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