The Auditorium

This chapter focuses on the feminist core of Spiritualism as it manifested in the women’s rights movement. It considers how the Lily Dale auditorium, which was built in 1883, represents the spirit of communal action, of gathering together to enact change. Although it is Susan B. Anthony who garners the most attention for her visits to Lily Dale in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other suffrage luminaries such as the doctor and minister Anna Howard Shaw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and a host of other well-known speakers spread the message of women’s rights in Lily Dale. Moreover, the work by lesser-known grassroots reformers and Spiritualists ensured that Lily Dale was a garden that nurtured the progressive fruit of women’s rights. Ultimately, Lily Dale was a hotbed of suffragist speakers and women’s leadership at the end of the nineteenth century, and continued to be until women got the right to vote. The network of women reformers who lived, worked, and passed through Lily Dale were part of a national movement, connected through Spiritualism as a religion, Spiritualism as a science, or Spiritualism as a vehicle of reform.