Spiritualists loved starting newspapers, and women found opportunities to edit their own newspapers or write regularly for certain titles.

In the booming print culture of the 19th century, newspapers proliferated, and Spiritualists jumped on this fast and cheap medium to spread their ideas. For Spiritualists, who disliked formal organization and hierarchical authority, the press was vital in linking believers across wide geographic space. Since Spiritualism preached gender equality, its ranks included many women’s suffrage activists, and the resulting woman-edited periodicals often covered reform movements.

Ann Braude, in her work compiling lists of Spiritualist titles, asserts that likely more than 214 Spiritualist newspapers circulated during the 19th century [1]. Most of these newspapers folded quickly. But Spiritualists kept trying, because the better future that they dreamed of depended on spreading the spiritual word: “[o]nce bringing out a paper is seen as a religious vocation, a reform activity, a vehicle for truth, and a source of cohesion in a nongeographic community, it is clear that it did not matter whether it paid or not” [2]. In 1874, Minnesota printer and Spiritualist A. Gaylord Spalding called the newspaper “the new bible” that was found everywhere [3].

In California, Spiritualist newspapers were a site of intersection for many threads in the print culture network. Several women editors listed below also fit under the printers category, as they printed their own paper and completed job work. Newspaper agents sold subscriptions to readers, who benefitted from the railroad lines bringing periodicals from all over the country. At least 25 Spiritualist titles came out of California before 1900, with at least 15 from San Francisco alone. These periodicals ran mediums’ ads, accounts of seances and lectures, speaker schedules, and women’s writing. 

A few prominent women who edited Spiritualist newspapers are described below, and further down is an evolving list of Spiritualist newspapers on the West Coast along with any women editors attached to the titles.