Victoria Woodhull
Categories: U.S. women's rights activists | 1838 births | 1927 deaths | United States presidential candidates | Feminists
Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927) was an American feminist reformer, stock broker, sex symbol, and advocate of free love.
She became a colourful and notorious symbol for womens rights, free love, and labour reform. Many of her speeches upon these subjects where not written by Claflin Woodhull herself, but her role as a figurehead in these movements was powerful and controversial nonetheless.
Woodhull was born into a poor family in Homer, Ohio; the only person in her family she really felt close to was her sister Tennessee (a.k.a. "Tennie C.") Claflin, who was seven years younger than her. She went from rags to riches twice, her first fortune being made on the road as a highly successful spiritualist.
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. 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 14th, 1870, she and Tennessee established a paper, 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 is now known primarily for printing the first English version of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto in its 30th December 1871 edition.
George Francis Train once defended her. Other feminists of her time, including Susan B. Anthony, disagreed with her aggressive tactics in pushing for women's equality. She tended to be opportunisitic and unpredictable; in one notable incident, she attempted to seize the podium of a meeting of the increasingly conservative National Woman Suffrage Association from Anthony, using it to advertise the People's Party. The attempt worked; many listeners, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, turned up at the People's 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)). Claflin Woodhull was 34 at the time, making her a year too young to legally run for U.S. President, and her name did not technically appear on the ballot; like many of Claflin Woodhull's protests, this was first and foremost a media performance, designed to shake up the prejudices of the day. It was not just that fact of her gender that made her campaign notable; her association with Frederick Douglass began a storm of controversy about the mixing of whites and blacks. The Equal Rights Party hoped to unite suffragists and civil rights activists with its choice of nominations, as the exclusion of female suffrage from the Fifteenth Amendment had caused a substantial rift.
Vilified in the media for her support of free love, Claflin Woodhull devoted an entire issue of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly (November 2nd, 1872) to an affair between Elizabeth Tilton and Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent conservative 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 marshalls arrested Victoria and Tennessee for sending obscene material through the mail. The sisters where held in the Ludlow Street jail for the next month, a place normally reserved for murderers. 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 Claflin Woodhull 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 sensationalised across the nation, eventually resulting in a hung jury.
She was an opponent of abortion, as were most feminists of her day, though what this entailed would confuse those familiar with the modern abortion debate. Being against abortion in her time meant being in favour of female reproductive freedom, a subject Claflin Woodhull spoke on extensively.
She stated in an 1870 issue of her weekly publication: “[t]he rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus”. In an 1875 edition of the Wheeling, West Virginia Evening Standard she attacked the practice of abortion:
- “Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth.”
References
- Frisken, Amanda. "Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution", 2004, University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 0-8122-3798-6
Publications
- 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.
- 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.
- Antje Schrupp, Das Aufsehen erregende Leben der Victoria Woodhull(2002: Helmer)