Feminism and Fortune Telling: Women of the Lower East Side Trolley Tour

Long before psychic infomercials and hotlines became all-the-rage, individuals seeking love advice or answers to life’s questions went to visit working-class fortune tellers in New York’s Lower East Side. In 1857, humor writer Mortimer Thomson (1831–1875), using the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, published a series of exposes in which he labeled these women “witches,” leading to arrests and public intrigue.

On this trolley tour, we’ll delve into the complicated and peculiar life of Thomson who crusaded against these clairvoyants. We’ll also discuss the practice and influence of spiritualism and fortune telling on the lives of working women who desperately sought to make a living in that era and the surprising ways in which these women appeared in some of the most sensational stories of the time.

This tour will be led by Marie Carter, tour guide with Boroughs of the Dead and author of Mortimer and the Witches: A History of Nineteenth-Century Fortune Tellers.

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