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• 1 2016-11-23T12:49:30-05:00 Evenings with the Spirits 3 plain 2016-12-16T21:07:17-05:00 In the article “Evenings with the Spirits” (The Sixpenny Magazine, 1868) the journalist L.E. attends three séances to test the validity of spiritualism. In the section excerpted below L.E. describes a female medium and her chaperone, paying particular attention to the gender and class of each. While spiritualism and séances in particular did grant women different kinds of power and authority (as Berry and Houghton demonstrate), they could be monitored and hegemonically controlled by men. This excerpt does not disprove the argument put forward by so many feminist scholars that spiritualism was often an avenue to power for women; I included this excerpt merely to complicate this generalized and homogenous interpretation of a phenomena that has many unique instantiations.