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