rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_c34873fe-6ede-595b-b7c0-cd17cdc3f327">Figure 1) exaggerated the sisters’ sexy (for the time) postures and their proximity to male clientele, and thereby questioned their morality. Another such image (Figure 2) depicted Claflin in an aggressive stance and bold stare that mirrored contemporary images of streetwalkers. The short skirts, more a reflection of the artist’s imagination than their actual clothing, revealed the sisters’ ankles and calves in popular shorthand for “fast” women. Only the third image (Figure 3), with a more respectable parlor setting, suggested the artists’ difficulty in representing the novel firm, but even its genteel imagery resembled depictions of high class brothels. The accompanying text exaggerated the strangeness of the female brokers, and diminished the political significance of the opening itself. The presence of Woodhull and Claflin on the cover of the illustrated sporting news sexualized the firm, and easily eclipsed any political agenda.6
Figure 1. This cover image of Woodhull and Claflin in a men’s sporting newspaper shows the sisters in suggestively curved postures. The men crowd Woodhull and Claflin and gaze directly upon them to indicate a lack of proper respect. The placement of the hand of the man on the left emphasizes Claflin’s moral ambiguity: is he merely gesturing, or is he actually touching Claflin’s thigh? The visual codes in this cover illustration established the sisters as sexually available. The Days’ Doings, February 26, 1870.
Other commercial illustrations reinforced this interpretation of the firm. A cover woodcut image in the Wall Street paper (Figure 4), the New York Evening Telegram, showed the sisters sitting in an open carriage and wielding a horsewhip, two visual markers of “fast” or immoral women. In 1874, the brothel imagery, complete with sensual touching and open bottles of alcohol, became embedded in Wall Street lore in Matthew Hale Smith’s The Bulls and Bears of New York (Figure 5). In this way, popular illustration of the brokerage firm set a tone that persisted in the sisters’ subsequent ventures in public life. It became the recurring theme in the strange political career of Victoria Woodhull. She would frame a spectacular event in the language of social principles; media coverage would then reinterpret it as a titillating spectacle. Woodhull survived these disparaging interpretations thanks to her skill in turning scathing media commentary into publicity for her struggle for social change. Put another way, she took her status as a disreputable woman, and converted it into a political asset.
Figure 2. Short skirts, exposed feet and ankles, and bold postures mark the new brokers as fast women in this second sporting illustration. A humorous reference to the sisters’ “telegraphic apparatus” reminds the reader that their direct gazes on the men are immodest. The Days’ Doings, February 26, 1870.
Woodhull’s public transformation from notorious woman to celebrity challenged Americans to come to terms with the full meaning of sex equality. She was not the most gifted female politician, though she was one of the most powerful speakers of the time. Her contribution was to act out the period’s most extreme positions on a public stage. From 1870 to 1876, against the political backdrop of Reconstruction, she used a range of tactics to demand opportunities denied to women on the basis of their sex. As a broker, editor, public speaker, presidential candidate and celebrity, she insisted that women and men be held to the same standards in public life. She made her biggest mark on the period’s popular culture, because she enacted spectacles in national media for the average person that challenged contemporary notions of gender and class. As a woman who surrendered her own privacy, and whose life was grist for the sensation-mongering press, she made the exposure of others’ secrets a powerful tool of social change.
Figure 3. A third image of the brokerage house offers a more respectful and genteel presentation of the business. The lack of conformity in these three depictions (Figures 1–3), appearing in the same sporting newspaper issue, indicates the sisters’ social ambiguity and the novelty of the new firm. The Days’ Doings, February 26, 1870.
The Strange Career of Woodhull and Claflin
Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin were children of the Second Great Awakening. They were the seventh and ninth children born into a large, transient family on the old Ohio Valley frontier. Their father was a miller and part-time confidence man who, neighbors believed, once burned his own mill for the insurance money. Their mother was a Methodist enthusiast spiritually reborn during religious revivalism of the 1830s. Born in 1838 and named for England’s new queen, Victoria was an odd, visionary child who believed herself destined for greatness. Her parents married her off at the age of fourteen to a doctor named Canning Woodhull. Because of her husband’s alcoholism, young Victoria largely supported their two children with her practice as a medical clairvoyant. Meanwhile, her parents capitalized on the “magnetic” powers of Victoria’s little sister Tennessee, seven years her junior, by hawking her through the old Northwest as the “Wonderful Child” clairvoyant and cancer healer. The nature of their business ventures frequently brought controversy to the family. Tennessee’s inability to cure one woman’s cancer brought a manslaughter suit in 1864. A year later, when a reunited Victoria and Tennessee practiced clairvoyance in Cincinnati, neighbors, suspecting them of prostitution, ran the family out of town. Later that year, Victoria’s clairvoyance business in Chicago shut down, this time on charges of fraud. The family supplemented such failures with lucrative traveling medical tours through the west in a covered wagon, which filled their coffers and gave the sisters firsthand experience in human nature and the art of salesmanship.
Figure 4. Other papers amplified the disorderly theme of the sporting illustrations. Here, Woodhull and Claflin drive the bulls and bears down Wall Street. The open carriage, the whip, and their violent conduct were visual shorthand for disorderly women and prostitutes. Their cruel treatment of the men in the image includes an obvious reference to castration, suggesting that the sisters’ presence on Wall Street threatens masculinity itself. New York Evening Telegram, February 18, 1870.
Figure 5. The symbolic codes of prostitution persist in this 1874 depiction of the “bewitching brokers.” One sister appears to promote their newspaper; the books and desk in the background indicate an office setting. However, the physical touching, the lewd expression of the man, and the alcohol on the table are suggestive of the brothel. Matthew Hale Smith, The Bulls and Bears of New York (1874). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
By 1866, the family had moved to St. Louis, where Woodhull operated a business as a clairvoyant healer in a local hotel. There a Civil War veteran named Colonel James Harvey Blood, who had heard of Woodhull as a “most brilliant literary character,” consulted her professionally and won her heart. Woodhull obtained a speedy divorce from her first husband (though she retained his last name), and married Blood in 1866. To evade his first wife (and two children), Woodhull and Blood embarked upon another tour in the covered wagon. It was in Pittsburgh, Woodhull later claimed, that she decided the family’s next move: in a vision, the Greek orator Demosthenes told her to move them all to New York City. In 1868, Woodhull, Blood, her two children, her sister Tennessee, their parents, and an assortment of siblings and relations settled at 17 Great Jones Street in New York. With the aid of Tennessee’s magnetic healing skills, they gained the trust and financial backing of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In January 1870, with his help, Woodhull