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Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice
Bottom of the pile
15
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
12/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Emily Midorikawa
Publisher:
Counterpoint
Date:
May 11, 2021
Tell the stories of six enterprising Victorian women whose apparent ability to move between the realms of the dead and the living allowed them to cross rigid boundaries of gender and class, and to summon unique political voices.
What The Reviewers Say
Midorikawa breathes life into these long-ago women in ways that make them feel contemporary despite their extraordinary circumstances and distance in time. Her description of Harding enduring an incident of stalking resonates with chilling familiarity. You’ll feel these women’s frustration and conviction, and you’ll cheer at their progressive empowerment.
... a large and variously peopled world of rights conventions, séances and legal proceedings, where suffragists, abolitionists, spiritualists and charlatans mixed in and out of drawing rooms. This is the great strength of Out of the Shadows; it offers up a tapestry of complex characters with conflicted motivations, woven together with the color of ghostly apparitions (and angry mobs).
Midorikawa’s chosen Spiritualists are a colorful bunch, and her lively writing makes their careers fun to follow. But why bring them together in a book? The author ventures that these six women acquired a 'voice within a patriarchal society' and, as such, belong in our accounts of 'the journey toward female empowerment.' True, every one of those visionaries knew how to draw a crowd. It’s true, too, that Spiritualists as a group played a major role in spreading the message about women’s rights throughout the 19th century and that merely by standing up and speaking in public they were defying Victorian gender norms. Yet the goal of advancing feminism played little role in prompting the careers of the women described by Midorikawa.
The author does an excellent job of characterizing the social milieu and constraints that these women were subject to, though the validity of the spiritualist process is not addressed. This well-researched book offers insight into a unique niche of women’s history, and would be a worthy addition to most libraries..
