THEIR WORLD

What was 19th century California and its printing world like for these women?

What is Spiritualism?

Spirit photograph by William Mumler of medium Fannie Conant with a spirit, supposedly her brother, circa 1868.

Spiritualism was a religious movement that gained widespread support in the mid-19th century and persisted, in evolving forms, through the early 20th century. Its central belief was that the immortality of the soul could be proven by contact with the dead through human mediums. Spiritualism’s origins are typically traced to the Fox sisters and the mysterious “Rochester rappings” of upstate New York in 1848, though this resonated with existing religious countercultures. Spiritualism seemed to be primarily a white movement, but there were African American followers in the mid- and late-19th century and more Black Spiritualist circles developed in the early 20th [1].

The curiosity in spirit contact often went hand in hand with radical dreaming for an improved society in the physical realm, too. The movement mixed religion with philosophy, science, and new technologies, intertwining with social justice and reform causes like the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, the health movement, and dress reform. Rather than being just a silly fringe movement, Spiritualism was an important presence in American life.

Spiritualism provided women the opportunity to inhabit influential roles and step into religious leadership. “Not all feminists were Spiritualists,” Ann Braude writes, “but all Spiritualists advocated woman’s rights, and women were in fact equal to men within Spiritualist practice, polity, and ideology” [2]. Spiritualist women spoke in trance on lecture circuits, held séance circles, ran newspapers, wrote books, or attended these gatherings and consumed these texts.

The 19th century print boom

Ad for the Women's Cooperative Printing Union in San Francisco, showing a woman working a printing press.

Ad for the Women's Cooperative Printing Union, which operated in San Francisco from 1868-1901.

Spiritualism’s rapid rise may have been intrinsically tied to the the rise of the media entertainment industry and the emerging mass market of books [3]. America was experiencing a boom in print, due to industrialization and new technologies in printing, paper production, and bookbinding. There was also increasing literacy and public education, a middle-class value of self-improvement, railroads to carry texts across the country, and eyeglasses to read them.

Americans could now get their hands on affordable books, pamphlets, and newspapers more than ever before. Spiritualists used these new mass print technologies to connect a wide readership over vast distances. The American Booksellers Guide from 1871 reports 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” [4]. Spiritualism’s anti-organizational nature meant that the public press was an important way for believers scattered across the country to share information and make connections. Spreading the message was seen as “a religious vocation, a reform activity, a vehicle for truth, and a source of cohesion in a nongeographic community” [5]. Periodicals, books, and pamphlets created their own geography, a collective space for ideas, activism, and organization across both earthly and spiritual boundaries.

Putting it all together: Spiritualism, women, and print culture in California

Map of California, 1851.

Print culture was central to the Spiritualist community just as much on the West Coast as the East, and women were instrumental in spreading the spiritual word.

Many Spiritualists, political radicals, and utopian dreamers moved West as part of the influx of settlers brought by the 1849 Gold Rush. White Americans perceived the Western frontier as open for development, but Native Americans, Mexicans, and other communities already called California home. White settlers, including Spiritualists, were part of this colonialist context. California also had growing African American communities, San Francisco in particular, and many cities had large Chinese populations [6]. The first Spiritualist lectures in San Francisco were held in 1859 [7]. The movement then grew quickly, and the next several decades saw an active West Coast culture of speakers, mediums, lyceums, state conventions, and newspapers.

These Spiritualists produced a lot of printed material. From my count so far, at least 25 Spiritualist titles came out of California before 1900 with at least 15 from San Francisco alone. Industry’s fast growth on the West Coast, with San Francisco as a printing hub, aided Spiritualist text production. San Francisco went from having 2 typefounders and 26 printers in 1869 to 8 typefoundries and 80 printers in 1884, with print shops printing in a number of languages [8]. Several important African American newspapers also connected communities in California cities (Eric Gardner has done important work on this subject) [9]. During this time, Indigenous communities in California were enduring devastating land grabs by the U.S. government in manipulative policy struggles that would stretch into the next century and the present day; but prominent examples of Indigenous newspaper printing in California exist from the mid--20th century [10].

The print industry remained male-dominated. But Spiritualist women in California, as other women across the country, filled roles in printing, writing, and selling (not to mention reading!). Not only were they trance speakers and mediums, they were also authors, editors, typesetters, bookbinders, illustrators, fine press designers, and booksellers. More and more women were joining the job force, and the printing trade offered considerable opportunity to women. And they organized—as early as the 1870s and 1880s, women-run printing associations like the Women’s Union Job Printing Co., the Woman’s Publishing Company, and the Women’s Co-operative Printing Union were producing a wide range of media (see the p rinting/printing organizations page for more on these groups). All of these factors combined to create the unique Spiritualist media network in California, in which women played an integral part.

To find out more about Spiritualism, 19th century California, and women in print, check out the Suggested Resources page.

Sources

Images:

[Spirit photograph] William Mumler, Mumler_(Conant).jpg, circa 1868, carte de visite, Wikimedia Commons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mumler_(Conant).jpg.

[Ad for the Women's Cooperative Printing Union] From the West Coast Journal, May 18, 1870. Sourced from Bancroft Library, in Mae Silver and Sue Cazaly, The Sixth Star (San Francisco: Ord Street Press, 2000), FoundSF. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Women%E2%80%99s_Co-operative_Printing_Union.

[Map of California, 1851] A newly constructed and improved map of the State of California: shewing the extent and boundary of the different counties according to an act passed by the Legislature April 25th, with a corrected and improved delineation of the gold region. J. B. Tassin, cartographer and compiler. San Francisco: Published by Cooke and Lecount, 1851. San Francisco: Lith. by Pollard & Peregoy, 1851. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018588046/.

[1] Mary Ann Clark, “Spirit Is Universal: Development of Black Spiritualist Churches,” in Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: ‘There Is a Mystery’…, ed. Stephen Finley, Margarita Guillory, and Hugh R. Page, Jr. (Leiden: BRILL, 2014), 96, ProQuest Ebook Central.

[2] Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001), 3.

[3] Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of the Modern Media Culture (Penn State University Press, 2016), Introduction, Hoopla ebook.

[4] The American Booksellers Guide (New York: American News Co., 1871), 62, HathiTrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102657159.

[5] Ann Braude, “News from the Spirit World: A Checklist of American Spiritualist Periodicals, 1847--1900,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 99, no. 2 (October 1989): 405, 409--410, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.simmons.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=31h&AN=44539462&site=eds-live&scope=site.

[6] Marne L. Campbell, Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community, 1850-1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 214, ProQuest Ebook Central.

[7] Julia Schlesinger, Workers in the Vineyard: A Review of the Progress of Spiritualism, Biographical Sketches, Lectures, Essays and Poems (San Francisco, California, 1896), 24-25, HathiTrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100128052.

[8] Alastair M. Johnston, “A Glance at the First Century of California Printing,” Printing History, no. 9 (January 1, 2011): 17, https://ezproxy.simmons.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.270812558&site=eds-live&scope=site.

[9] Several important African American newspapers in California in the latter part of the 19th century were The Mirror of the Times, San Francisco Elevator, and Pacific Appeal. For more on this, see Eric Gardner’s work: “Early African American Print Culture and the American West,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 75-89; and Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

[10] For example, Terri Castaneda, “Making News: Marie Potts and the Smoke Signal of the Federated Indians of California,” 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), 77-125.