Victoria Woodhull
Victoria Claflin Woodhull (
September 23,
1838 –
June 9,
1927) was an
American suffragist who was publicized in
Gilded Age newspapers as a leader of the American woman's suffrage movement in the 19th century. She became a colorful and notorious symbol for women's rights,
free love, and labor reforms. The authorship of her speeches and articles is disputed. Some contend that many of her speeches on these subjects were not written by Woodhull herself, but her role as a representative of these movements was nonetheless powerful and controversial. She is probably most famous for her declaration to run for the
United States Presidency in 1872.
Woodhull was born into a poor family in Homer,
Licking County, Ohio. Victoria was closely associated during most of her life with her sister
Tennessee Celeste (a.k.a. "Tennie C.") Claflin, who was seven years younger than she. Victoria went from rags to riches twice, her first fortune being made on the road as a highly successful magnetic healer before she joined the
spiritualist movement in the 1870's.
When she was just 15, Victoria became engaged to a 28-year old Canning (Channing, in some records) Woodhull from a town outside of
Rochester,
New York. Dr. Woodhull was an Ohio medical doctor at a time when formal medical education and licensing was not required to practice medicine in that state. He met Victoria in 1853 when her family called him to treat her for an illness. According to some accounts, Canning Woodhull claimed he was the nephew of a
New York City mayor, who was actually a distant cousin. Victoria married Canning Woodhull in November 1853, just a few short months after they met. Victoria soon learned that her new husband was an alcoholic and a womanizer, and that her own work would often be required to support the family financially. She and Canning had two children: Byron and Zulu (later Zula). According to one account, Byron was born
mentally retarded in 1854, a
birth defect Victoria believed was caused by her husband's alcoholism. Another story says his retardation resulted from a fall from a window.
Woodhull's support of
free love probably originated with her first marriage. Even in loveless marriages, women in
United States in the 19th century were bound into unions with few options to escape. Any woman who
divorced was stigmatized and often ostracized by society. Victoria believed women should have the choice to leave unbearable marriages, and she rallied against the hypocrisy of married men having
mistresses and other sexual alliances. When she became a prominent national figure, her enemies falsely characterized Victoria's views on free love as advocating the immoral sexual
libertinism being experimented with in such "
utopian"
communities as
Oneida and
Modern Times. Victoria in fact believed in monogamous relationships, although she did state she had the right to also love someone else "exclusively" if she desired.
She made another fortune on the
New York Stock Exchange with Tennessee, as the first female
Wall Street brokers.
Woodhull, Claflin & Company opened in 1870 with the assistance of a wealthy benefactor, her admirer, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Many contemporary men's journals (e.g.,
The Day's Doings) published sexualised images of the pair running their firm (although they did not participate in the day-to-day business of the firm themselves), linking the concept of publicly-minded, un-chaperoned women with ideas of "
sexual immorality" and
prostitution.
On
May 14,
1870, she and Tennessee established a paper, (with money made from her brokerage days),
Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which stayed in publication for the next six years, and became notorious for publishing controversial opinions on taboo topics (especially with regard to
sex education and
free love). The paper advocated, among other things, women's suffrage, short skirts, spiritualism, free love, vegetarianism, and licensed prostitution. It's commonly stated that the paper also advocated birth control, but some historians disagree. The paper is now known primarily for printing the first English version of
Karl Marx's
Communist Manifesto in its
December 30,
1871 edition.
George Francis Train once defended her. Other feminists of her time, including
Susan B. Anthony, disagreed with her tactics in pushing for women's equality. Some characterized her as opportunisitic and unpredictable: in one notable incident, she had a run in with Anthony during a meeting of the NWSA. (The radical NWSA later merged with the convervative AWSA to form the
National American Woman Suffrage Association.) The attempt worked: many listeners turned up at the Equal Rights Party meeting the next day.
In the year that Anthony cast her vote in the 1872
presidential election, Woodhull became the first woman put forward as a presidential candidate, nominated by the
Equal Rights Party (with ex-slave
Frederick Douglass running for Vice-President; Douglass never acknowledged this nomination, and it is possible that he saw it as an attempt to get "the colored vote" (black suffrage having been granted in the
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870).
Victoria Woodhull was 34 at the time. On the date of the inauguration, she would have been seven months shy of the constitutionally mandated age of 35, a technicality that was not emphasized until the twentieth century. It's a common misconception that her name did not appear on the ballot because she failed to meet the necessary legal requirements. In 1872, the
President of the United States was not elected by the current
Australian ballot method in which the government prints the ballots. Back then, political parties printed the ballots. The Washington Post claimed 50 years after the election that the Equal Rights Party did pass out ballots at the polls in 1872. Like many of Woodhull's protests, this was first and foremost a media performance, designed to shake up the prejudices of the day. It was not merely her gender that made Woodhull's campaign notable; her association with Frederick Douglass stirred up controversy about the mixing of
whites and
blacks. The Equal Rights Party hoped to use these nominations to reunite suffragists with
civil rights activists, as the exclusion of female suffrage from the
Fifteenth Amendment two years earlier had caused a substantial rift.
Vilified in the media for her support of
free love, Woodhull devoted an entire issue of
Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly (
November 2,
1872) to a rumored affair between
Elizabeth Tilton and Reverend
Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent Protestant figure (who incidentally was a supporter of female suffrage), in order to highlight what she saw as a sexual double-standard between men and women.
The next day,
U.S. Federal Marshals arrested Victoria and Tennessee for sending obscene material through the mail. The sisters were held in the
Ludlow Street Jail for the next month, a place normally reserved for civil offenses, but which contained more hardened criminals as well. The arrest was arranged by
Anthony Comstock, the self-appointed moral defender of the nation at the time, and the event incited questions about censorship and government persecution. The Claflin sisters were found not guilty six months later, but the arrest prevented Victoria from being present during the 1872
presidential election. The publication of the Beecher-Tilton scandal led, in 1875, to
Theodore Tilton (husband of Elizabeth Tilton) suing Beecher for "alienation of affection". The trial was sensationalized across the nation, eventually resulting in a hung jury.
Her opposition to
abortion is frequently cited by
Pro-life supporters when writing about
first wave feminism. The most common Woodhull quotations cited by Pro-Lifers are:
"[t]he rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus". [From an 1870
Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly article]
"Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth." [From an 1875 edition of the
Wheeling, West Virginia Evening Standard]
One of her articles on abortion that is not cited by Pro-life supporters is from the September 23, 1871 issue of the
Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. She wrote:
"Abortion is only a symptom of a more deep-seated disorder of the social state. It cannot be put down by law..... Is there, then, no remedy for all this bad state of things? None, I solemnly believe; none, by means of repression and law. I believe there is no other remedy possible but freedom in the social sphere.."
Woodhull also promoted
eugenics which was popular in the earlier 20th century prior to World War II. Her interest in eugenics was likely motivated by the profound mental retardation of her son. She advocated, among other things, sex education, "marrying well," and pre-natal care as a way to bear healthier children and to prevent mental and physical disease. Her writings demonstrate views closer to those of the anarchist eugenists, rather than the coercive eugenists like Sir
Francis Galton. In 2006, publisher Michael W. Perry claimed in his book "Lady Eugenist" that Woodhull supported the forcible sterilization of those she considered unfit to breed. He based his claim on a single 1927 New York Times article in which she said she agreed with the ruling of the case
Buck v. Bell. Whether the article accurately stated her views or not, it stands in stark contrast to her earlier works in which she advocated social freedom and opposed government interference in matters of love and marriage.
She died in 1927 at Norton Park in
Bredon's Norton,
Worcestershire,
West Midlands,
England,
United Kingdom.
*Frisken, Amanda.
Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ISBN 0812237986
*Gabriel, Mary.
Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull Uncensored. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998, 372 pages. ISBN 1565121325
*Goldsmith, Barbara.
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998, 531 pages. ISBN 0060953322
*Antje Schrupp,
Das Aufsehen erregende Leben der Victoria Woodhull (2002: Helmer).
*Woodhull, Victoria C.
Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull (Seattle, 2005). Four of her most important early and radical speeches on sexuality as facsimiles of the original published versions. Includes: "The Principle of Social Freedom" (1872), "The Scare-crows of Sexual Slavery" (1873), "The Elixir of Life" (1873), and "Tried as by Fire" (1873â€"74). ISBN 1587420503.
*Woodhull, Victoria C.
Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull (Seattle, 2005). Seven of her most important speeches and writings on eugenics. Five are facsimiles of the original, published versions. Includes: "Children--Their Rights and Privileges" (1871), "The Garden of Eden" (1875, publ. 1890), "Stirpiculture" (1888), "Humanitarian Government" (1890), "The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit" (1891), and "The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race" (1893). ISBN 1587420406.
*Woodhull, Victoria C.
Constitutional equality the logical result of the XIV and XV Amendments, which not only declare who are citizens, but also define their rights, one of which is the right to vote without regard to sex. New York: 1870.
*Woodhull, Victoria C.
The Origin, Tendencies and Principles of Government, or, A Review of the Rise and Fall of Nations from Early Historic Time to the Present. New York: Woodhull, Claflin & Company, 1871.
*Woodhull, Victoria C.
Speech of Victoria C. Woodhull on the great political issue of constitutional equality, delivered in Lincoln Hall, Washington, Cooper Institute, New York Academy of Music, Brooklyn, Academy of Music, Philadelphia, Opera House, Syracuse: together with her secession speech delivered at Apollo Hall. 1871.
*Woodhull, Victoria C. Martin. "The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit". New York, 1891.
*Davis, Paulina W., ed.
A history of the national woman's rights movement for twenty years. New York: Journeymen Printers' Cooperative Association, 1871.
*Riddle, A.G.
The Right of women to exercise the elective franchise under the Fourteenth Article of the Constitution: speech of A.G. Riddle in the Suffrage Convention at Washington, January 11, 1871: the argument was made in support of the Woodhull memorial, before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, and reproduced in the Convention. Washington: 1871.
See
List of personalities associated with Wall Street.
*
Victoria-Woodhull.com*
Woodhull on harvard.edu
