READERS
Spiritualist believers, newspaper subscribers, book buyers, library patrons, reformers and activists
Women readers made up a diverse group, with a range of motivations and ways of consuming texts. Readers controlled market demand, influencing the content and delivery of books, newspapers, and pamphlets. And printed words took on a life of their own once they left the printing press. Once the words were out in the world, women made them their own!
The 19th century’s more accessible reading culture and increase of cheap printed material allowed women to form new kinds of communities with each other. During this time, the idea of gendered spheres—that women belonged in the “private” domestic sphere, and men in the public sphere—was prevalent and shaped women’s social, political, and economic activities. But printed texts expanded these spheres: “reading has been a connecting factor for women past and present, mediating between dreams and lived experiences, between private and public” opening up “a larger world” [1]. For California Spiritualists, this larger world was made up of lyceums and lecture halls, libraries, bookshops in physical spaces and through the mail, seance circles, letter-writing networks, and a newspaper reading community both near and far, as well as the living room at home.
And the Spiritualist reading pool was substantial. Spiritualist newspaper editor Julia Schlesinger wrote in 1896 that Spiritualism “has crept silently into the pages of popular books, magazines and newspapers throughout the land, and unconsciously has the public mind been educated and moulded into conformity therewith” and had taken root in California as early as 1857 [2]. The 1871 edition of The American Booksellers Guide reported that the number of “Spiritual and Progressive” books and pamphlets sold that year was around 100,000 and that “[t]he sale of these books is as steady as of books in any other department of the trade, and they should not be overlooked by the bookseller” [3].
Women read newspapers; books they bought from agents, shops, or ordered through newspaper advertisements; or checked out library books for themselves or their children.
Sources
Images:
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[Woman reading a book] “Woman reading a book at Sugar Loaf, Santa Catalina Island, 1892.” Photograph, 1892. University of Southern California Libraries and California Historical Society. Digitally reproduced by the USC Digital Library, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll65/id/26037.
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[1] Barbara Sicherman, “Connecting Lives: Women and Reading, Then and Now,” in Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 8-9, ProQuest Ebook Central.
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[2] Julia Schlesinger, Workers in the Vineyard: A Review of the Progress of Spiritualism, Biographical Sketches, Lectures, Essays and Poems (San Francisco, California, 1896), 19, 23, HathiTrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100128052.
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[3] The American Booksellers Guide (New York: American News Co., 1871), 62, HathiTrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102657159.
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[4] Elizabeth Long, “Foreword,” in Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), xviii, ProQuest Ebook Central.
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[5] The Carrier Dove, April 1887 (San Francisco, California), page 139. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/carrier_dove/.
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[6] The Carrier Dove, April 1887 (San Francisco, California), page 143. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/carrier_dove/.
The ways that women used and experienced these printed materials can tell us a lot of interesting things. The letters that women wrote to newspapers are one avenue of seeing how Spiritualist texts functioned in women’s lives. “Letters from readers show the importance of print culture for satisfying women’s hunger for substantive intellectual and political fare, and also for giving them a sense of companionship and common purpose with other likeminded women” [4]. Spiritualist women formed communities of print through their shared beliefs.
In one letter written to The Carrier Dove, the illustrated Spiritualist journal put out by Julia Schlesinger, San Francisco resident Eliza A. Pittsinger expresses the deep meaning she finds in the journal’s words:
Dr. and Julie—Dear Friends: I have been reading and examining The Carrier Dove, and here let me congratulate you on your glorious success. Typographically, it reaches the summit of grace and beauty, and its pages seem to be overflowing with the divine manna, such as we might suppose makes fitting food for the redeemed and glorified, My sister finds in it much to comfort her in her loneliness; for you know our darling Jonetta now speaks to us from the spirit side of life. Go on, brother an sister, in the work so nobly begun. may all good Powers be with you to cheer and to bless. Yours in the bonds of divine love, Eliza A. Pittsinger.” [5]
-- The Carrier Dove, April 1887
Print acts a proxy for lost loved ones, bringing comfort to those still living. In some cases, printed words speak for the spirits. A few pages later in the same edition, Eliza’s niece reaches out to her aunt and mother in “A Message from Jonetta May Ingram in Spirit Life”:
Jonetta lives; she’s born again…
So much I now desire to say:
A poet came to me to-day,
Told me of auntie, said she’d write,
If I the language would indite;
And so dear papa stood by me,
And he and I did both agree
To send these lines, that you might know
The tender love that we bestow…” [6]
-- The Carrier Dove, April 1887