Word for Word: Abolition

I’m in a writers’ group that meets on Zoom, though before the pandemic we met in person. Every week, we do a writing prompt: someone gives a page number, and our organizer picks a word from a huge dictionary. We write for five minutes. In this example, the word is: abolition.

Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America by Ann Braude, the main book that inspired my response to today’s word prompt.

Spiritualism was born in upstate New York in 1848, when the Fox Sisters claimed they were communicating with ghosts that tapped on surfaces. However, Spiritualism in the 1850s and ’60s ended up being more than about communicating with spirits. It was tied in with abolition and women’s suffrage. Spiritualists were abolitionists and suffragists, many of whom were Quakers. After the Civil War, abolition was no longer an issue, but Spiritualism was still tied in with women’s rights. It was acceptable for women to speak in public… as long as the audience believed that spirits were speaking through them.

The current abolition movement is about abolishing the prison industrial complex. I think it’s also about defunding police, whose origin is in slave-catching, but I need to read up more on modern-day abolition books before I’m certain. Another reason to read up on the topic is to have a better understanding of what society would look like.

My novel Skeleton from the Closet is available at Amazon.com:

Skeleton from the Closet