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.