Print Culture and the Construction of Radical Identity: Juliet H. Severance and the Reform Press in Late Nineteenth-Century America

"The author ashamed of professed Liberals", declared Juliet H. Severance in 1893, which are "so ignorant as not to perceive that this is the club with which the church intends to beat out the brains of the Liberal movement". An amalgam of nineteenth-century religious, reform, and third-party political movements, Juliet Severance's life offers an excellent opportunity to explore how social radicals used print culture to construct identity, build community, and challenge socially and legally sanctioned ideas. The epistolary nature of the many nineteenth-century reform periodicals to which she contributed, among them the Water-Cure Journal, the sex radical Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, the free thought Boston Investigator and Truth Seeker, and the Spiritualist Banner of Light, Religion-Philosophical Journal, and Woodhull & Catlin's Weekly, enabled tens of thousands of readers to read and respond to her ideas, thus serving as incubators for social change. Print culture played a primary role in transforming Severance from a farmer's daughter into a physician.