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Victoria Claflin Woodhull (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927) was an American suffragette who was one of the early leaders of the American woman's suffragette movement in the 19th century. She became a colourful and notorious symbol for women's rights, free love, and labour reforms. Many of her speeches on these subjects were not written by Woodhull herself, but her role as a figurehead in these movements was powerful and controversial. She is probably most famous for her declaration to run for the United States Presidency in 1872.
Early life
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.
When she was just 15, she became engaged to a 28-year old Canning Woodhull of Rochester, New York. Woodhull, who claimed he was a medical doctor, met Victoria in 1853 when her family called him to treat her for an illness. Canning Woodhull claimed he was the son of a New York judge and the nephew of a New York City mayor. After just a few months from meeting Woodhull, Victoria and Canning Woodhull married in November 1853. Shortly later, Victoria learned her new husband was neither a doctor nor anything else he pretended. Canning Woodhull turned out to be a lifelong alcoholic and he saddled the young Victoria with a disastrous marriage with much poverty. She and Canning had two children; one son born mentally retarded in 1854, a birth defect Victoria believed was caused by her husband’s alcoholism.
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 to 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.
Female broker
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. 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.
Newspaper editor
On May 14, 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 30 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 American Woman Suffrage Association from Anthony, using it to advertise the Populist Party. The attempt worked; many listeners, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, turned up at the Populist Party meeting the next day.
Presidential candidate
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, making her a year too young to legally run for President of the United States, and her name did not technically appear on the ballot; 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 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 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 sensationalised across the nation, eventually resulting in a hung jury.
Views on abortion
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. During the 19th century, opposing abortion meant supporting women's reproductive and sexual freedom, subjects which Woodhull spoke on extensively. Feminists of her day saw abortion as a tool used mostly by men to force women to murder their babies, so the fathers would not have to take financial responsibility for them after birth.
She stated in an 1870 issue of her weekly publication:
- “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.”
Death
She died in 1927 in Bredon, , Worcestershire, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom.
References
- Frisken, Amanda. Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution, 2004, University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 0-8122-3798-6
- Gabriel, Mary. Notorius Victoria, The Life of Victoria Woodhull Uncensored. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998, 372 pages. ISBN: 1-56512-132-5.
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.
- 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.
- Antje Schrupp, Das Aufsehen erregende Leben der Victoria Woodhull(2002: Helmer)