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,