of “firsts.”7
Her stock market opening was surprising for a woman in 1870, but Woodhull aspired to greater things. That April, she nominated herself a candidate for the 1872 presidential race. Within a month she and her sister launched a journal, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which quickly became a pioneer of radical thought. She developed political connections with Radical Republican Representative Benjamin Butler from Massachusetts, and in January 1871 presented a memorial to Congress on behalf of woman’s suffrage, becoming the first woman to address a Congressional committee. She shocked and fascinated audiences with candid speech on the subject of free love, a loosely defined ideology that meant anything from easing the divorce laws to abolishing marriage altogether. She headed a section of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), and protested with the organization in the streets of New York. She and her friends sought to unite disparate reform groups into a single political organization called the Equal Rights Party. In 1872, the party nominated Woodhull for president with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
The consequences of this radical nomination came swiftly: she lost her home, her paper, her means of earning a living and Vanderbilt’s backing. In frustration, and to demonstrate her ideology of a single sexual standard, she spoke out against a number of prominent men, notably the nationally beloved Brooklyn pastor Henry Ward Beecher, who had, she claimed, committed adultery with the wife of one of his closest friends. The Beecher exposure eclipsed her presidential bid, and she faced harassment and jail for obscenity and libel charges for the accusations. Fighting these charges left her financially crippled. Over time, however, the legal action against her became an asset, and she became a celebrity in her own right as the victim of excessive federal persecution. She spent the next four years popularizing the Beecher story and her evolving ideas about sexuality on the national lecture circuit to large and increasingly enthusiastic audiences. In 1876 she divorced Colonel Blood, and a year later she sailed to England, lecturing successfully in several English cities. At one such lecture she met a younger scion of an old British banking family, James Biddulph Martin. She married him in 1883 and lived the life of an English gentlewoman until her death in 1927.
This book focuses on Woodhull’s American heyday, from 1870 to 1876, when she became a symbol of the period’s radical sexual politics. It examines not her life but rather a series of media events she launched to challenge the existing social order. Social activists migrating toward the Democratic Party hailed her as a renegade populist, a victim of church and state, and welcomed her attacks on the declining radicalism of the Republican Party. Conservatives saw her as an incarnation of evil, and disparaged her as “the Woodhull” and her supporters as “Woodhullites.” Woodhull’s repeated acts of political theater gave her unusual prominence and make her an instructive, and heretofore unrecognized, period marker for Reconstruction. Along with the social activists who promoted her, she struggled to shape the course of Reconstruction’s political culture even as it scripted her actions and limited the arena in which she could promote radical change. The popular press singled her out as a sign of the times, a “folk demon” representing perceived threats to the established social order. In response, she used the tools of popular media to turn her notoriety into social and political power. Her transformation from notorious woman to celebrity illuminates the gendered political landscape of the early 1870s. She is, in effect, a barometer of the political culture of Reconstruction.
Recovering Victoria Woodhull
Generations of Americans have found Woodhull fascinating. During the twentieth century, Woodhull’s biographers have confronted and contributed to her story, as well as her elusiveness as a historical subject. Biographies, biographical novels, documentaries, plays, a musical, and chapters in volumes about American “originals” perpetually add—or invent—new twists to the Woodhull story.8 At the same time, Woodhull remains curiously absent from mainstream historical narratives. Despite all the retellings of her story, it is ironic that, after a lecture by her most recent biographer, a member of the audience asked the speaker, “Why have we never heard of Woodhull before?”9
It is nearly impossible to recover Woodhull as a historical actor in her own right. Her own personal papers are fragmentary and heavily edited. We will never know for certain who really wrote the lectures, speeches, letters, and articles attributed to her. They were almost never written in her own hand, and she later repudiated many, saying they had been written without her knowledge or consent. Some contemporary observers said that Woodhull could barely write, and that she did not have the education, breadth of knowledge, or grasp of the language necessary to produce the writings that appeared over her name. On the other hand, many others credited her with a powerful gift for extemporaneous speech on a wide variety of subjects. Whether these conflicting assertions are accurate or an indication of contemporary prejudice remains unknowable and, perhaps, unimportant.10
The question of authorship arises from Woodhull’s unusual status as a female politician at a time when women were all but barred from political leadership. It also reflects the scruples of contemporary political radicals who worried about the dishonesty in crediting Woodhull for other people’s work. Most historians and biographers agree that anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews wrote the words to her famous lectures, with help from others (including her husband, Colonel Blood, who frequently wrote letters and editorials attributed to Woodhull, and even signed her autographs). It was not an uncommon practice. Fifty years later, her associate, anarchist Benjamin Tucker, remembered with shame being given credit for a speech he delivered to the New England Labor Reform League in 1873 that had been written by someone else; he referred to this, and most of Woodhull’s lectures, as “humbug” and “fraud.”
Speakers were often selected for their appeal to particular audiences, regardless of authorship. This explains the choice of a nineteen-year-old (Tucker) to address a major convention: he was selected for his appeal to younger radicals. Similarly, radical thinkers like Andrews deliberately chose Woodhull as the mouthpiece for their ideas. Perhaps they suspected their views would get a better hearing (or a wider audience) coming from a woman. Former abolitionists, reorganizing after the Civil War, looked for new faces to appeal to newer, younger, constituencies. Like many modern presidents, whose speeches are the products of committees and focus groups, Woodhull spoke the words in the public realm, and lent her name to the many letters to the editor, speeches, and articles attributed to her. She was a willing and effective voice for reform. Her importance lay in her power to move an audience and her courage to express ideas that defied more conventional views.
The lack of traditional historical sources makes the “authentic” Woodhull tantalizingly difficult to find. Her closest associates, among them the most radical social reformers of the time, left little documentation about Woodhull. Her influence on more respectable social reformers was so poisonous that their own papers conspicuously omit reference to her.11 To make the historian’s task still more difficult, Woodhull spent decades revising her life story. Her most explicit account of her early life is highly suspect, because she dictated it for the public eye, and continually updated and revised this account in her paper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.12 Her subsequent marriage into old English money, which funded a new series of autobiographical pamphlets in Britain, further complicates her account. She published several edited autobiographies before her death in 1927, and she left a provision in her will for her daughter Zula Maud to rewrite her life story yet again.13
Woodhull’s historical obscurity stems in part from her social origins. To modern interpreters, she may seem like yet another middle-class suffrage woman in crinoline; to her contemporaries, however, she was anything but respectable. Her first biographer, Emanie Sachs, relied heavily on the impressions of well-connected suffrage activists, to whom Woodhull had always been an outsider. “I do not believe Mrs. Woodhull was ever an important factor either in this country or in England,” Carrie Chapman Catt advised Sachs in 1927. “Her life was chiefly valuable as demonstrating that a reformer can entirely queer every effort she makes by getting too far ahead of the average trend of public opinion, or entirely off the beat.” Harriet Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, likewise cautioned Sachs that “Mrs. Woodhull’s life would probably not repay study” as she was “never active in suffrage.” For Blatch, Woodhull’s 1871 memorial to the House Judiciary Committee on behalf