Micro: What One Page of the BofL Can Tell Us (Part 3)

Now the fun stuff. Not statistically significant. For anyone who wants to crunch for themselves, the data set referenced is available in Numbers and Excel formats.

There are 170 speakers -- first- or second-circle Spiritualists -- willing to lecture (for money, in almost all cases) in the issue of the BofL I am looking at. Of those 170 speakers, I class 27 of them as first-circle, based on whether or not they feature regularly in the BofL, and/or publish works on Spiritualism, and/or participate in the founding of other movements. My 27 first-circle Spiritualists are: Mrs. H. M. F. Brown, Emma Bullene, Adin Ballou, Warren Chase, Laura Cuppy, Lizzie Doten, Andrew Jackson Davis, E. C. Dunn, S. J. Finney, Laura De Force Gordon, Mrs. D. A. Gallion, Emma Hardinge, Mrs. F. O. Hyzer, Moses Hull, Anna Kimball, J. S. Loveland, Leo Miller, J. M. Peebles, L. Judd Pardee, Anna M. L. Potts, P. B. Randolph, H. B. Storer, J. H. W. Toohey, Hudson Tuttle, A. B Whiting, E. V. Wilson, Lois Waisbrooker, and Henry C. Wright. Someone more familiar with the movement than I am may well class some of my second circle as first circle; I did the classification on the basis of my knowledge only.

By gender: 11 first-circle Spiritualists are female, and 16 male. For the second circle (N=143), 62 are female and 81 men. (Note to academics: "most" are NOT women.)

By state: first-circle cadre bases itself in 14 states: IL (3), NY (5), MA (7), CA (1), NJ (1), MI (2), CO (1), IA (1), MD (1), WI (1), OH (2), PA (1), KY (1), MN (1). Second circle cadre bases itself in at least 17 states (there were four UNKNOWNS): MA (33 -- due to the fact that the BofL is in Boston), WI (8), MS (1), NY (19), MI (15), VT (7), IA (4), NH (4), IL (13), CT (6), NJ (4), OH (8), IN (2), ME (5), PA (4), CA (2), KS (1),

There are other things worth noting here (1867, mind you) including 2 female licensed (I checked) MDs on the list (one first, one second circle), some sites in the upper Midwest with 3 or 4 mediums/speakers based there, and generally a density in the Midwest that is surprising, since the Midwestern Spiritualist community had its own organ, the RPJ, by this time.

A final thought: it's tedious to consider, but.... I have 20 years of the BofL in preparation for IAPSOP; that's 1040 issues, each of which has a page like this, representing a more or less week-by-week snapshot (time-delayed in many cases by 1-3 weeks for post and BofL production cycles). At, say, 100 lecturers per week, that is 104,000 data points about place, gender, class, topic and other key aspects of the actual operation of the actual Spiritualist network in the US. It took me two hours to do 1 issue: 2080 person-hours worth of work. With that 20-year-period, week by week, in a database, we would actually be in a position to make generalizations about MS based on real data, and I suspect "most of them were women" would, along with a lot of other unsubstantiated generalizations, fall by the wayside.