When We Spoke to the Dead: How Ghosts Gave American Women Their Voice

Ghosts spoke. Women listened. Everything changed.

It began with whispers in a dimly lit room. In the 1840s, the Fox Sisters—and the legions of mediums they inspired—ignited the Spiritualist movement that swept through Victorian parlors and presidential campaigns alike. Contacting the dead wasn't merely a parlor trick: It was a political statement, a declaration of self that still echoes. Séances attracted suffragists and scientists, skeptics and charlatans, giving women a voice in a society ...