Frederick Douglass’s home in Rochester destroyed by fire
Introduction
Victoria Woodhull, Sexual Revolutionary
Early in 1870, two women opened for business on Wall Street. In a deluge of publicity, Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin demonstrated that women could establish and successfully run a business, even in a man’s world of stock speculation. No one knew much about them, except that they appeared to be unfazed by controversy. They seemed accustomed to public life; they said they had pursued a series of careers, from acting to magnetic healing and fortune telling. They had also privately speculated in stocks and claimed a stunning $700,000 profit on “Black Friday” the previous autumn. They even had some experience in women’s politics: Woodhull had attended a suffrage convention in Washington the year before. The opening of Woodhull, Claflin, & Company, however, marked their elevation to the national public stage. Across the country, newspapers called them the “Bewitching Brokers” and spread word of their sensational financial debut to the nation at large. It was the beginning of a tradition for Woodhull and Claflin, in which they dramatized the tensions inherent in women’s public lives, and made spectacles of themselves for political effect. They dispensed with the protection of respectability and soon learned that speculation over their sexual lives dominated their reception in the popular press.1
Woodhull, Claflin & Company, Brokers, directly confronted the traditional gender roles that made public life controversial for women in 1870. Though men, particularly Woodhull’s second husband Colonel James Blood, conducted the firm’s day to day business, as owners the sisters were trailblazers for women’s economic power. They called their company “the first firm of Female Brokers in the World,” according to one reporter who emphasized the sisters’ conscious defiance of the status quo. “No women had ever been stock or gold brokers,” said Claflin, according to a New York Courier reporter, who quoted her in characteristically pithy language. “Wall Street was taboo to petticoats.… [But] we did not intend to let our petticoats interfere with anybody, or take up any more room in the street than the other brokers’ trousers.” They were not the first women to speculate on Wall Street, but their vocation as brokers was a first in the disreputable world of high finance, where even male brokers bore the stigma of immorality. Woodhull and Claflin challenged the notion that a female broker was improper because she performed public work in mixed company, unprotected in a world of men.2 As the Courier reporter quoted Claflin: “Why shouldn’t [women] just as well be stockbrokers as keep stores and measure men for shirts? We couldn’t see why.”3
Publicity, Woodhull later revealed, was a primary goal in establishing the firm. She hoped “to secure the most general and at the same time prominent introduction to the world that was possible.” The opening brought attention but it also brought public debate over the propriety of women in male spaces like Wall Street. It was a novelty for Wall Street brokers who came to visit the firm; it was a sensation for the crowd of men who reportedly pressed their faces to the glass outside.4 Brokering was a business that most people thought unsuitable for women. Even one supporter of women’s work cautioned, “women could not very well conduct the business without having to mix promiscuously with men on the street, and stop and talk with them in the most public places; and the delicacy of woman would forbid that.” Precisely because of its challenge to the idea of woman’s delicacy, women’s rights activists saw the opening as a harbinger of change. Wall Street had too long excluded women, Susan B. Anthony wrote in her paper, The Revolution, because of the “bad habits of Wall Street men who stare at every woman on the pavement except the apple sellers.” The new firm established a precedent; Woodhull and Claflin, Anthony predicted, would “stimulate the whole future of women by their efforts and example.”5 As a dramatic event that defied convention, the opening of Woodhull, Claflin & Company became a lightning rod for sexual politics in 1870.
Popular media tended to recast the opening as a sexualized spectacle; daily and weekly papers, seeking to shock and entertain their readers, used Woodhull and Claflin as sensational news copy. Illustrated sporting newspapers were probably most effective in making the sisters notorious. The Days’ Doings, for example, used the full battery