Invisible Hosts: Performing The Nineteenth-Century Spirit Medium’s Autobiography

Finalist – 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Religion category

Provides a rhetorical analysis of female spirit mediums’ autobiographies in the historical and social contexts of Victorian-era America. Invisible Hosts explores how the central tenets of Spiritualism influenced ways in which women conceived of their bodies and their civic responsibilities, arguing that Spiritualist ideologies helped to lay the foundation for the social and political advances made by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As public figures, female spirit mediums of the Victorian era were often accused of unfeminine (and therefore transgressive) behavior. A rhetorical analysis of nineteenth-century spirit mediums’ autobiographies reveals how these women convinced readers of their authenticity both as respectable women and as psychics. The author argues that these women’s autobiographies reflect an attempt to emulate feminine virtues even as their interpretation and performance of these virtues helped to transform prevailing gender stereotypes. She demonstrates that the social performance central to the production of women’s autobiography is uniquely complicated by Spiritualist ideology. Such complications reveal new information about how women represented themselves, gained agency, and renegotiated nineteenth-century gender roles.

“This brief study will benefit scholars of new religions, the history of feminism, and nineteenth-century American culture. It is a solid contribution to the growing body of scholarly work that is expanding our understanding of the significance of Spiritualism and its practitioners.” — Nova Religio

“There is much solid historical scholarship within these contents, and newcomers to the field will appreciate Lowry’s clarity of expression and useful summations of key events in spiritualist history.” — Aries