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 ... It’s remarkable that none of these women seems disingenuous. Throughout Out of the Shadows, they occupy a liminal space between genuine belief in supernatural forces and the ingenious ways they used those forces to their own ends. By the book’s end, it no longer matters whether you believe these six remarkable spirit mediums were hoaxes or not; you’ll certainly believe in them.

... 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) ... Ms. Midorikawa leaves the reader to draw final conclusions. Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is the book’s presentation of these women as being both seen and heard. They are not mere embellishments of the parlor, nor are they, like the spirits they claimed to summon, mere disembodied voices in the night. Each of them stood before a public world where women had not yet gained basic human rights and demanded the spotlight. And this is visionary indeed.

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 ... Other Spiritualists would have made a much better fit as feminists, but Midorikawa’s ensemble do belong together in a different book — one that explores the making of popular entertainments in the 19th century and the origins of celebrity.

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 has assembled and analyzed an impressive range and variety of sources in building her biographies, but also in delineating the social, scientific and political changes that formed their backdrop. This was an era of rapid scientific changes bewildering to most people, as well as a time when the rumblings of the feminist movement in both US and UK were attracting more general attention. The latter and its relationship to the anti-slavery movement could have been further elaborated ... Overall, however, this is a thrilling read, striking inter alia for the nonchalance with which these female Victorian visionaries took on the rigours of transatlantic travel, and for the incidental intertwining of their remarkable lives.

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 ... Brisk and entertaining, this biography should draw the attention of readers interested in the social effects of the Spiritualist movement, or in 19th-century women’s history.

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 ... Drawing on archival material and contemporary accounts of the women’s personal and professional entanglements, Midorikawa briskly recounts their eventful lives, accomplishing the goal inherent in the book’s title ... A well-researched, fresh contribution to women’s history.

... entertaining and informative ... Midorikawa doesn’t stint on the drama, detailing money troubles, sisterly discord, poor marital choices, and fraud accusations as she builds a persuasive case for the Spiritualist movement’s considerable influence on 'the journey toward female empowerment.' Women’s history buffs will be enthralled.