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..

... enthralling.

Midorikawa focuses her text on the women’s personal histories and activities before and during their Spiritualist phases. She only briefly touches on aspects of their later lives, including Woodhull’s fervent eugenicist beliefs and the Fox sisters eventually confessing to fraud.

Midorikawa gives readers a simplified and overly romantic portrayal of heroic young women bravely fighting the patriarchy during an era of intense gender-based restrictions. At no point does she consider the idea that the women’s performances could have cast them—and potentially all women—as irresponsible and untrustworthy, or that their scams might have suggested that women in general were undeserving of financial independence and social power. Instead, Midorikawa states that our modern perspective might 'mean few readers today will trust in the feats supposedly performed by the famed mediums of the Victorian era'. She argues that our contemporary view 'has led to [spiritualism’s] devaluing as a historical movement of significance'...This argument needn’t be true. A thoughtful analysis of how spiritualism allowed women to present themselves in public (and sometimes even in political roles) does not require us to believe that they might have had supernatural talents or to accept that those women were heroes. In an era when our society has to fight every day against fake news and the rejection of the scientific method, authors who turn their complicated historical subjects into supposedly inspirational role models and heroines are doing both them and us a disservice..

... lively portraits.

... entertaining and informative.