Music for the Kingdom of Shadows: Cinema Accompaniment in the Age of Spiritualism

This idea of extra scrutiny seems crucial. Were there similarly disproportionate expectations for women in other socially permitted careers? Teaching is the obvious analogy for performance.

Actually, I see now that the video provides some of the explanation I was looking for a few paragraphs back –insert a clearer reference to the video?

Either here or somewhere else (cross-referenced from here) it would be useful to have a brief description of exactly what the Photo Player did and how it worked. From the pics I deduce that it contained some kind of memory that allowed the keyboardist to make (automatic?) sounds on additional instruments while she played a straight piano/organ instrument.

Both here and later I have difficulty with this analogy of technologies. Those employed by mediums seem pretty cheap and low-end by any standards, even those of the 19th century; while motion pictures and electric organs were among the more elaborate and expensive and quickly mass-commercialized technologies invented in the period.

I am glad you have this section because I was just starting to wonder about the explicit connections and why you were arguing for the importance of pairing them together in this book. Perhaps you could make some of this information clearer in your introduction? Or even the introduction to this chapter?

Actually, I’m rethinking my comment about financial accounting. Were these women all single & supporting themselves (mediums and players) or were they sometimes married? My first instinct would be that these women would of course be unmarried, but I’m obviously not the expert.

I know (again, sorry) in my period that dutiful wives were occasionally asked to keep the books – was that true by the early twentieth century? How is that relevant here?

Forgive me if you’ve said this elsewhere and I missed it, but re: section 17 — are there any statistics on approximately how many women / what percentage of women in the early twentieth century might have been involved as spiritualists?

This idea of pretending to less knowledge than they actually had is so great. Go, ladies!

I’m not sure if you’re thinking of Habermas here in part 12, but more recent scholarship (more recent than Walkowitz, too) has realized that the separate spheres idea is an inaccurate one (in literary and historical studies, that is). I don’t know if it’s worth citing a different source that doesn’t preserve this binary idea, or if you want to clarify in this paragraph that you are aware that the idea of completely separate spheres is a bit misleading.