Women, Power & Spiritualism

ELT 49 : 2 2006 nineteenth-century literature. "The first principle of good housekeeping is to have no dark corners," writes Sarah Grand, and in that respect the book, it is to be hoped, will succeed in its aim of itself being an example of literary housekeeping. If nothing else, Raising the Dust ought to spark interest in the novels of Ward, Grand, and Gilman, many of which are still either out of print or difficult to obtain at anything like a reasonable cost. ANNA PEAK ------------------------ Temple University Women, Power & Spiritualism Alex Owen. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xxi + 314 pp. Paper $19.00 ALEX OWEN'S The Darkened Room, which first appeared more than a decade ago, now in paperback, examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers and pioneers during the so-called golden age of Spiritualism in the late-Victorian period. Owen argues that women have been "virtually written out of a movement [Spiritualism ] in which they originally held a revered and privileged place." This is partly because women were less likely to write up their spiritualist experiences for public consumption and partly because they seemed less keen than their male counterparts and guardians to take the role of evangeliser on behalf of spiritualist causes. However, as Owen's detailed and scrupulous research in this book shows, women had a vital role to play as mediums and as supporters of Victorian Spiritualism. Owen begins by outlining the position in which women in the latenineteenth century found themselves legally, socially and professionally . She investigates key changes in legislation that affected the status of women such as the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 and describes the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement. She uses this as a backdrop to the rest of the book, returning to issues raised, for example, by the Married Women's Property Act in later chapters on the legal dilemmas of Georgina Weldon and Louisa Lowe. Owen's summary of the main points pertaining to the position of women in this period is succinct and helpful. One area that may have benefited from more explanation, however, is the question of women's dress. This was a key preoccupation during the late-nineteenth century as women campaigned to be freed from the clothing which literally constrained them. The English Rational Dress Society, for example, was formed in 1881 for the promotion of rational 208 BOOK REVIEWS dress for women. The primary aims of the society were to draw attention to the restrictive corsetry of the day and to encourage women to wear a maximum of seven pounds of underwear. Most women during this period wore at least fourteen pounds of underwear. Owen mentions the Rational Dress campaign in passing but it would have been interesting, for example, to have seen how the dress worn by women mediums during public and private sittings fitted in with the arguments being made about clothing at the time. Were mediums, for example , trying to indicate their respectability by dressing appropriately or did they adopt a more bohemian attire in order to indicate their difference from the women who did not share their gifts? One of the most interesting points in Owen's book is the central dichotomy she identifies in the position of women mediums. They were, on the one hand, given by Spiritualism "attention, opportunity, and status denied elsewhere" but on the other hand, "the 'innate' feminine qualities which afforded women scope and status as mediums also bound them to contemporary codes and definitions." The very idea of women as in some way gifted in dealing with the spirit world thus tied them to the preconception that they were more sensitive and passive than men. Although therefore women took on a powerful role in mediating between the spirit world and the temporal, they remained merely communication "vessels." Owen examines this dichotomy in detail, taking it a step further in her chapter on mediumship and medicine. She argues that the progressive nature of medicine in the late-nineteenth century meant that doctors were keen to apply objective scientific research to Spiritualism. This would lead...