Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution
Описание книги
Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, forced her fellow Americans to come to terms with the full meaning of equality after the Civil War. A sometime collaborator with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, yet never fully accepted into mainstream suffragist circles, Woodhull was a flamboyant social reformer who promoted freedom, especially freedom from societal constraints over intimate relationships. This much we know from the several popular biographies of the nineteenth-century activist. But what we do not know, as Amanda Frisken reveals, is how Woodhull manipulated the emerging popular media and fluid political culture of the Reconstruction period in order to accomplish her political goals. As an editor and public speaker, Woodhull demanded that women and men be held to the same standards in public life. Her political theatrics brought the topic of women's sexuality into the public arena, shocking critics, galvanizing supporters, and finally locking opposing camps into bitter conflict over sexuality and women's rights in marriage. A woman who surrendered her own privacy, whose life was grist for the mills of a sensation-mongering press, she made the exposure of others' secrets a powerful tool of social change. Woodhull's political ambitions became inseparable from her sexual nonconformity, yet her skill in using contemporary media kept her revolutionary ideas continually before her peers. In this way Woodhull contributed to long-term shifts in attitudes about sexuality and the slow liberation of marriage and other social institutions. Using contemporary sources such as images from the «sporting news,» Frisken takes a fresh look at the heyday of this controversial women's rights activist, discovering Woodhull's previously unrecognized importance in the turbulent climate of Radical Reconstruction and making her a useful lens through which to view the shifting sexual mores of the nineteenth century.
Отрывок из книги
Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution
Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America
.....
Tennessee Claflin exaggerated her sister’s notoriety in sporting news, because she was if anything less respectable than her sister. Woodhull’s sponsors frequently promoted Claflin as a surrogate for her older sister. Together, the sisters came to embody a cultural radicalism that arose not only from their daring sexual politics, but also from the coded class and gender positions they represented. Claflin would mirror Woodhull’s actions during these years. They ran the stock brokerage business jointly, Claflin ran for Congress after Woodhull ran for president (unofficially, and neither was elected), and she also published and spoke about free love. The twinning of the sisters is not surprising in a nation that was, at the time, obsessed with twins and duality. It is informative to view the sisters as they appeared in contemporary sporting news, with Woodhull as the representative public woman, and Claflin as her more rambunctious alter ego.31
Woodhull was at first unfazed by her notoriety; after all, she invited the reporter from The Days’ Doings to her hotel, and she must have known how coverage in such a paper would appear to the public at large. The fact that she welcomed this publicity suggests that she was less sensitive to the hazards of public life than more respectable women. As a traveling healers, stage performers, and professional clairvoyants, she and Claflin were accustomed to public scrutiny. They may have had no conventional status to lose, in fact; there is conflicting evidence that the sisters may also have been occasional prostitutes, but even without that stigma they were far from respectable in the commercial northeast.36 To nineteenth-century readers, their flamboyant brokerage opening, as evidence of their penchant for media coverage, signaled their lack of delicacy; they deliberately flouted the decorum required of ladies. They dined, for instance, without a male escort at New York’s fashionable Delmonico’s Restaurant at a time when such behavior marked them as prostitutes.37 When Woodhull declared herself a presidential candidate in April 1870, and stood before a congressional committee to present a memorial on behalf of women’s suffrage the next January, she showed the world that she was not ashamed of being seen. When her private life became the subject of public criticism, she used the criticism as evidence of hypocrisy in high places. When newspapers linked her sexual nonconformity to her political ambitions, she made sexual liberation the cornerstone of her revolution.
.....