Click on the different categories in the web diagram above to learn more about women's labor in each role.
How did women and women's labor shape the life cycles of Spiritualist printed texts in California?
My research has shown that Spiritualist text objects from 19th century California were created by collectives in which women were an integral part. While print production was still a male-dominated space, women were enmeshed in Spiritualist print culture. They worked at many levels in this network, which collaboratively made texts and connected communities across the West Coast and across the country.
This network demonstrates Helen Smith’s “spiderweb” model of women in book history, which she outlines in 'Grossly Material Things': Women and Book Production In Early Modern England (2012)[1]. Smith does a feminist revision of Robert Darnton’s oft-cited “Communications Circuit,” which sought to diagram “a circuit for transmitting texts” with an emphasis on people rather than only objects [2]. Darnton’s circuit is a valuable model for visualizing people’s roles in print production, but Smith rightfully critiques the traditional depiction of book history as a solely male realm. Drawing from Virginia Woolf’s description in A Room of One’s Own of fiction as a spider’s web, with each interconnected thread holding up a corner of “grossly material things,”[3] Smith argues that printed texts are products of complex, embodied, and laborious social factors:
“Rather than being a circuit or map, the life of a book may best be represented through Woolf’s web, connecting the discursive strands of the text to the people and things which shape and are shaped by it…the strands of the web are not simply dependent upon, but are made of, interlinked economic, social, and corporeal relationship.” [4]
Smith stresses authorship as a collaborative concept: “[t]exts, rather than being the product of a solitary author, transmitted direct from fertile mind to well-stocked bookshelf, are the products of numerous processes populated by diverse persons" [5]. Each thread has a hand in shaping the product. Maureen Bell has also feminized the book history model, calling on scholars to consider “the specifics of women’s agency, as writers, scribes, patrons, dedicatees, translators, editors; as printers, booksellers, bookbinders, publishers, hawkers, mercuries and peddlers; and as owners, listeners, readers and collectors of books" [6].
While Smith’s scope is women in early modern England, we can also apply her model to women in 19th century American Spiritualist print culture.
Sources
[1] Helen Smith, “Introduction,” in ’Grossly Material Things': Women and Book Production In Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1-15, e-book, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.32872, accessed 24 Jan 2021, downloaded on behalf of Wellesley College.
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[2] Robert Darnton, “What is the history of books?” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 67, Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard. Darnton also revised his Communications Circuit in a later article: Robert Darnton, “‘What is the history of books?’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (2007): 495–508, doi:10.1017/S1479244307001370, Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.
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[3] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 62-63, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/woolf_aroom/page/n1/mode/2up.
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[4] Helen Smith, “Introduction,” 9-10.
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[5] Helen Smith, “Introduction,” 2.
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[6] Maureen Bell, “Women Writing and Women Written,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 6 vols., ed. by John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, assistant ed. by Maureen Bell (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Quoted in Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production In Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3-4, e-book, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.32872, accessed 24 Jan 2021, downloaded on behalf of Wellesley College.
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[7] Wm. Emmette Coleman, “Introduction,” in Workers in the Vineyard: A Review of the Progress of Spiritualism, Biographical Sketches, Lectures, Essays and Poems, by Julia Schlesinger (San Francisco, California, 1896), 16, HathiTrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100128052.
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'With voice, pen, money, or otherwise': Tracking women's involvement in Spiritualist print culture in 19th century California
By investigating women’s labor in print production’s interwoven threads, we find that without women, the web would fall apart. This print network is too enmeshed to untangle the strands into a neat diagram. Social and economic factors shape these women and their labor, which in turn shapes the creation of printed texts. I draw inspiration from Smith’s spiderweb to envision the vibrant culture of Spiritualist texts in California, and I've chosen to focus on identifying the roles that women inhabited. This project does not encompass all the factors at play in the web — but showing the relationships between people and highlighting individual women’s labor helps illuminate at least part of this printed world.
Women’s roles that I’ve identified include readers, printers/printing organizations, newspaper editors/writers, typesetters, authors, booksellers, agents, mediums, speakers, and librarians. Follow the links in the above diagram to read more about each thread and find examples of women working in those roles.
Each of these roles affects the others: authors are spiritually inspired in seance circles, newspaper editors advertise the mediums, typesetters set the words, agents sell the printed texts on commission from the booksellers, librarians share the products with their communities, and readers inform the market demand for the authors’ work. Familiar names pop up in multiple sections. Teasing apart these sections for the project was difficult, as many categories overlap, and I could’ve made different organizational decisions.
This is also not a complete diagram. There are many roles left to investigate — visit the Continuing Questions page to read about future research possibilities.
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The introduction by Wm. Emmette Coleman in Julia Schlesinger’s Workers in the Vineyard (1896) describes this interconnected network of Pacific Coast women and men spreading the “Spiritualistic Gospel”:
Check out the Their World page for more about the context these women lived in, including information on Spiritualism, its relationship to print, and the community in California. If you’d like to submit a comment, question, research lead, or correction, visit the Contact page.
Happy exploring!
“In addition to many noble workers native to it or resident therein, this coast has been enriched by the presence and labors of a number of the leading ‘workers in the vineyard’ from all parts of America, and from England and other countries…the mediums, the lecturers, the writers, the workers in the societies and the lyceums, the sustainers and promoters of the good work by their means, their time, their influence, etc.,—the active ‘workers’ in the cause, whether with voice, pen, money, or otherwise.” [7]