ABSTRACT
This chapter argues in large part because mediumship so closely replicated private secretarydom, illuminating its contradictory appeal to both self- assertion and self-effacement, to professional status and inspired amateurism, to public service and private ministration. In representing themselves as secretaries to the stars, mediums rehearsed the dual roles their communicators assigned them: at once the elite of the elite, the specially "chosen", and common work-a-day drudges, the mundanely serviceable. The chapter also argues that in taking to the extreme this vision of secretarial labor, these mediums, opened a new space for their own agency and influence by putting into view the opportunities for authorship implicit in dictation and typewriting. For the mediums who facilitated the communications, their role as secretary to a host of major luminaries conferred on them considerable authority as well as influence, if only in spiritualist and psychical research communities.
