Women, Reform, and the Churches

Spiritualism's significance is not exhausted by the question of whether the rappings were genuine. As the historian Ann Braude has shown, the movement gave nineteenth-century women a rare public religious authority: because mediumship required no ordination, education or institutional sanction, only the "gift", women became its most prominent voices, and Spiritualist platforms became entangled with the causes of abolition and of women's rights, so that the seance and the reform lecture often shared a speaker.

The movement also helped provoke the founding of organised psychical research, the Society for Psychical Research was established in London in 1882, which set out to investigate mediums scientifically and produced both exposures of fraud and a serious literature on the question of survival. Spiritualism endures today in organised Spiritualist churches and the National Spiritualist Association, a living if much smaller religious body, and its imprint on modern popular ideas about mediums and contact with the dead is large.