Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution. Amanda Frisken

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.

       Chapter 2

       “A Shameless Prostitute and a Negro”