While modern American spiritualism was averse to organized religion by design during its nineteenth-century heyday, it bore persistent affinities to progressive movements including abolitionism, socialism and first-wave feminist issues like suffrage and reproductive rights. Indeed, as Ann Braude has noted, while not all women's rights supporters were spiritualists, all spiritualists were feminists. From its genesis in 1848 with the Fox sisters’ rappings (a Morse code-like form of communication by which spirits of the deceased are said to rap or tap out messages to the living) outside of Rochester, New York, spiritualism generally aligned itself with the march of progress, a scientific religion for the future according to some of its proselytes. The relationship between spiritualism and progressivism made sense: the former was premised on the belief that, because there is no death, the dead can continue speaking to the living with a presumed posthumous wisdom about the betterment of life on earth (and beyond). Of course, lofty humanistic messages from the dead often echoed talking points from the social change platforms of actually living persons. Speaking for or being spoken through by the dead was simply a popular performative means by which generally subordinated social groups could—publicly and privately—affect the perspectives of otherwise unattainable audiences. As Cathy Gutierrez has recently judged, though, spiritualist desire to improve the human condition problematically lent itself to a full-on eugenic desire to perfect the human race.

Moreover, and for different reasons altogether, not everyone was receptive to spirit communications from the dead. Namely, workers in emergent professional fields of the 1870s like medicine, and even magic, viewed spiritualists as encroaching upon and even tainting the legitimacies of their own vocations. Charges brought against spiritualist healers and performers typically alleged that they were frauds or something more sinister. Though famed British novelist and actress Florence Marryat recounted of her experiences as a spirit medium—“often have I sat, surrounded by an interested audience, who knew me too well to think me either a lunatic or a liar”—most mediums faced such scrutiny and accusations from the press or in court. After the American Civil War especially, opponents persistently and rather sprawlingly lambasted spiritualists as frauds, criminals, racially backward or suffering from a variety of mental illnesses.