspire to professional status. None pressed the claim more vociferously than those who presumed to act as channels of communication with the spirit world. Spiritualism grew into a strong cultural force in nineteenth-century America. Once the Fox sisters, with the aid of Horace Greeley and the publicity of the New York Tribune, had proved that people would pay to witness spirit manifestations, mediums appeared in almost every city and town in the country.2