CONTINUING QUESTIONS
This is a work in progress.
I have a lot of remaining questions.
There are many roles in the West Coast printing industry that women may have been involved in. Some of these roles include:
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Image-makers: Some women worked as wood engravers in San Francisco. Abbie T. Crane, Leila Curtis, Eleanor P. Gibbons, and Mary E. Ingalsbe all variously worked in a wood engraving firm together, sometimes called Crane and Curtis Co. [Edna Martin Parratt, “Women Printers and Engravers in San Francisco,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations 56 (1952): 42-43, New York: New York Public Library, on Hathitrust Digital Library]. I’m unclear whether there were women artists who contributed to Spiritualist publications.
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Bookbinders
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Other roles in the print shop, like press feeders (often a woman’s job)
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Workers in type foundries
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Part of the “supply chain”: papermakers, ink-makers
19th century California was a multiracial geography, but there are gaps in current research and in archival sources. While I’ve tried to include diverse stories, I acknowledge this project’s shortcomings and the work I still need to do as I continue. A big challenge was trying to investigate African American printing in the West, since the research is still developing and there are silences in the primary sources. African American clubwomen were especially influential, and formed many literary and social aid clubs. What was the presence of African American and other women of color in these print networks? What did the contact zones look like between California’s multiethnic communities, and how did they intersect with Spiritualism? Were Spiritualist circles and mediums’ clientele in California primarily white, divided along racial lines, or integrated?
My scope also ends at approximately 1900. With the rise of typewriters and other writing technologies, Spiritualist practice and authorship changed quite a bit. Women’s creation of Spiritualist books in the first decades of the 20th century deserves its own attention.
Continuing this research, I plan to expand my newspaper resource pool and track down evidence from more titles, especially the few other Spiritualist periodicals on the West Coast that had women editors.
And beyond these questions about women’s labor in printing, what were the meanings of texts in Spiritualist practice, especially for women? What was the relationship between print’s materiality and Spiritualism’s immaterial world of ghosts?