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Introduction

Victoria Woodhull, Sexual Revolutionary

Early in 1870, two women opened for business on Wall Street. In a deluge of publicity, Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin demonstrated that women could establish and successfully run a business, even in a man’s world of stock speculation. No one knew much about them, except that they appeared to be unfazed by controversy. They seemed accustomed to public life; they said they had pursued a series of careers, from acting to magnetic healing and fortune telling. They had also privately speculated in stocks and claimed a stunning $700,000 profit on “Black Friday” the previous autumn. They even had some experience in women’s politics: Woodhull had attended a suffrage convention in Washington the year before. The opening of Woodhull, Claflin, & Company, however, marked their elevation to the national public stage. Across the country, newspapers called them the “Bewitching Brokers” and spread word of their sensational financial debut to the nation at large. It was the beginning of a tradition for Woodhull and Claflin, in which they dramatized the tensions inherent in women’s public lives, and made spectacles of themselves for political effect. They dispensed with the protection of respectability and soon learned that speculation over their sexual lives dominated their reception in the popular press.¹

Woodhull, Claflin & Company, Brokers, directly confronted the traditional gender roles that made public life controversial for women in 1870. Though men, particularly Woodhull’s second husband Colonel James Blood, conducted the firm’s day to day business, as owners the sisters were trailblazers for women’s economic power. They called their company “the first firm of Female Brokers in the World,” according to one reporter who emphasized the sisters’ conscious defiance of the status quo. “No women had ever been stock or gold brokers,” said Claflin, according to a New York Courier reporter, who quoted her in characteristically pithy language. “Wall Street was taboo to petticoats.… [But] we did not intend to let our petticoats interfere with anybody, or take up any more room in the street than the other brokers’ trousers.” They were not the first women to speculate on Wall Street, but their vocation as brokers was a first in the disreputable world of high finance, where even male brokers bore the stigma of immorality. Woodhull and Claflin challenged the notion that a female broker was improper because she performed public work in mixed company, unprotected in a world of men.² As the Courier reporter quoted Claflin: “Why shouldn’t [women] just as well be stockbrokers as keep stores and measure men for shirts? We couldn’t see why.”³

Publicity, Woodhull later revealed, was a primary goal in establishing the firm. She hoped “to secure the most general and at the same time prominent introduction to the world that was possible.” The opening brought attention but it also brought public debate over the propriety of women in male spaces like Wall Street. It was a novelty for Wall Street brokers who came to visit the firm; it was a sensation for the crowd of men who reportedly pressed their faces to the glass outside.⁴ Brokering was a business that most people thought unsuitable for women. Even one supporter of women’s work cautioned, “women could not very well conduct the business without having to mix promiscuously with men on the street, and stop and talk with them in the most public places; and the delicacy of woman would forbid that.” Precisely because of its challenge to the idea of woman’s delicacy, women’s rights activists saw the opening as a harbinger of change. Wall Street had too long excluded women, Susan B. Anthony wrote in her paper, The Revolution, because of the “bad habits of Wall Street men who stare at every woman on the pavement except the apple sellers.” The new firm established a precedent; Woodhull and Claflin, Anthony predicted, would “stimulate the whole future of women by their efforts and example.”⁵ As a dramatic event that defied convention, the opening of Woodhull, Claflin & Company became a lightning rod for sexual politics in 1870.

Popular media tended to recast the opening as a sexualized spectacle; daily and weekly papers, seeking to shock and entertain their readers, used Woodhull and Claflin as sensational news copy. Illustrated sporting newspapers were probably most effective in making the sisters notorious. The Days’ Doings, for example, used the full battery of visual stereotypes to make the firm analogous to a brothel. A cover image (Figure 1) exaggerated the sisters’ sexy (for the time) postures and their proximity to male clientele, and thereby questioned their morality. Another such image (Figure 2) depicted Claflin in an aggressive stance and bold stare that mirrored contemporary images of streetwalkers. The short skirts, more a reflection of the artist’s imagination than their actual clothing, revealed the sisters’ ankles and calves in popular shorthand for “fast” women. Only the third image (Figure 3), with a more respectable parlor setting, suggested the artists’ difficulty in representing the novel firm, but even its genteel imagery resembled depictions of high class brothels. The accompanying text exaggerated the strangeness of the female brokers, and diminished the political significance of the opening itself. The presence of Woodhull and Claflin on the cover of the illustrated sporting news sexualized the firm, and easily eclipsed any political agenda.⁶

Figure 1. This cover image of Woodhull and Claflin in a men’s sporting newspaper shows the sisters in suggestively curved postures. The men crowd Woodhull and Claflin and gaze directly upon them to indicate a lack of proper respect. The placement of the hand of the man on the left emphasizes Claflin’s moral ambiguity: is he merely gesturing, or is he actually touching Claflin’s thigh? The visual codes in this cover illustration established the sisters as sexually available. The Days’ Doings, February 26, 1870.

Other commercial illustrations reinforced this interpretation of the firm. A cover woodcut image in the Wall Street paper (Figure 4), the New York Evening Telegram, showed the sisters sitting in an open carriage and wielding a horsewhip, two visual markers of “fast” or immoral women. In 1874, the brothel imagery, complete with sensual touching and open bottles of alcohol, became embedded in Wall Street lore in Matthew Hale Smith’s The Bulls and Bears of New York (Figure 5). In this way, popular illustration of the brokerage firm set a tone that persisted in the sisters’ subsequent ventures in public life. It became the recurring theme in the strange political career of Victoria Woodhull. She would frame a spectacular event in the language of social principles; media coverage would then reinterpret it as a titillating spectacle. Woodhull survived these disparaging interpretations thanks to her skill in turning scathing media commentary into publicity for her struggle for social change. Put another way, she took her status as a disreputable woman, and converted it into a political asset.

Figure 2. Short skirts, exposed feet and ankles, and bold postures mark the new brokers as fast women in this second sporting illustration. A humorous reference to the sisters’ “telegraphic apparatus” reminds the reader that their direct gazes on the men are immodest. The Days’ Doings, February 26, 1870.

Woodhull’s public transformation from notorious woman to celebrity challenged Americans to come to terms with the full meaning of sex equality. She was not the most gifted female politician, though she was one of the most powerful speakers of the time. Her contribution was to act out the period’s most extreme positions on a public stage. From 1870 to 1876, against the political backdrop of Reconstruction, she used a range of tactics to demand opportunities denied to women on the basis of their sex. As a broker, editor, public speaker, presidential candidate and celebrity, she insisted that women and men be held to the same standards in public life. She made her biggest mark on the period’s popular culture, because she enacted spectacles in national media for the average person that challenged contemporary notions of gender and class. As a woman who surrendered her own privacy, and whose life was grist for the sensation-mongering press, she made the exposure of others’ secrets a powerful tool of social change.

Figure 3. A third image of the brokerage house offers a more respectful and genteel presentation of the business. The lack of conformity in these three depictions (Figures 1–3), appearing in the same sporting newspaper issue, indicates the sisters’ social ambiguity and the novelty of the new firm. The Days’ Doings, February 26, 1870.

The Strange Career of Woodhull and Claflin

Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin were children of the Second Great Awakening. They were the seventh and ninth children born into a large, transient family on the old Ohio Valley frontier. Their father was a miller and part-time confidence man who, neighbors believed, once burned his own mill for the insurance money. Their mother was a Methodist enthusiast spiritually reborn during religious revivalism of the 1830s. Born in 1838 and named for England’s new queen, Victoria was an odd, visionary child who believed herself destined for greatness. Her parents married her off at the age of fourteen to a doctor named Canning Woodhull. Because of her husband’s alcoholism, young Victoria largely supported their two children with her practice as a medical clairvoyant. Meanwhile, her parents capitalized on the “magnetic” powers of Victoria’s little sister Tennessee, seven years her junior, by hawking her through the old Northwest as the “Wonderful Child” clairvoyant and cancer healer. The nature of their business ventures frequently brought controversy to the family. Tennessee’s inability to cure one woman’s cancer brought a manslaughter suit in 1864. A year later, when a reunited Victoria and Tennessee practiced clairvoyance in Cincinnati, neighbors, suspecting them of prostitution, ran the family out of town. Later that year, Victoria’s clairvoyance business in Chicago shut down, this time on charges of fraud. The family supplemented such failures with lucrative traveling medical tours through the west in a covered wagon, which filled their coffers and gave the sisters firsthand experience in human nature and the art of salesmanship.

Figure 4. Other papers amplified the disorderly theme of the sporting illustrations. Here, Woodhull and Claflin drive the bulls and bears down Wall Street. The open carriage, the whip, and their violent conduct were visual shorthand for disorderly women and prostitutes. Their cruel treatment of the men in the image includes an obvious reference to castration, suggesting that the sisters’ presence on Wall Street threatens masculinity itself. New York Evening Telegram, February 18, 1870.

Figure 5. The symbolic codes of prostitution persist in this 1874 depiction of the “bewitching brokers.” One sister appears to promote their newspaper; the books and desk in the background indicate an office setting. However, the physical touching, the lewd expression of the man, and the alcohol on the table are suggestive of the brothel. Matthew Hale Smith, The Bulls and Bears of New York (1874). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

By 1866, the family had moved to St. Louis, where Woodhull operated a business as a clairvoyant healer in a local hotel. There a Civil War veteran named Colonel James Harvey Blood, who had heard of Woodhull as a “most brilliant literary character,” consulted her professionally and won her heart. Woodhull obtained a speedy divorce from her first husband (though she retained his last name), and married Blood in 1866. To evade his first wife (and two children), Woodhull and Blood embarked upon another tour in the covered wagon. It was in Pittsburgh, Woodhull later claimed, that she decided the family’s next move: in a vision, the Greek orator Demosthenes told her to move them all to New York City. In 1868, Woodhull, Blood, her two children, her sister Tennessee, their parents, and an assortment of siblings and relations settled at 17 Great Jones Street in New York. With the aid of Tennessee’s magnetic healing skills, they gained the trust and financial backing of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In January 1870, with his help, Woodhull and Claflin opened the first women’s brokering business on Wall Street—the start of a career of “firsts.”⁷

Her stock market opening was surprising for a woman in 1870, but Woodhull aspired to greater things. That April, she nominated herself a candidate for the 1872 presidential race. Within a month she and her sister launched a journal, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which quickly became a pioneer of radical thought. She developed political connections with Radical Republican Representative Benjamin Butler from Massachusetts, and in January 1871 presented a memorial to Congress on behalf of woman’s suffrage, becoming the first woman to address a Congressional committee. She shocked and fascinated audiences with candid speech on the subject of free love, a loosely defined ideology that meant anything from easing the divorce laws to abolishing marriage altogether. She headed a section of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), and protested with the organization in the streets of New York. She and her friends sought to unite disparate reform groups into a single political organization called the Equal Rights Party. In 1872, the party nominated Woodhull for president with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.

The consequences of this radical nomination came swiftly: she lost her home, her paper, her means of earning a living and Vanderbilt’s backing. In frustration, and to demonstrate her ideology of a single sexual standard, she spoke out against a number of prominent men, notably the nationally beloved Brooklyn pastor Henry Ward Beecher, who had, she claimed, committed adultery with the wife of one of his closest friends. The Beecher exposure eclipsed her presidential bid, and she faced harassment and jail for obscenity and libel charges for the accusations. Fighting these charges left her financially crippled. Over time, however, the legal action against her became an asset, and she became a celebrity in her own right as the victim of excessive federal persecution. She spent the next four years popularizing the Beecher story and her evolving ideas about sexuality on the national lecture circuit to large and increasingly enthusiastic audiences. In 1876 she divorced Colonel Blood, and a year later she sailed to England, lecturing successfully in several English cities. At one such lecture she met a younger scion of an old British banking family, James Biddulph Martin. She married him in 1883 and lived the life of an English gentlewoman until her death in 1927.

This book focuses on Woodhull’s American heyday, from 1870 to 1876, when she became a symbol of the period’s radical sexual politics. It examines not her life but rather a series of media events she launched to challenge the existing social order. Social activists migrating toward the Democratic Party hailed her as a renegade populist, a victim of church and state, and welcomed her attacks on the declining radicalism of the Republican Party. Conservatives saw her as an incarnation of evil, and disparaged her as “the Woodhull” and her supporters as “Woodhullites.” Woodhull’s repeated acts of political theater gave her unusual prominence and make her an instructive, and heretofore unrecognized, period marker for Reconstruction. Along with the social activists who promoted her, she struggled to shape the course of Reconstruction’s political culture even as it scripted her actions and limited the arena in which she could promote radical change. The popular press singled her out as a sign of the times, a “folk demon” representing perceived threats to the established social order. In response, she used the tools of popular media to turn her notoriety into social and political power. Her transformation from notorious woman to celebrity illuminates the gendered political landscape of the early 1870s. She is, in effect, a barometer of the political culture of Reconstruction.

Recovering Victoria Woodhull

Generations of Americans have found Woodhull fascinating. During the twentieth century, Woodhull’s biographers have confronted and contributed to her story, as well as her elusiveness as a historical subject. Biographies, biographical novels, documentaries, plays, a musical, and chapters in volumes about American “originals” perpetually add—or invent—new twists to the Woodhull story.⁸ At the same time, Woodhull remains curiously absent from mainstream historical narratives. Despite all the retellings of her story, it is ironic that, after a lecture by her most recent biographer, a member of the audience asked the speaker, “Why have we never heard of Woodhull before?”⁹

It is nearly impossible to recover Woodhull as a historical actor in her own right. Her own personal papers are fragmentary and heavily edited. We will never know for certain who really wrote the lectures, speeches, letters, and articles attributed to her. They were almost never written in her own hand, and she later repudiated many, saying they had been written without her knowledge or consent. Some contemporary observers said that Woodhull could barely write, and that she did not have the education, breadth of knowledge, or grasp of the language necessary to produce the writings that appeared over her name. On the other hand, many others credited her with a powerful gift for extemporaneous speech on a wide variety of subjects. Whether these conflicting assertions are accurate or an indication of contemporary prejudice remains unknowable and, perhaps, unimportant.¹⁰

The question of authorship arises from Woodhull’s unusual status as a female politician at a time when women were all but barred from political leadership. It also reflects the scruples of contemporary political radicals who worried about the dishonesty in crediting Woodhull for other people’s work. Most historians and biographers agree that anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews wrote the words to her famous lectures, with help from others (including her husband, Colonel Blood, who frequently wrote letters and editorials attributed to Woodhull, and even signed her autographs). It was not an uncommon practice. Fifty years later, her associate, anarchist Benjamin Tucker, remembered with shame being given credit for a speech he delivered to the New England Labor Reform League in 1873 that had been written by someone else; he referred to this, and most of Woodhull’s lectures, as “humbug” and “fraud.”

Speakers were often selected for their appeal to particular audiences, regardless of authorship. This explains the choice of a nineteen-year-old (Tucker) to address a major convention: he was selected for his appeal to younger radicals. Similarly, radical thinkers like Andrews deliberately chose Woodhull as the mouthpiece for their ideas. Perhaps they suspected their views would get a better hearing (or a wider audience) coming from a woman. Former abolitionists, reorganizing after the Civil War, looked for new faces to appeal to newer, younger, constituencies. Like many modern presidents, whose speeches are the products of committees and focus groups, Woodhull spoke the words in the public realm, and lent her name to the many letters to the editor, speeches, and articles attributed to her. She was a willing and effective voice for reform. Her importance lay in her power to move an audience and her courage to express ideas that defied more conventional views.

The lack of traditional historical sources makes the “authentic” Woodhull tantalizingly difficult to find. Her closest associates, among them the most radical social reformers of the time, left little documentation about Woodhull. Her influence on more respectable social reformers was so poisonous that their own papers conspicuously omit reference to her.¹¹ To make the historian’s task still more difficult, Woodhull spent decades revising her life story. Her most explicit account of her early life is highly suspect, because she dictated it for the public eye, and continually updated and revised this account in her paper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.¹² Her subsequent marriage into old English money, which funded a new series of autobiographical pamphlets in Britain, further complicates her account. She published several edited autobiographies before her death in 1927, and she left a provision in her will for her daughter Zula Maud to rewrite her life story yet again.¹³

Woodhull’s historical obscurity stems in part from her social origins. To modern interpreters, she may seem like yet another middle-class suffrage woman in crinoline; to her contemporaries, however, she was anything but respectable. Her first biographer, Emanie Sachs, relied heavily on the impressions of well-connected suffrage activists, to whom Woodhull had always been an outsider. “I do not believe Mrs. Woodhull was ever an important factor either in this country or in England,” Carrie Chapman Catt advised Sachs in 1927. “Her life was chiefly valuable as demonstrating that a reformer can entirely queer every effort she makes by getting too far ahead of the average trend of public opinion, or entirely off the beat.” Harriet Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, likewise cautioned Sachs that “Mrs. Woodhull’s life would probably not repay study” as she was “never active in suffrage.” For Blatch, Woodhull’s 1871 memorial to the House Judiciary Committee on behalf of suffrage “began and ended her suffrage activity.” The suffrage historian Ida Husted Harper concurred. “Only a little handful of suffragists in New York City knew Mrs. Woodhull,” she wrote. “I never saw her. She flashed in and flashed out, was handsome and brilliant and ignored the conventional morality.”¹⁴ The discomfort of these prominent suffrage women reflected in part a social position closed to Woodhull, but probably also their awareness of the way popular media used such figures to discredit their movement.

A few of Sachs’s sources looked beyond the media version of Woodhull and Claflin and gave them credit for their courage in defying convention. “They represented an unpopular cause,” Joseph Greer, who knew the sisters slightly, told Sachs in 1927, “and like nearly all pioneers they paid the penalty in misrepresentation.” Others agreed with this view. “I know so well what it cost any woman to take any forward step, in those days, that my hat is off to every one of them,” wrote Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson, who was barely in her teens during Woodhull’s heyday. A playwright and friend of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Channing-Stetson had little patience for the young, modern women of the 1920s. The flapper generation, in her view, shirked responsibility and spurned the vote that previous generations had struggled for decades to secure. Instead, they wallowed in materialism and incapacitated themselves with high heels and extreme diets. “They even think they have discovered Sex—which we knew all about three generations ago and did not think we had invented then.”¹⁵

True to its times, sex rather than responsibility was the focus of Sachs’s biography, “The Terrible Siren”. Writing in the commercial, sexualized climate of the Roaring Twenties, Sachs unearthed the old stories and scandals to produce a muckraking biography that appeared in 1928, a year after Woodhull’s death. Sachs rightly questioned Woodhull’s adopted British respectability and criticized her for her hypocrisy in denying free love, but also reduced her to a ridiculous figure. The Red Scare and attendant dismissal of reform in the 1920s made it easy to trivialize Woodhull, her paper, and the radicals who supported her. The book’s widespread popularity thwarted Zula Maud Woodhull’s dying wish to have her mother’s biography written in a more favorable light. Sachs’s lively, scurrilous biography became the master narrative on Woodhull for the next forty years.¹⁶ Subsequent biographies through the McCarthy era represented the sisters as lunatics, eccentric icons from the annals of Americana. Antagonism for the American left and tacit adherence to the new domesticity made Woodhull into a cartoonish foil for the post-World War II American woman.¹⁷

It took the reemergence of feminism to challenge “The Terrible Siren”. In 1959, Eleanor Flexner questioned the notion that Woodhull singlehandedly put women’s suffrage back half a century. Feminist scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s highlighted the sisters’ brokerage business as a milestone for women. Woodhull also began to resurface as a major player in the struggle for women’s equality. Two collections sidestepped the question of provenance and published the articles and speeches that bore Woodhull’s name as if she had written them herself.¹⁸ More recently, a new focus on the political significance of the “New Departure” theory has revealed how this argument for woman suffrage, developed by activists in the late 1860s, gained national publicity by Woodhull’s memorial to Congress in early 1871.¹⁹ Woodhull’s connection to international socialism has resurfaced in new studies that show her in a broader role in that movement than previous scholars of socialism had allowed.²⁰ These looks at the 1870s reveal that Woodhull had important interactions with the period’s radical political movements.

In the wake of second wave feminist scholarship, three new biographies shed new light on Woodhull’s remarkable life. The first to appear, Lois Beachy Underhill’s The Woman Who Ran for President (1995), is a thoughtful recovery of Woodhull as a political actor and thinker in her own right with strong connections to other social radicals. Underhill also tackles the difficult question of Woodhull’s authorship; she goes so far as to analyze the handwriting on autobiographical notes written, she says, by Woodhull herself. Underhill’s discovery of these notes through the Holland-Martin family (descendants of Woodhull’s third husband, John Martin) is a major new source of historical information about Woodhull, particularly her life after her marriage to Martin. Two other biographies published in 1998 offer fascinating interpretations of Woodhull’s impact on her contemporaries. One, by journalist Mary Gabriel, salvages extensive newspaper coverage from the period in a way that illuminates several episodes of Woodhull’s life, particularly her relationship with the International Workingmen’s Association. Barbara Goldsmith’s biography, on the other hand, celebrates a more sensational reading of Woodhull reminiscent of “The Terrible Siren”, but rightly focuses on the centrality of Spiritualism to Woodhull’s influence and popularity. Together, the three biographies round out Woodhull as an individual, and clarify her relationships with notable personalities of the 1870s.²¹

Woodhull the person, however, can only partly explain her historical significance; it is as a phenomenon that she most influenced the period. For example, her exposure of Henry Ward Beecher was a watershed event in the nineteenth century. The ensuing Beecher-Tilton scandal sent shock waves through contemporary views about personal life and religious faith. Richard W. Fox has argued that the scandal reflected shifting popular ideas about intimacy, marriage, sexuality and divorce. Its significance far transcended the actors themselves. Beecher and the Tiltons, like Woodhull and Claflin, were merely dramatizing prevailing views in a turbulent moral climate. It was a media event that fed off popular fascination for celebrity. It also provoked a religious controversy within the Protestant faith; as Altina Waller shows, conservative Protestants saw in it a way to halt what they saw as creeping liberalism among their flocks. Contemporary responses to the three principal actors were also revealing; many assumed Beecher’s guilt, yet found in Tilton an easier scapegoat, while his wife Lib Tilton gradually retreated into obscurity and (temporary) blindness.²² Thanks to Woodhull’s exposure, the scandal left a lasting impression on contemporaries.

This study attempts to place Woodhull in the larger context of the trial she set in motion. Her decision to expose Beecher, a spontaneous act apparently made on her own initiative, had profound consequences. It galvanized conservatives to act against what they saw as runaway social freedom that threatened to gain great commercial power. As Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz argues, Woodhull was on the cusp of a new sexual framework emerging in the nineteenth century that saw sex as essential to a full and happy life. As this view gained popular currency, formidable opposition arose to silence the open discussion (and sale) of provocative ideas and devices (like contraception). Young Men’s Christian Association activist Anthony Comstock capitalized on conservative disgust with Woodhull, and her very public accusation against Beecher, to enact a strict federal statute in 1873 called the “Comstock Law.” As the new law’s chief enforcer, Comstock oversaw public, commercial discourse about sexuality and contraception. Nevertheless, Woodhull’s flamboyant defiance meant that questions of sexuality entered contemporary discourse. Comstock slowed but did not halt the gradual liberalization of views about sexuality and reproduction. As Andrea Tone demonstrates, obscenity law often failed in the courtroom, as juries and judges downplayed the crimes of publishers and commercial contraceptive manufacturers in recognition of popular usage. Comstock was successful, however, in censoring the most outspoken sex radicals, and Woodhull was his big target.²³

New scholarship on nineteenth-century sexual reform movements shows the strategic alliances and choices of far-flung activists as they faced the growing shift away from reform. Many radical reformers in Reconstruction had cut their teeth on the Spiritualist movement, which gave women a forum where they could meet, organize, and speak before mixed crowds of like-minded individualists. A small subset of this amorphous non-organization was an uncompromising network of sex radicals who saw the sexual liberation of women as the key to all other reform. Many independent-minded women, particularly in the midwest, found the ideas of the sex radicals compelling.²⁴ Woodhull tapped into their broad-based network, as well as their local organizations and associations; her connection to these activists helps explain her popularity in rural areas of the country. Sex radicals demanded plain speech on the subject of human sexuality; they continually struggled to make simple, nonprovocative, scientific information about human physiology available in the public sphere. Woodhull brought this information into the realm of popular culture.

Woodhull’s revolution was cultural; she brought the ideas of sexual hygiene activists into the commercial public sphere. This, in turn, depended on her personal transformation from a notorious object of scorn to a popular celebrity. Over the six years studied here, Woodhull became one of the modern world’s first celebrities. Her longevity in the public eye was the key to her fame—to paraphrase Daniel Boorstin, she was “known for [her] well-knownness.” Woodhull’s well-knownness was a fluke of timing; she came to prominence in the midst of a graphic revolution and used its tools to further her fame. Graphic media took off after the Civil War. Popular images gave Americans easy access to popular spectacles, and created a perpetual demand for new visual stimuli. Woodhull satisfied this hunger. As a favorite subject in men’s sporting news, she reached a mass audience in poses ranging from prostitute to public teacher to entertainer. Such popular illustrations, though they tended toward the satirical, made her ubiquitous; her image became a metaphor for radical social critique that could not be fully disregarded. Woodhull catered to the public desire for flamboyant individual figures by staging dramatic public events, by courting newspaper attention, and by selling publicity photographs and lithographs to fans. Celebrity, as David Marshall notes, is a function of consumer culture, but also promises democracy by advertising the notion of possibility. Woodhull and her “rags-to-riches” story—as well as the populist message she drew from it—probably appealed to Americans’ need for hope in a turbulent era of social and economic change.²⁵

Notorious Victoria Woodhull

This study seeks to reconcile competing views of Woodhull and Claflin as sex radicals and sexual objects in sporting news. The story begins with representations, particularly illustrations in the sporting press. Historians have only begun exploring the realm of cheap illustrated news.²⁶ The use of sporting papers as sources poses a formidable research challenge. They were both sensational and cheap, which made them less likely to be preserved than the average commercial newspaper. Despite the relatively high circulation they enjoyed, two of the three most popular sporting papers were not preserved in complete sets for the early 1870s. The Days’ Doings (New York) is the only such paper still available in a complete run for these years. Frequent references to this paper in contemporary sources name it almost interchangeably with the National Police Gazette (New York) and the Illustrated Police News (Boston); I take it as a representative of its kind, though I do supplement it with available copies of the other two major sporting papers.

Historians have overlooked Woodhull’s extensive coverage in the sporting news, yet this was precisely where her notoriety took hold. In 1870, people across the nation knew that Woodhull was not respectable, because her image was on the covers of the men’s newspapers displayed in newsstands, cigar shops, barbershops, and barrooms. Papers like the National Police Gazette and The Days’ Doings regularly reported on “the Woodhull” and used her to sell papers. Catering to a male clientele, the papers were part of the social coming-of-age—an initiation ritual—for young men, who read them in public, exclusively male environments. Their pages showcased feisty and often violent women in ways that emphasized their bodies and sexual availability. In the three years following their brokerage debut, The Days’ Doings featured Woodhull and her sister more than any other celebrity or event.²⁷ Typical renderings gave the sisters shortened skirts and suggestive postures. Such visual cues denoted “fast” women and marked them for viewers as sexually depraved.²⁸ Woodhull’s very public life made her prime fodder for such papers. Regardless of the content of stories about her or even the actual depictions of her, her regular presence in the sporting press classed her as a notorious and disorderly woman;²⁹ portrayal in such papers made her as sexually suspect as the other women who appeared in the same pages.

In the 1870s, there was a growing commercial market for distorted, sexualized representations of women in the popular men’s sporting newspapers like The Days’ Doings and the Police Gazette. As the images from the brokerage opening suggest (Figures 1–5), they were more than neutral renderings of “authentic” scenes; they conveyed complex meanings through the arrangement of the players in the frame. Commercial illustrators in the nineteenth century, like those producing images for the popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, created a partial view of reality. As Joshua Brown demonstrates, narrative and technical strategies made illustrations dramatic and visually striking, but also constructed or reinforced stereotypes about class, race and gender.³⁰ That paper’s tawdry cousin The Days’ Doings (also produced by Leslie), and other sporting papers, were less subtle because more specialized: they offered white male spectators sensational narratives of women’s duplicity, fallen women doomed to prison or death, and other fables of women’s subordination. These visual tableaux depended on and reinforced negative stereotypes of women. Woodhull’s presence in such a forum established her disreputable social standing, even as it brought her fame.

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

What is interesting about Woodhull is her insistence that her reputation, especially the sensational version filling the pages of the sporting press, was irrelevant to her ideas. She was attempting to create a new definition of public womanhood in the nineteenth century, when political activism was still a rather controversial activity for respectable women. This was not a new feature of women’s public lives: before the Civil War, critics used sexual innuendo to discount female activists ranging from Quaker abolitionists to free thinkers like Frances Wright, regardless of their actual behavior; even after the war, critics sexualized women’s rights advocates to discredit them.³² There were two reasons for this. First, many believed that, without the protections of home and family to keep her chaste, a woman in public would become immoral. In addition, the challenges by female activists to women’s subordinate, dependent role in the traditional family aggravated this fear; their ideological challenge to woman’s domestic nature left them vulnerable to speculation about their sexual lives. Women who were sex radicals explicitly discussed questions of sexuality and reproduction. As the daily labor paper, the New York Standard, put it in 1871 “How is it that woman’s rights, and shrieking for suffrage, and women speaking in public, always seem to be inseparable from nastiness?”³³

Woodhull and the social radicals in her network sought to make accusations of nastiness irrelevant to the lives of public women. Words alone, they believed, would never change women’s position in society. Only individual acts of defiance in local situations would force people to recognize the artifice behind what everyone thought of as “normal.” Dress reformers—women who risked ridicule, harassment, or jail by wearing pants in public—knew this well. Many made personal sacrifices to further the cause of women’s equality. Sex radical Laura Cuppy Smith, for example, offended her neighbors by walking through town with her pregnant, unwed daughter to defy the double standard that blamed the woman for the mutual offense of extramarital sex.³⁴ Woodhull and her supporters were for a time determined to do whatever it took to eradicate social inequality. From small acts of defiance to civil disobedience, Woodhull demanded that her contemporaries recognize their own preconceived notions of women’s nature as nothing more than social constructs.

In styling herself a public woman, Woodhull sought a female analogue of the public man of politics. This was a hazardous undertaking. The common usage of “public woman” literally meant a street prostitute, and conservatives deliberately blurred the distinction between the two. Most public work for women at the time had immoral connotations; even middle-class women who ventured into public occupations, such as sales clerks, were open to suspicions of sexual profligacy.³⁵ The ideal of a strict division between public and private spheres had great power in the nineteenth century to define class and gender privilege. Many women led public lives, but often faced negative consequences that ranged from open taunting to covert criticism. Sex radicals located the heart of the problem in private relationships. Public men rarely faced negative consequences for illicit sexual behavior; women’s private transgressions, by contrast, infiltrated their public status. Woodhull’s exposure of Beecher’s sexual secrets in 1872 asked society to judge a charismatic public man on the same terms that it judged a public woman. According to the sex radicals, true equality demanded that scurrilous gossip be equally relevant to women and men, or irrelevant to both.

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.

Woodhull’s political performances exposed her to public scorn, but she appeared less anxious to deny accusations against her morality than to insist that they should not matter. In this sense her actions transcended the older choice women faced between seclusion and exposure. She “made a spectacle of herself,” to use Temma Kaplan’s formulation, as a tool of social protest. Political allies, from sex radicals to women suffragists to socialists, used her example to mobilize constituencies and to dramatize the contradictions that made women’s political life so fraught with tension to begin with. Social movements chose—even welcomed—Woodhull as a leader, attracted by her public flouting of convention. They applauded her disruptive inversion of power and legitimacy in the public sphere. Woodhull was an unruly woman who both galvanized support and antagonized opposition; she dramatized a comic upheaval of the sexual order, yet in the process significantly altered that order. Both heroine and folk devil, her disorderly conduct celebrated revolution and stimulated a sizeable conservative reaction.³⁸

Victoria Woodhull and Her Sexual Revolution

Not all revolutions succeed unequivocally. In the 1870s, Victoria Woodhull staged a series of revolutionary events to challenge the existing social order, and eventually participated in the reaction against her earlier views. This study traces the waxing and waning of the sexual revolution Woodhull embodied for her contemporaries. The four chapters encapsulate four significant episodes of her career: (1) the early effort to forge a consensus about women’s sexual oppression; (2) the attempt to mobilize a broad constituency through acts of political theater; (3) a program of civil disobedience against laws designed to stifle opposition to the sexual status quo; and (4) the popularization and coincident taming of her radical critique of the social order. Woodhull’s story sheds new light on the intertwining of radical political movements in the 1870s. Her revolutionary program coincided with Radical Reconstruction; by 1876 both movements were in decline.

Chapter 1 describes the early phase of her political activism, in which Woodhull and a small group of radical freethinkers attempted to forge a consensus based on what they called “the Principles of Social Freedom.” Social freedom was a polite euphemism for a philosophy the press dismissed as free love. It held that social, cultural, and religious control over sexuality was harmful to society, and particularly to women. Woodhull attempted to unite a coalition that included socialists, sex radicals, and women’s rights activists. Her organizing principle was that women’s inequality stemmed from their economic dependence on men: marriage was a form of sexual slavery for women through which women exchanged sexual and maternal labor for economic security. She argued that exaggerated sexual differences, including prescriptions about woman’s proper place, reinforced the subordination of women. Sex radicals backed Woodhull to promote the idea that women should cast off the unnatural bonds of marriage as a first step toward liberation. Controversy fragmented the fragile coalition, and by 1872 only a small cadre of social radicals endorsed Woodhull’s Principles and her politics of defiance.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth look at Woodhull’s nomination for president of the United States. This was a deliberate act of political theater designed to shake up popular notions about race and gender. When delegates of the Equal Rights Party nominated Woodhull for president of the United States at their convention in May 1872, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate, they wanted to send a symbolic message of universal rights to the world. Amid the political backlash against Radical Reconstruction, however, the press cast the nomination in highly sexualized and racist tones, revealing deep-seated resistance to the idea of universal rights. Woodhull was the national spokeswoman for social freedom (free love). Douglass, on the other hand, was the national spokesman for social equality (civil rights). He supported the controversial Civil Rights Bill, which sought to provide African Americans equal access to public institutions, including transportation, accommodations, courts of law, and public schools. His opponents accused Douglass of promoting interracial “mingling.” Douglass, not consulted before the convention, rejected the place on Woodhull’s ticket, but not before the nomination had generated satirical and racist press commentary. Because of their respective positions on sexual and social equality, the Woodhull/Douglass nomination laid bare the growing miscegenation hysteria of a critical election year. Vilified in the press, Woodhull turned to a more accessible and effective method of getting her message across.

Chapter 3 explores Woodhull’s use of “exposure” as a political tool, and a form of civil disobedience. Late in 1872, Woodhull exposed the nation’s most prominent Protestant minister, Henry Ward Beecher, for allegedly committing adultery with the wife of his good friend Theodore Tilton. The scandal allowed conservatives to discredit a generation of reform movements, from abolition to woman suffrage, that Beecher represented. The public “outing” of Beecher and a few other respectable men put the principles of the sex radicals into practice, and posed a dramatic challenge to sexual hypocrisy and the existing social order. At the same time, the Beecher exposure triggered the antagonism of moral crusaders, notably Anthony Comstock. He had both Woodhull and Claflin arrested repeatedly under obscenity legislation that he strengthened in the process with their punishment in mind. His relentless pursuit of the sisters crippled them both socially and financially. The questionable grounds of his actions, however, gradually generated popular backlash against the moral authoritarianism he represented. To dramatize the sexual double standard, Woodhull deliberately challenged Comstock and the federal government to act against her. Sex radicals used the Beecher scandal and Comstock’s actions to stimulate open debate on taboo social questions, including prostitution, adultery and divorce. Woodhull’s persecution in 1872–73 prompted anarchists and free lovers, as well as general commentators throughout the country, to question the rise of Comstockery. Her exposure and the subsequent popularization of the Beecher scandal marked the beginning of the end of the period’s revolutionary potential.

Most historians leave Woodhull after the Beecher exposure. Chapter 4 recovers from historical obscurity the last three years of Woodhull’s American career, during which she popularized and simultaneously tamed her radical social critique in a new incarnation of her family’s traveling show. From 1873 to 1876, Woodhull earned a small fortune spreading her version of the Beecher scandal. To the delight of sex radicals, Woodhull’s canny performances on the lecture circuit brought the notion of the single sexual standard before large audiences nationwide. But the popular appetite for her lectures, and the commercialization of Woodhull’s political message, coincided with the declining popularity of universal rights activism. Beecher was just one of several discredited Republican stalwarts during these years, and their shaming was yet another blow to the party’s moral authority. As Republicans during Grant’s second term eschewed the more extreme possibilities for racial reform, by 1876 Woodhull likewise abandoned her most controversial positions. Her later lectures replaced the abstract ideal of total sexual liberation with a more palatable notion of maternal “sexual science.” This deeply religious and proto-eugenicist argument for sex education, for the benefit of the race (initially the human race as a whole) became the underpinning of her later eugenics work in Britain in the 1890s. Woodhull’s retreat from her radical positions of 1872 coincided with the end of Radical Reconstruction, as well as the declining fortunes of international socialism and woman suffrage.

Many sex radicals were disappointed when Woodhull abandoned their most radical principles and sailed for England in 1877. Their most unconventional, powerful, and dramatic spokeswoman had apparently betrayed them to occupy herself whitewashing her own reputation. Hindsight suggests that their criticism was misguided, if not unfair. Reaction against Woodhull was both personal and political in nature, a backlash against both the woman and the liberal humanism she represented. Woodhull herself ultimately participated in this backlash. People expected impossible, contradictory things of Woodhull. Because she was one of very few women willing to take radical positions on women’s sexual rights in the public sphere, activists pinned extravagant hopes on her success. They wanted both the unlettered populist heroine from the Ohio frontier and the female scholar; the downgraded prostitute and the chaste reformer; the hero of the working man and the champion of bourgeois capitalism. It is not surprising that people wanted all this from Woodhull; she offered all these versions of herself to the public at different stages of her career. She was the ultimate performer, dramatizing every possibility of women’s advancement on the public stage. In the end, she personally underwent the reaction against a revolutionary historical moment.

Early women’s rights activists faced a host of obstacles inconceivable to male political contemporaries, invisible to twenty-first-century readers. Many would like to have a female Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, statesmen, public speakers, politicians. And they do exist: theoretician Elizabeth Cady Stanton, fiery rhetorician Sojourner Truth, uncompromising moralist Susan B. Anthony, principled conciliator Lucy Stone. But there was also Victoria Woodhull, and her prominence in contemporary culture makes her significant today. Her ambition and social obscurity enabled her to take risks most respectable women avoided. Stanton shrewdly recognized Woodhull’s significance in the aftermath of the Beecher-Tilton scandal:

Victoria Woodhull has done a work for woman that none of us could have done. She has faced and dared men to call her the names that make women shudder, while she chucked principle, like medicine, down their throats. She has risked and realized the sort of ignominy that would have paralyzed any of us who have longer been called strong-minded.³⁹

To understand fully the continued, perplexing lag in women’s active involvement in public life, it is necessary to appreciate what put it beyond the reach of most women in the past. The historical origins of women’s exclusion from the public sphere are starkly evident in the experiences of those who dared to defy conventional wisdom. This book hopes to offer some insight into the resistance of modern political culture to the full meaning of equality.