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Chapter 1

“The Principles of Social Freedom”

Ten weeks after the opening of Woodhull, Claflin & Company, Brokers, in 1871, Victoria Woodhull took another swipe at the male monopoly on public life; she nominated herself as a candidate for the 1872 presidential contest. She saw herself as eligible because she embodied the many facets of women’s rights activism. In an open letter to the New York Herald, Woodhull said:

While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; … while others sought to show that there was not valid reason why woman should be treated … as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised woman of the country, and … announce myself as a candidate for the Presidency.¹

Soon after, Woodhull, along with her sister and a small network of social activists, began publication of a new radical press, called Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Woodhull used her new visibility and her newspaper to establish a coalition of reformers determined to erase class and gender inequality. Her social critique appealed for the support of activists housed in three distinct social movements: a revolutionary group of Spiritualists known as “free lovers,” women’s rights activists who sought equal political opportunities for women, and a splinter of labor reformers who sought recognition from Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association (IWA, the First International). To all three groups, Woodhull offered a blueprint for a new order that was based on a principle she called social freedom.

As a woman in public life, Woodhull regularly collided with gender and class prescriptions restricting womanly behavior. Society tended to see two kinds of women, those who were respectable and those who were not. Those who saw themselves as respectable women generally sought male protection and economic support in marriage and avoided public life: they saw their seclusion in the private sphere, in fact, as proof of their superior class status. Women activists and public speakers sought to challenge this limited view of respectability in a variety of ways, but only a few openly flouted the underlying sexual double standard. Woodhull’s apparent failure to shrink from public commentary marked her from the outset as not respectable, but she fought against the tendency to reduce all debate to her reputation. Her strategy, instead, was to call the double standard into question by insisting that her sexual life was irrelevant to her public image unless men upheld the same strict code of behavior they used to denounce her.

Creating a Reform Coalition

The Sex Radicals

The sex radicals—members of a faction of the Spiritualist movement that contemporaries often dismissed with the more disparaging term “free lovers”—were quick to recognize Woodhull’s political significance. Within weeks of the brokerage’s opening, anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews sought out Woodhull’s acquaintance; he saw her as an attractive spokeswoman for social reform, and probably helped her to draft her nomination letter to the New York Herald. Before the Civil War, Andrews had been an ardent abolitionist, socialist, Spiritualist and women’s rights activist. He was widely known for his advocacy of “social freedom,” a polite euphemism for the free love movement that had flourished in the radical press and a few experimental communities in the 1850s: Andrews himself had been associated with Long Island’s free love community, Modern Times (now Brentwood, New York). In 1853, Andrews published his views—a frank defense of free love and critique of the hypocrisy of conventional marriage—alongside opposing perspectives in a pamphlet entitled Love, Marriage and Divorce. He and other sex radicals based their ideology of social freedom on an Enlightenment belief in individual rights as applied to women. He introduced Woodhull to a national network of activists who believed, as Helen Lefkovitz Horowitz puts it, “that sex lay at the core of being”; for them, free love (defined in a number of ways) was the key to all other reforms. Andrews’s editorial influence over the Weekly brought it an agenda and a following, making it a forum for social freedom as the harbinger of revolution.²

Through the spring and summer of 1870, Andrews and his fellow sex radicals used the Weekly to articulate the most extreme claims to women’s political and social emancipation. They denied that sex was merely for procreation, insisting on women’s rights to sexual agency within and possibly even outside marriage. Even among these extreme reformers, there was a wide spectrum of opinion on exactly what free love meant. Some believed that monogamy was the highest possible state, and that individuals should have the freedom to choose a lifelong mate carefully based on spiritual and physical affinity; within the current, imperfect state of marriage, they felt, a woman had the right to refuse her husband sexual access. Others, who might be termed “serial monogamists,” wanted to abolish marriage, which they saw as a form of sexual slavery for women, but advocated enduring free relationships based on mutual attraction. Most extreme were the varietists, who opposed any social restraints on sexuality whatsoever; only individual attraction, rather than social sanctions, they held, should dictate the frequency and permanency of sexual partnerships. From its publication, all these strands of the debate over social freedom filled the pages of the Weekly; sex radicals like Andrews, Ezra Heywood, Juliet Severance, Olivia Freelove Shepard, Lois Waisbrooker, Moses Hull, and Francis Barry wrote regularly about prostitution, the abolition of marriage, the single sexual standard, and dress reform.³ Their writing strove to raise consciousness about sexual inequality, to eliminate exaggerated indicators of sexual difference, and to destroy the double standard that forgave men for behavior condemned in women.

Most sex radicals were also Spiritualists. Spiritualism was a loosely connected movement of Christian nonconformists and freethinkers who believed that the spirits of the dead could, if properly understood and heeded, make a positive contribution to the world of the living. Spiritualism empowered the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement because Spirit guidance gave female activists the cultural authority to lead public lives.⁴ Female mediums and especially trance speakers claimed to channel male spirit voices, which freed them from conventional gender roles, and allowed them to speak in public and instruct audiences in the parlor and on the stage. Spiritualists’ emphasis on women’s rights posed a very real threat to traditional marriage; the goal was to free women from conventions and appearances (including clothing) that demonstrated their subordination to men. Woodhull’s new allegiance to Spiritualists and dress reformers, for example, was evident late in 1870 when she adopted a variant of the reform costume—leggings under a flowing shirt and a man’s jacket. All but the most extreme Spiritualists had abandoned the reform dress after the Civil War: sex radicals used such controversial displays of reform dress to exhibit their struggle for women’s complete sexual liberation. They lived their principles publicly and dared the rest of the world to do the same.⁵

Sex radicals believed that hypocrisy tainted the social order and made class and gender equality inaccessible to women. To illustrate this point, they frequently wrote about prostitution, which they saw as a disease, caused by the economic exploitation of women, that “festered in silence.” Only equal economic rights for women would cure it. “Remove the causes and the effects will cease,” argued a typical Weekly editorial. “Give woman employment and you remove her from the need of self-destruction.” Desperation drove many women into abusive or exploitative relations with men purely for survival. “We hope all our girls and women will soon be educated up to the standard of preferring the glorious freedom of self-support, even as washerwomen and ragpickers, to holding legal or illegal sexual relations undictated by attraction. She who marries for support, and not for love, is a lazy pauper, coward and prostitute.” In advocating social and economic remedies for prostitution, sex radicals went beyond a demand for the vote.⁶ By referring to marriage as legal prostitution, they insisted that both groups of women exchanged sexuality for material benefit, but men held up married women as exemplary, and disparaged the prostitutes they secretly visited. This double standard punished women for sexual behavior forgiven in men; silence, sex radicals maintained, only made women more vulnerable to exploitation.⁷ Their demand for an open assessment of men’s role in perpetuating the social evil became the backbone of Woodhull’s free love philosophy.⁸

Beneath these calls for economic equity and sexual openness lay the belief that women, like men, were sexual beings. Prostitution, “the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors,” was a natural consequence of denying women’s sexual agency. “Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society,” a Weekly correspondent insisted. Most provocative here was the assertion that society’s denial of a woman’s natural appetites essentially forced her into prostitution. The idea that women experienced sexual desire—even if it led them astray—contradicted more palatable claims of victimization offered by earlier reformers. The assertion of female sexual agency undermined the Victorianism of some pre-Civil War women’s reform movements: as spiritual rather than physical beings, the argument said, women would purify political corruption.⁹ Woodhull’s insistence on female sexual agency, but more important, her determination to end the silence on the subject, scorned the idea of women’s moral superiority to men. Instead, she insisted that both sexes be held to the same standard: a moral order that shielded men and condemned women for the same act was not worthy of protection. Only honest scrutiny of social problems could bring about their solution.

The Woman Suffrage Movement

Woodhull’s social activism also had a political bent, evident in her self-nomination for president, which attracted her to the woman suffrage cause. She forced the connection in January 1871, by presenting a powerful suffrage Memorial to the House Judiciary Committee. It was one of Woodhull’s few public ventures that garnered respectful treatment in illustrated news (Figure 6). The Memorial encapsulated a recent shift in legal theory on women’s right to the vote. Suffragists had divided in 1868–69 when the Fifteenth Amendment, which had granted federal protection of the vote regardless of race, left women out of the franchise because the Fourteenth Amendment referred to citizens for the first time as “male.” Most woman suffrage activists saw no other option than to pursue a “Sixteenth Amendment” enfranchising women. Woodhull’s Memorial brought national attention to a legal strategy known as the “New Departure.” Ignoring the word “male,” it argued that the Fourteenth Amendment had indeed made women citizens (by virtue of being born in the United States), and demanded Congressional action to enforce women’s right to vote. The New Departure gave suffrage women a way to mend fences following the heated racialized debate over the Fifteenth Amendment. It also offered them an appealing route to the vote by direct action at a local level that would avoid the tedious and probably doomed attempt to pass a separate amendment.¹⁰

Suffrage women were both intrigued and repelled by Woodhull’s flamboyant public life. Even members of the more militant wing of the suffrage movement, the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), were reluctant to attend Woodhull’s Memorial: her visibility in illustrated sporting news like The Days’ Doings made her anything but respectable. NWSA leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were hard pressed to persuade Connecticut suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker to attend Woodhull’s presentation. Hooker, a new member of the NWSA, hoped to give the movement an aura of respectability, but Woodhull’s financial and political resources soon overpowered Hooker’s genteel reservations. When Woodhull repeated the Memorial before the suffragists’ convention later that day, she also pledged $10,000 to the cause; while the money never explicitly appeared in the organization’s coffers, it is possible that she contributed as much in kind by publishing the Weekly and circulating other literature for woman suffrage. NWSA leaders tapped Woodhull for copies of the Memorial and the Judiciary Committee reports it generated to spread the word about the “new departure.” Such potential contributions to the movement, particularly her willingness to speak publicly for an unpopular cause, made Woodhull too powerful an asset to ignore.¹¹ Trance speakers had long proved attractive spokeswomen for suffrage, and Stanton saw in Woodhull a new charismatic figure on the rostrum. “Neither Anna Dickinson nor Kate Field ever [thought] enough of our movement to make a speech on our platform,” Stanton wrote to a friend soon after meeting Woodhull, referring to the two most popular female lecturers of the period. Woodhull’s potential to publicize the cause proved hard to resist.¹²

Women opposed to suffrage seized on Woodhull’s new prominence in the movement to discredit the idea of the woman’s vote. For these anti-suffrage women, Woodhull was the perfect illustration of the dangers that public life posed to women’s special status as guardians of domestic virtue. Their paper, The True Woman, saw Woodhull’s unsavory reputation as eroding women’s respectability. “While some good, but misguided women, have, doubtless from the best of motives, embarked in this [suffrage] cause,” wrote the editors, “we have, of late, witnessed with great surprise, an affiliation between them and others of more than doubtful lives, who by throwing off all feminine delicacy, have gained a bad notoriety. This fact proves the dangerous and downward tendency of the doctrines of these free thinking women.” Woodhull, these anti-suffrage women insisted, epitomized the “dangerous and downward” slide of suffrage women to infamy.¹³

Figure 6. Woodhull achieved a political coup for suffrage by obtaining a hearing with the House Judiciary Committee for her suffrage Memorial. Here she holds the attention of the Representatives as well as the suffragists who were initially reluctant to hear her. Claflin is seated at the right of the image. This depiction, much more respectful than those found in the sporting papers, was intended for a middle-class family audience. Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, February 4, 1871. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

In May 1871, Woodhull’s notoriety became even more burdensome for pro-suffrage activists when her personal life became a public scandal in New York’s Essex Police Court. Woodhull’s mother brought charges against Woodhull’s second husband, Colonel Blood, for “alienating the affections” of daughters Victoria and Tennessee, apparently because he had supplanted their parents and drawn them into the realm of social radicalism. Newspapers underscored the family’s coarseness, evident for these editors both in the bizarre charges and the “shameless effrontery” with which the sisters “bore the inquisitive glances of the crowd” when they appeared in court. Other signs of their lack of respectability were the unusual facts that Woodhull was divorced and sheltered her first husband, Dr. Canning Woodhull (an ailing alcoholic) under the same roof with her current husband Colonel Blood (to whom she may not have been legally wed). The Days’ Doings depicted the family engaged in public sparring in the courtroom as a crowd of amused male spectators looked on (Figure 7). Lurid headlines like “Tennie and Vic” and “Blood Will Tell,” and disreputable revelations of her family background showcased Woodhull as a vulgar public woman. As the Cleveland Leader put it, her

Figure 7. Tennessee Claflin’s squabbling in police court with sister Mary Sparr over mother Roxanna Claflin’s affections placed the family in the disorderly category. The humorous expressions of the male bystanders provide visual cues that invite comparable responses in the (largely male) readers. The Days’ Doings, June 3, 1871.

brazen immodesty as a stock speculator on Wall street, and the open, shameless effrontery with which she has paraded her name in circus-bill types at the head of her newspaper as candidate … for the Presidency in 1872.… [A]ll this has proclaimed her as a vain, immodest, unsexed woman, with whom respectable people should have as little to do as possible.

The public disgrace imputed to her Essex Police Court appearance was fodder in the hands of the respectable press. By virtue of an unconventional background and a failure to shrink from public scrutiny, Woodhull reinforced the idea of the shameless public woman.¹⁴

The timing was unfortunate. The story burst into print just as pro-suffrage women were preparing for their annual May conventions. Woodhull’s personal scandal unleashed controversy over sexuality and public life for women, or sex in politics, as popular commentary put it. Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe channeled her objections to Woodhull into her novel, My Wife and I, serialized in her brother Henry Ward Beecher’s Christian Union. As one of Stowe’s characters put it, women like Woodhull cut “the very ground from under the whole woman movement; for the main argument for proposing it was to introduce into politics that superior delicacy and purity which women manifest in public life.” According to Stowe, Woodhull’s notoriety seemed to prove that women would have a negative impact, for it jeopardized the moral purity, and thus the class status, of suffrage crusaders. In illustration, the fictional female editor Audacia Dangyereyes bore all the hallmarks of a fast, slangy woman, from her direct stare to her exposed ankles (Figure 8). “If Mrs. Woodhull was a real lady, she would refuse to hold office,” one disenchanted suffrage advocate wrote to Isabella Beecher Hooker soon after this appeared. “A repentant Magdalen I can accept—even in office and before the world—but a woman who ‘glories in her shame’—never!” In spite of resistance from within the movement, Woodhull, along with other sex radicals like Frances Rose McKinley, promoted woman suffrage in acts of public theater, such as testing the “new departure” theory that women could vote by going to the polls that November (Figures 9–10). Her visibility continually linked woman suffrage to her questionable life and provocative theories, and became a tangible thorn in the side of the movement. It was difficult for suffrage women to enjoy the benefits of her celebrity without seeming to endorse her radical social critique.¹⁵

Figure 8. Harriet Beecher Stowe lampooned the “public woman” in her portrayal of Audacia Dangyereyes, a minor character representing Woodhull and Claflin, in her serialized novel My Wife and I. In this image, a slangy, improper Dangyereyes sits on the edge of a table like a man and gazes directly into the shocked eyes of narrator Harry Henderson. Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I (1871). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The International Workingmen’s Association

By summer 1871, Woodhull hoped that her class and gender critique might prove more attractive to a third constituency, the international socialists. She was not the first suffragist to connect women’s inequality to their lack of financial independence; Susan B. Anthony, for one, had worked with the Labor Reform League and frequently addressed the subject of women’s work in the Revolution.¹⁶ Most labor activists, however, worked through malecentered organizations devoted to the interests of single trades or crafts. International socialists, under the auspices of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), were alone in promoting large-scale collective actions in the early 1870s. (The IWA was at the time the only national labor organization in the United States not devoted to any single craft.) The IWA had formed in 1864 to promote international labor solidarity as a crucial weapon in the war against capital. The American branch had strong roots in the German trade union movement: the first section in America formed in 1867 out of the German General Working-Men’s Union, and officially became Section One of the IWA in December 1870. Friedrich Sorge, a German immigrant whom Philip Foner has called the “Father of modern socialism in America,” led Section One. American radicals, ranging from Spiritualists and sex radicals to former abolitionists and labor reformers, formed several sections of what Timothy Messer-Kruse calls the “Yankee International.” By early 1872, the IWA peaked with an estimated five thousand members in roughly thirty sections.¹⁷ Between 1871 and 1872, Woodhull was instrumental in both the movement’s growth and its subsequent decline.

Figure 9. Acting upon the new departure theory in the women’s suffrage struggle, Woodhull and Claflin attempt to vote in New York on election day in 1871. Her ballot was refused, Woodhull later claimed, because the Democrats who controlled the polling stations feared that women would vote for the Republican ticket. The Days’ Doings, November 25, 1871.

Figure 10. Free lover and suffragist Frances Rose McKinley also asserts her rights under the new departure theory of suffrage, and succeeds in registering to vote. She is shown with the upraised arm of the “strong-minded woman.” In this image, McKinley literally invades the male world of the polling station, the barbershop, a novelty evident in the consternation of the patrons. The Days’ Doings, November 25, 1871.

Woodhull, Andrews, and other sex radicals formed Section Twelve of the IWA in spring 1871, on the heels of her family scandal in Essex Police Court. They hoped that Internationalists would prove more courageous than suffragists in supporting their interpretation of social freedom. Offering her services as a lecturer, and making available her paper (Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly), offices, and staff to the IWA, Woodhull swiftly took on a leadership role in Section Twelve. To Sorge’s disgust, the commercial press soon used Woodhull to disparage the American IWA as a whole. From June through August 1871, Woodhull and her fellow social radicals promoted Section Twelve as uniquely situated to steer the course of the entire IWA in America, a position that put them immediately into conflict with Section One. In Woodhull’s favor, Section Twelve had strong connections to the American left. Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly gave Section Twelve unique access to English-speaking radical public opinion: in 1871 it was the IWA’s only English language press in America. That summer, Section Twelve translated, printed, and distributed Marx’s defense of the Paris Commune (probably at Woodhull’s expense), The Civil War in France, while the Weekly published articles sympathetic to the Commune and the International alongside arguments for dress reform and women’s rights. By August, however, Section Twelve had come to blows with Sorge and the German American leadership of Section One, who were appalled by such a flagrant connection between the IWA and free love.¹⁸

Events that September made the Woodhull connection even more onerous for the IWA’s Section One. That month popular editor Theodore Tilton published a biography of Woodhull, at her dictation. Tilton’s biography, he later claimed, was a price he paid to prevent Woodhull from revealing a personal scandal involving his wife and popular minister Henry Ward Beecher. In the biography, Woodhull’s frank disclosures, revealed in a rather ludicrous mixture of showmanship and disingenuousness, gave credit to Spirit influences for her rise to prominence. She claimed their powers as clairvoyants and magnetic healers had allowed her and Claflin to secure the backing of railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt to finance their brokerage house. Illustrated sporting newspapers like The Days’ Doings depicted the biography in scathing images that mocked her Spiritualism and exaggerated her family’s vulgarity (Figure 11), while popular news reports emphasized Woodhull’s connection with the IWA. Sorge and Section One immediately responded to the threat Woodhull posed to his vision of the IWA as a manly workers’ organization. As the press excoriated Woodhull’s biography, Sorge quickly worked behind the scenes to convince Karl Marx and the IWA General Council in London to reject Section Twelve’s petition to lead the American IWA.¹⁹ International socialists did not agree with Woodhull that sexual slavery was the underlying cause of social evils like prostitution; like the suffragists before them, they feared Woodhull’s potential to discredit their movement.

Figure 11. Woodhull’s life story, as published by Theodore Tilton, provided much amusement to The Days’ Doings. Here the sporting newspaper mocks her candid revelations to Tilton, including her claims that she had been attended by spirits since infancy, and her ambition to rule America as the twin “Victoria” to the Queen of England. The Days’ Doings, October 7, 1871.

The Principles of Social Freedom

The Tilton biography’s emphasis on Spiritualism was not accidental: Woodhull had commissioned the pamphlet to solidify her position among sex radicals in the Spiritualist movement. Its focus on the role of Spirit powers in shaping her destiny was good advertising for the movement’s only national organization, the American Association of Spiritualists (AAS): that same September, delegates found copies of the biography on their seats at the eighth annual convention of the AAS in Troy, New York.²⁰ Sex radicals apparently dominated the convention; they found Woodhull’s speech captivating, and elected her, over a few objections, the organization’s president for the following year. Her Spiritualist opponents, however, felt that she had manipulated the organization, and immediately protested that she was ineligible for election, and even that she and her friends had stuffed the ballot box (claims vigorously denied by officials monitoring the election). Critics said that she was using Spiritualism as a vehicle for her own ambition. Behind these technical concerns and accusations lay a longstanding tension over the place of free love in the movement. Woodhull’s election as AAS president divided Spiritualists into three camps, represented by three competing newspapers: opponents published their criticisms in Chicago’s Religio-Philosophical Journal, moderates debated her leadership in Boston’s Banner of Light, while fervent supporters found voice in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. As the controversy raged in the Spiritualist press, Woodhull, Blood, and Andrews prepared to bring the entire debate before the public, in a speech (delivered by Woodhull) fully explicating the meaning of social freedom.²¹

Woodhull presented this lecture, entitled “The Principles of Social Freedom,” on November 20, 1871, at New York City’s Steinway Hall. It was probably the most frank defense of social freedom before a public audience in American history. She intended that the lecture would answer her critics and unify her coalition around the theme that sexual slavery was the basis of women’s inequality. Placards advertising the lecture billed it as her vindication, designed “for the express purpose of silencing the voices and stopping the pens of those who … persistently misrepresent, slander, abuse and vilify [Woodhull] on account of her outspoken advocacy of, and supreme faith in, God’s first, last and best law,” namely social freedom or free love. Placards cautioned, however, that those seeking scandalous behavior in the free love lecture would be disappointed, for “the advocacy of its principles requires neither abandoned action nor immodest speech.”²² These disclaimers only underscored the lecture’s sensational content and the speaker’s notoriety: she was a celebrity by virtue of her reputation and her unconventional views. A vast and boisterous audience turned out to hear her speak.

Woodhull had spoken before crowds in the past, but the size and commotion of this audience was intimidating. Her notoriety made the spectacle particularly risqué, as it allowed people to assess, and even confront Woodhull in person. A rowdy audience waited impatiently and with much commotion for the lecture to begin, while Woodhull waited backstage for Henry Ward Beecher, who had agreed to introduce the lecture as part of a deal to prevent her from revealing the alleged relationship between him and Elizabeth Tilton. When Beecher failed to show, Theodore Tilton finally agreed to introduce Woodhull, using chivalry as an excuse once it became apparent that no other man would do so. “I was told she was coming upon this stand unattended and alone,” Tilton told the crowd to hisses and applause. Woodhull’s courage in facing the unruly crowd, to deliver a lecture on a subject widely believed to be morally improper, established her credentials among sex radicals and reform lecturers. Her vulnerability as a woman before a disorderly crowd became an asset: her poise and energy won her several ovations.²³

The message of the lecture—“one sexual standard for all”—combined several strands of social radicalism. As a generation of sex radicals had done before her, Woodhull demanded remedy for the sufferings of women under the abuses of “legalized prostitution,” or marriage. The American Revolution had justly put an end to religious and political despotism, Woodhull told the audience; only social tyranny remained. Marriage, sanctioned by law and church, was the agent of this social tyranny, but its roots lay deeper, in the economic inequality of women. This analysis of social relations led inevitably to a critique of “respectable” conventional marriage. Natural attraction was the only reliable guide to human emotion, Woodhull insisted. Law alone could not protect morality: “I honor and worship that purity which exists in the soul of every noble man or woman, while I pity the woman who is virtuous simply because a law compels her.” In fact, she argued, law itself made people dishonest, for “all persons whom the law holds married against their wishes find some way to evade the law and to live the life they desire. Of what use, then, is the law except to make hypocrites and pretenders of a sham respectability?” The hypocrisy of the current situation, in other words, was what she deplored.²⁴

Furthermore, she argued that economic inequality fueled the sexual double standard that punished women and excused men for the same sexual acts. “The veriest systems of despotism still reign in all matters pertaining to social life,” Woodhull claimed. “Caste stands as boldly out in this country as it does in political life in the kingdoms of Europe.” Society held prostitutes in contempt, even as it upheld the respectability of the men who visited them: “there are scores of thousands of women who are denominated prostitutes, and who are supported by hundreds of thousands of men who should, for like reasons, also be denominated prostitutes, since what will change a woman into a prostitute must also necessarily change a man into the same.” A dearth of economic alternatives forced women into marriages and then made them support a system that degraded less “fortunate” women:

I have heard women reply when this difficulty was pressed upon them, “We cannot ostracize men as we are compelled to [ostracize] women, since we are dependent on them for support.” Ah! here’s the rub. But do you not see that these other sisters are also dependent upon men for their support, and mainly so because you render it next to impossible for them to follow any legitimate means of livelihood? And are only those who have been fortunate enough to secure legal support entitled to live?

Women were thus complicit in the very system that kept them subordinate to men. They valued only legally sanctioned unions and dismissed as despicable their less fortunate sisters, “the only difference between the two being in a licensed ceremony, and a slip of printed paper costing twenty-five cents and upward.” Class differences among women prevented honest assessment of a system where respectability hid the exploitation of prostitutes.²⁵

“Social freedom,” Woodhull told the audience, was the only logical solution to such social tyranny. “The sexual relation must be rescued from this insidious form of slavery,” she said. “Women must rise from their position as ministers to the passions of men to be their equals.” The only way to achieve this goal was to give women the educational benefits enjoyed by men, and train them for purposeful economic lives independent of marriage. “They must be trained to be like men, permanent and independent individualities, and not their mere appendages or adjuncts, with them forming but one member of society. They must be the companions of men from choice, never from necessity.” As such, women should determine sexual relations, and seize control of maternal functions, through abstinence if necessary. Noting that most women entered marriage without any knowledge of sexual relations or human physiology, Woodhull insisted that women be properly educated in the workings of their own bodies. Only open discussion and education could properly prepare women for safe and harmonious sexual lives. Women must demand this change to liberate themselves from social tyranny.²⁶

The lecture was an effort to link three fractious and divided communities around a single cause and one charismatic figure. Few, however, took the “Principles” to be an articulation of serious social theory. Such a controversial subject, presented by an infamous speaker, was unlikely to find respectful consideration in the press. The most controversial aspect of the lecture was the extreme individualism inherent in Woodhull’s argument. “And to those who denounce me,” Woodhull told her audience at one point, “I reply: ‘Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.’”²⁷ In this statement, Woodhull went beyond the bromide of “monogamist” sex radicals; when she claimed the right to change lovers at will, even daily, she took the theoretical extreme of the free love cause, known as “varietism.”

Woodhull’s contemporaries interpreted this statement as a spontaneous response to audience heckling, and therefore an “authentic” reflection of her own views. In fact, it was likely the product of Andrews’s thinking on individual sovereignty in sexual relations, and it appeared within the text of the speech itself, later sold in pamphlet form. Andrews took the “varietist” position that social freedom meant unconditional freedom from any restraints or conventions in intimate relations, whereas Woodhull’s own views, to judge from her later statements, were probably closer to the serial monogamist position, at least in theory. She spent the next few years backpedaling from this extreme position on free love. But regardless of whether this statement was written by Andrews or Woodhull, this application of “rights” here appealed overtly to civil libertarians on the fringes of social reform. What mattered was that Woodhull—a woman—gave voice to such a controversial idea on a public platform. It was certainly newsworthy: it was the most frequently cited passage of the lecture. In that single statement, she became the byword for sex radicalism and a target for conservative defenders of the “traditional” family.²⁸

The event proved even more spectacular when vocal opposition to Woodhull’s argument emerged from the balcony, in the voice of her own sister, Utica Brooker. Brooker disrupted the lecture, standing up to demand that Woodhull explain what was to become of illegitimate children born of free love. Woodhull tried to quiet her sister by inviting her on stage to debate the question: when Brooker declined, police intervention forced her to resume her seat (Figure 12). This public demonstration gave the press more evidence of the coarse family displays that dogged Woodhull’s public persona. In fact, Brooker’s objection to Woodhull’s “varietism” was part of the free love debate: it is even possible, given the family’s expertise in showmanship, that the interruption had been planned in advance to bring out the question and allow Woodhull to score rhetorical points. Instead, the media exaggerated the spectacle, its nonconformist audience of free lovers, and “the fast young men about town, who had come for the fun of the thing,” at the expense of any principles Woodhull articulated. Inflammatory media coverage effectively stifled any rational discussion on the merits of “social freedom.”²⁹

Woodhull and her supporters responded to scathing press commentary with even more defiance of social hypocrisy. They countered the public outcry following the Steinway Hall lecture with threats to expose the private free love practices of “respectable” critics. Tennessee Claflin, for example, in a letter to the New York Sun, criticized Horace Greeley’s recent editorial in the New York Tribune on a new Infant Asylum. She noted his hypocrisy of calling the Asylum a model of “a Christian institution,” when the institution’s purpose was to rear the babies born out of wedlock to women of “respectable birth.” In other words, said Claflin,

society first damns the woman, and charges as a crime on her the beautiful and natural facts of maternity, and then organizes an institution for the express purpose, and connives with her to evade the law, and impose a lie on the same society which has condemned her; and this organized falsehood and hypocrisy is praised by the Tribune, which pretends to be horrified at free love, as a “noble Christian charity.”

Two weeks later the Weekly published a muckraking letter from a woman who ran a brothel in New York. This self-confessed “Madam” offered to give Woodhull two ledgers containing “the names and residences and some of the incidents of each visit” of the “male prostitutes” (as she called her clientele).³⁰ Both threats directly confronted sexual hypocrisy and demonstrated the centrality of sexual openness to Woodhull’s definition of social freedom. Her critics had cornered Woodhull—and her allies—into defending a principle of social revolution through the exposure of hypocrisy.

Figure 12. Woodhull and master of ceremonies Theodore Tilton, on the stage at the left, fail to silence the heckling of one of Woodhull’s sisters, Utica Brooker, during Woodhull’s controversial free love speech at Steinway Hall. Police intervention to silence this sisterly disturbance, as well as the raucous crowd in the background, reinforce the disorderly woman connotations. The Days’ Doings, December 9, 1871.

A Fractured Coalition

The Steinway Hall lecture fragmented Woodhull’s constituencies, one by one. The first to go were the international socialists. Woodhull’s public promotion of social freedom terminated relations with Sorge and Section One of the First International. Advance rumors of the lecture prompted Section One to set up a new American council behind Woodhull’s back. The new council dismissed her social critique underlying the “free love” question as the work of a few bourgeois enthusiasts and excluded any mention of women’s issues from the IWA agenda. “All this talk of theirs is folly, or worse than folly, and we don’t want their foolish notions credited as the views of this society,” one member of Section One declared. “This nonsense which they talk of, female suffrage and free love, may do to consider in the future, but the question that interests us as working-men is that of labor and wages.” The new council inaugurated a “two-thirds rule,” holding that two-thirds of the members of any IWA section must be wage laborers, a decision that favored participation by workers in trades and crafts but largely excluded reform-minded women.³¹

Figure 13. The mock-funeral march of the American International Workingmen’s Association in honor of the martyrs of the Paris Commune became the march of Woodhull and Claflin in popular press renditions. The image gives precedence to Woodhull’s controversial Section Twelve, names Claflin as the flag-bearer, and emphasizes the proximity of the women to the African American militia. More reliable reports place Woodhull and Claflin in a carriage near the back of the march. The Days’ Doings, January 6, 1872.

The exclusion of Section Twelve from the new council coincided with Woodhull’s increasing celebrity as a leader of the International. That December, commercial newspapers highlighted the presence of Woodhull and Claflin at the IWA funeral parade for the Communards (recently executed by the Thiers government in France), for example. Planned by French sections in collaboration with Section Twelve and others (over the opposition of Sorge and Section One) to protest continuing suppression of radicals in Paris, the march was a political spectacle whose message was the principle of universal rights. The Skidmore Light Guard, a Black militia unit, led the procession, followed by a group of women on foot; political refugees from Cuba and France; French, German, Swiss, and Bohemian sections of the International; and finally Irish nationals. Several additional symbols of universal rights were evident, notably three men—a French, an Irish, and a Black man—who marched with linked arms in a prominent place. As many as five thousand marchers gathered in Cooper Square (at Eighth Street), and marched down Third Avenue into the Bowery, west on Great Jones Street, up Fifth Avenue to Thirty-Fourth Street, down Sixth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, Union Square, where the marchers dispersed after circling the statue of Lincoln. Illustrations of the march appearing in The Days’ Doings and the less flamboyant Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (Figures 13–14) both centered on the presence of Woodhull and Claflin, particularly their close proximity to the Skidmore Light Guard, when in fact the sisters rode in carriages at the back.³² Such illustrations inflated their importance to the IWA in a way that equated its economic goals with extreme social radicalism.

Woodhull’s media prominence, along with growing evidence of grass roots support for Woodhull among unskilled laborers in early 1872, may explain why her section refused to cede leadership of the American IWA to Section One. She delivered a popular lecture called “The Impending Revolution” that February, which compared the wealth of a few capitalist entrepreneurs at the expense of workers with the wealth of slave owners before the Civil War. Thousands flocked to the lecture—even the critical New York Herald reported that six thousand attended, with as many more turned away for lack of seats. Woodhull’s revolutionary message, and the audience’s enthusiastic response to her calls for an uprising of the disenfranchised workers, generated extraordinarily negative commentary in the commercial press.³³ “Personally Mrs. Woodhull is of no possible consequence,” the New York Times editorialized. “Still, her periodical exhibitions of bitter language upon the platform attract numbers of idle people, among whom are some whose ignorance and envy fit them to receive her folly as though it were words of wisdom.” The Times was particularly concerned with her power to incite class unrest. “She is … capable of mischief in inflaming the unthinking hostility of the poor to the rich, and in fostering, in the minds of the working men who applauded her last Tuesday night, the conviction that capitalists have no rights which working men are bound to respect.”³⁴

Woodhull’s uncompromising anticapitalist statements in the lecture made her an attractive spokesperson for downtrodden workers in early 1872. In March, fifteen hundred unemployed workers rallying in Tompkins Square spontaneously began chanting Woodhull’s name.³⁵ Four days later, workers responded enthusiastically to her lecture at an anniversary gathering in honor of the Paris Commune.³⁶ However, Woodhull’s popularity had the opposite effect on Marx and the General Council in London, who decided that March to take Sorge’s advice and provisionally suspended Section Twelve from the IWA, pending approval by the International Congress in the Hague the following September. Although she continued to advocate the positions of the “Yankee International,” the IWA’s leadership seemed determined to sever all connection with Woodhull and Section Twelve.³⁷

Figure 14. This image, which appeared in a family illustrated paper, includes the catafalque in the march. It also emphasizes the juxtaposition of the African American militia and the women marchers, giving Claflin the shortened skirt of the “fast” woman. Figures 13 and 14 demonstrate the fictional quality of illustrated news in the 1870s, which relied on often unreliable press accounts as sources, and allowed its illustrators great artistic license. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 6, 1872.

The Steinway Hall lecture likewise sowed division in the ranks of the woman suffrage movement. Catharine Beecher, perhaps the most influential critic of Woodhull’s influence, recast her longstanding opposition to woman suffrage by appealing to suffragists’ class interests and respectability. “Can any Christian woman sanction in any way the efforts of such a woman?” she demanded in public print as rumors of Woodhull’s coming “social freedom” lecture circulated in Hartford, Connecticut. Woodhull’s “past character and history,” said Beecher, have “not been favorable to the cultivation of feelings of delicacy and propriety.”³⁸ Woodhull’s public endorsement of social freedom allowed anti-suffrage women to show that public women like Woodhull were dangerous threats to the respectability of the suffragists. Woodhull embodied, in fact, the central dilemma of activism for women. Media coverage of suffragists was rarely flattering; a typically disparaging illustration (Figure 15) appearing in The Days’ Doings in February mocked the “raid of the strong-minded” women, one wielding the inevitable raised umbrella, on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then reconsidering the Woodhull Memorial. Woodhull’s connections came with the price of notoriety. As Abigail Duniway, editor of moderate suffrage paper The New Northwest put it, however unsavory Woodhull might be as an associate, she was “the only woman who can get the ear of the men who have usurped our rights, and women must speak through her until they get into power.” Woodhull’s celebrity was both an asset and a liability.³⁹

The most vivid illustration of this dilemma appeared in the famous “Mrs. Satan” caricature, which depicted Woodhull as a demon (Figure 16). Drawn by Thomas Nast, the best-known political cartoonist of the 1870s, Woodhull stood in the foreground, complete with horns, wings and claws resembling the demon Apollyon in John Bunyan’s popular Christian parable, Pilgrim’s Progress; she held a sign that read “Be Saved by Free Love.” In the background, a wife and mother, overburdened with a drunken husband and countless small children, rejected Woodhull and her teachings and piously turned away to face her hard lot. The cartoon’s overt message was negative: faced with the temptation of social freedom, the struggling mother tells Woodhull that “I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps.” Perhaps unintentionally, however, the heavy burdens of the wife and mother illustrated some of the reasons why women’s emancipation was necessary. Its irony was obvious to women’s rights activists when they saw it in 1872. As pro-suffrage Martha Coffin Wright wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton soon after it appeared, with warm regards for Stanton’s sick daughter, “you must strengthen her all you can, for the inevitable burdens in store for her, if the choice is such as Harper describes in that cartoon.” As Wright saw it, “Mr. Nast proved a little too much in that picture.”⁴⁰

Suffrage leaders of the NWSA, particularly Stanton and Anthony, publicly supported Woodhull’s social critique and the idea of a single sexual standard, even though they disagreed privately about the wisdom of associating with her. Stanton dismissed charges of Woodhull’s immorality as irrelevant: “When a woman of this class shall suddenly devote herself to the study of the grave problems of life, brought there by profound thought and experience, and with new faith and hope struggles to redeem the errors of the past by a grand life in the future, shall we not welcome her to the better place she desires to hold?” Stanton saw no practical reason to deny the movement access to Woodhull’s newspaper, powerful connections with the New York media, and network of social radicals. Anthony likewise made a strong public defense of Woodhull, on the ground that women should not be held to a higher standard than male politicians. “I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew of Mrs. Woodhull’s antecedents,” Anthony told the NWSA convention in January 1872. “I said I didn’t, and that I did not care any more for them than I do about those of the members of Congress. Her antecedents will compare favorably with any member of Congress.” Anthony strenuously objected, however, when trance speaker Addie Ballou, who sat upon the NWSA platform, rushed down to the floor to nominate Woodhull as a candidate for president of the United States.⁴¹

Figure 15. The “strong-minded women” overrun the Senate Judiciary Committee, then considering Woodhull’s Memorial on the Fourteenth Amendment. Frenetic postures, upraised arms, umbrellas, and eyeglasses designate the women as political agitators. Senator Carpenter’s helpless fear lends the scene a humorous, satirical note. The Days Doings’, February 17, 1872.

Figure 16. Published after her free love speech at New York’s Steinway Hall, this image established Woodhull as a folk devil. Her clawed wings resemble those of the demon Apollyon in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious fable enjoying renewed popularity in the 1870s. Like Bunyan’s hero Christian, the wife in the background willingly shoulders heavy burdens (in her case, a drunken husband, many children, and poverty) and resists the temptation of an easier path that Woodhull offers. Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Privately, Anthony thought Woodhull was bad for the movement. She was frustrated that Stanton courted the controversial connection in spring 1872 by helping Woodhull and the sex radicals develop a platform for the “Grand Combination Convention” planned for that May.⁴² Unlike her friend, Anthony became increasingly convinced as she toured the Northwest that winter and early spring that Woodhull was a political liability. Facing declining audiences and insufficient cash receipts throughout the tour, Anthony spent considerable effort clearing up the misconception of many on the west coast that woman suffrage meant free love. She was also personally opposed to the notion of free love, particularly the varietism Woodhull had promoted at Steinway Hall. As she commented in her diary, Woodhull “was the first woman man had succeeded in fashioning to his own ideal—so that she theoretically accepted man’s practical theory of promiscuity or change.” Anthony, who saw varietism as a male-centered philosophy that ignored possibly dire consequences for women, saw much to fear in Woodhull’s public declaration of social freedom.⁴³

To “Shock the World to Its Very Center”

Spiritualists, those most likely to be sympathetic to Woodhull’s unconventional views, similarly divided over the question of Woodhull’s leadership. The Religio-Philosophical Journal editor, S. S. Jones, provided a forum for Spiritualists who supported women’s rights, marriage reform, and free thought, but rejected Woodhull’s revolutionary application of the “principles of social freedom.” Many objected, as had the suffragists, to varietism itself. Moderate Spiritualist Emma Hardinge-Britten, for one, dismissed Woodhull’s views for failing to consider the fate of children born out of wedlock. Moderates also worried that Woodhull’s notoriety would erode the fragile reputation of Spiritualists in the eyes of mainstream Christians, the press, and the public at large. Correspondent Hudson Tuttle voiced the concerns of many readers when he wrote to the Journal early in 1872:

Her notions of love and the marriage relation are the most objectionable, as they place in the hands of our enemies a powerful weapon to wield against us, inasmuch, I regret to say, as she is endorsed, as far as I have noticed, by the spiritual press, and also stands elected President of the association of Spiritualists.⁴⁴

Sex radicals countered this criticism by noting Spiritualism’s long association with social freedom. Dr. Juliet Severance was blunt: “Talk of freedom as a cause of impurity in social life. Nonsense! It is the only means by which purity becomes possible.” For Severance, Turtle’s criticisms denied Spiritualism’s inherent challenge to conventional morality. “What is the ground of complaint? Simply that she advocates social freedom. Is that any thing new for Spiritualists?” Severance demanded. “I admit that in clear, forcible argument, in earnest, fearless advocacy, she excels any of us who have preceded her, but that she has advanced any more radical ideas on social life, I deny.”⁴⁵

The popular Spiritualist organ, the Banner of Light, sought the middle ground, hailing the controversy over Woodhull as a means to promote debate on the free love question. Without fully endorsing her views, the paper remained true to the movement’s heterodoxy, and encouraged readers to study Woodhull’s entire lecture (which it reprinted on the front page), not just those portions published, out of context, in the popular press. In February 1872, the Banner gave Woodhull extensive space to defend herself, printed a flood of letters in her favor, and offered readers a running debate on the front pages on the meaning of “social freedom.” Elderly Spiritualist E. S. Wheeler, for one, defended her election, by pointing out that Woodhull gained little by association with Spiritualists. “American Spiritualists have not done a great deal to enlarge the ‘opportunities’ of Victoria C. Woodhull for enunciating her ‘peculiar views,’” Wheeler wrote.

With a powerful journal in her hands, with wealth at her command, with faith “to remove mountains,” with an intellect and inspiration to teach philosophers and statesmen, and a consecrated eloquence to enchain the hearing of the people, she assumed the service of the Spiritualists of America and the world.… She might have shunned unpopularity by refusing to become identified as a Spiritualist in so public a manner.⁴⁶

The Banner also printed a spirited defense of Woodhull by trance speaker Laura Cuppy Smith, who said that “social reform is hazardous work, and we want no cowards. We are ready to walk through martyrdom, if need be, for this holy cause.”

Lois Waisbrooker agreed: as she explained in her regular column, men and women were answerable only to the Spirits, or to what she called the “court” of science, for their actions. Spiritualists ran the danger of becoming “as tyrannical as any other class of people” if they succumbed to the scruples of the “respectable;” it was not a movement for those who shrank from conflict. “When they come to feel the spirit of the above, they will not shrink from the discussion of any question,” said Waisbrooker. “If they can’t stand the fire, then let them go.”⁴⁷ Spiritualism gave Woodhull an irrefutable defense for her controversial actions. The faith of its adherents in Spirit guidance was both a strength and weakness for the movement: it allowed widely dispersed individuals to take part in a collective identity based on a phenomenon—Spirit manifestation and control—that was not easily verified. Woodhull benefited from this uncertainty; the unruly guidance of the Spirit world, she insisted, dictated all of her uncompromising positions on social issues. She was merely the instrument of a higher cause:

I have no personal cause to maintain. I propose to obey, so far as in me lies, a guidance superior to my own knowledge; and that guidance commands me to speak, and I speak. I cannot yield my allegiance to it; and if its mandates carry me where Spiritualists cannot follow, let them not say that I desire to commit them to anything but the truth.⁴⁸

Supporters likewise challenged skeptics who questioned Woodhull’s Spirit influences. “Once deny that Joan of Arc or Mrs. Woodhull have been inspired by spirits,” as Charles Holt put it, “and, by the same process of reasoning, I will convict of fraud every inspirational medium on earth.” Spiritualism, such arguments revealed, was on shaky ground when it sought to purge its ranks by making respectability and scientific proof criteria for membership. Sex radicals blamed conservative Spiritualists for dividing a movement that should be strong enough to support any radical views, as orthodoxy of any kind was antithetical to the movement. “Brother,” Holt chided Hudson Tuttle in an open letter, “let us have no more bickering. The Orthodox world is laughing at us.”⁴⁹

Predictably, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly aired the most extreme positions raised in Woodhull’s Steinway Hall lecture. Here correspondents debated the full implications of social freedom with Woodhull and the Weekly’s editorial staff, in a series of letters and articles through the spring of 1872. Many of these writings elaborated upon the evils of marriage. Marriage gave men the legal power to force women to submit, said E. S. Wheeler: “Being a chattel, a thing, a possession, a piece of goods, it is requisite that the landlord and owner use his own, and somehow get the value out of that which is his,” he said. Mary Leland likewise condemned marriage as a “religio-civil institution which binds woman soul and body, and delivers her over to tyranny and lust, to go when her master says go, to come when he says come, to bear children in sorrow and disgust, to be parlor ornament or kitchen drudge as her lord may fancy.” Like other sex radicals, Leland looked to “new methods of relating the sexes which shall banish pain and slavery and secure harmony and happiness.”⁵⁰ Such writers fueled Woodhull’s conviction that she spearheaded a revolution in social mores.

Exactly what this sexual revolution should accomplish was a point of lively dispute. As it had done before Steinway Hall, the Weekly published a range of perspectives that sought to distinguish “free love” from promiscuous “lust.” In response to a reader’s concerns, the Weekly clarified the theory of varietism: “If it be ever proper to change our love; if we may conscientiously ever do it; if indeed we may rightfully love more than once during the whole course of our life, it must follow that there is none but a natural limit to the right to change.” That March, Frances Rose McKinley’s lecture on free love, published in the Weekly, supported this view. “In a perfect condition of society,” McKinley stated, “special loves which jealously demand the entire consecration of one to the other will be almost unknown.” Other writers explained the difference between social freedom, loosely defined, and promiscuity implicit in Woodhull’s system. As Spiritualist lecturer Sarah Somerby saw it, “A true free lover can never be promiscuous in the sexual relations. That is the very thing they are fighting against. They are the only ones who see clearly that what is by the world called marriage is a system which forces people into adultery and promiscuity.” Veteran sex radical Henry Child agreed that Woodhull was misunderstood: “She stands convicted of advocating love, pure love to all humanity—they of legal prostitution.”⁵¹

Not all Weekly writers accepted these views; a few warned that sex radicals underestimated the potential dangers, specifically to women, arising from the common understanding of free love, particularly from the theory of varietism. Spiritualist Lucinda Chandler cautioned, “Perfect liberty or freedom (used to express liberty), is and can be only through perfect obedience to the highest quality of being.” She did not endorse the new framework emerging among sex radicals that “the ‘sexual union’ is an overwhelming necessity of human beings.” On the contrary, she believed that sexual excesses led to many kinds of social evils, including children born without strong parental protection, and the spread of disease. Chandler struggled to reconcile the competing problems of freeing women from the tyranny of marriage while preventing their exploitation by a male-oriented varietist system. Like many sex radicals, she fell back on two solutions: true love, freed from the crass considerations of money and power over another, and sexual education. “More knowledge,” Chandler believed, “a higher standard of manhood and womanhood, of the obligations of wedlock involving requirements of the highest purity and reverent regard for personal rights, and of the responsibilities of parentage, will tend to secure a higher standard of marriage.”⁵²

While they differed on specifics, most Weekly correspondents agreed on the need accelerate the war in the name of social freedom. A typical writer urged Woodhull to “unmask the batteries, expose the enemies’ works, and success will crown with unfaiding [sic] laurels, all noble defenders of the truth.” When one correspondent asked Woodhull, “When in your lecture upon social freedom, you remark that you have a right to change your love every day if you wish, do you not make an extravagant and useless expression?” the question offered a timely opportunity to explain her motives. “It is time, in the advance of the ages,” Woodhull responded, “that the broadest freedom should be proclaimed. It was necessary that the whole false fabric of society should be shocked to its very center.” Echoing Chandler, Woodhull’s rejoinder blamed the current “low state” in sexual relations on poor education and lack of knowledge that only complete openness could cure. “I shall never cease to lift my voice,” Woodhull’s response promised. “Therefore, I say: Proclaim it long and loud, that every one is free, and that nobody has the right to rule over another, even as to love.” Two weeks later, another writer echoed Woodhull’s words, encouraging her to use her radical views to “shock the world to its very center.”⁵³

Such extreme endorsements of social freedom and sexual openness, particularly in light of Woodhull’s own vulnerability to scrutiny and gossip, help explain what many contemporaries saw as a low phase in her activist career. Many reformers who complained of Woodhull’s visibility in the movement, she knew, had indiscretions of their own (including adultery and divorce) to hide from view. To explode the myth of “respectability” among her critics, Woodhull (or her associates) printed mock-ups detailing these transgressions under the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly banner. In return for silence, they demanded financial support for the free love cause endorsed by the private actions, if not the public statements, of respectable reformers. Woodhull maintained that the threats were merely part of her social critique that saw prevailing sexual mores as disproportionately beneficial to the ruling classes, and especially men. Most recipients, however, interpreted them as blackmail. When Susan B. Anthony heard of it from friends who had received such threats, for example, she became determined to oust Woodhull from the NWSA.⁵⁴ Woodhull’s principles of social freedom had led her toward the abstract notion of exposure at any cost, alienating a wide range of middle-class reformers along the way.

By spring 1872, Woodhull’s “Principles of Social Freedom” rallied the most unconventional social activists to her defense. Their next effort to “shock the world” was to be a political gathering scheduled for that May at New York’s Apollo Hall, which they promoted as a “Grand Combination Convention,” to bring together prominent activists from across the spectrum of socialists, Spiritualists, and woman suffragists. Woodhull’s extreme views on social freedom had stripped her following of all but the most radical activists, who began preparations for an act of political theater designed to engage the most radical promises of Reconstruction. They planned it as a spectacle of defiance of the current political situation that would stimulate further revolutionary acts. Collectively, they hoped that the Convention would generate significant public dialogue in a critical election year.