a little handful of suffragists in New York City knew Mrs. Woodhull,” she wrote. “I never saw her. She flashed in and flashed out, was handsome and brilliant and ignored the conventional morality.”14 The discomfort of these prominent suffrage women reflected in part a social position closed to Woodhull, but probably also their awareness of the way popular media used such figures to discredit their movement.
A few of Sachs’s sources looked beyond the media version of Woodhull and Claflin and gave them credit for their courage in defying convention. “They represented an unpopular cause,” Joseph Greer, who knew the sisters slightly, told Sachs in 1927, “and like nearly all pioneers they paid the penalty in misrepresentation.” Others agreed with this view. “I know so well what it cost any woman to take any forward step, in those days, that my hat is off to every one of them,” wrote Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson, who was barely in her teens during Woodhull’s heyday. A playwright and friend of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Channing-Stetson had little patience for the young, modern women of the 1920s. The flapper generation, in her view, shirked responsibility and spurned the vote that previous generations had struggled for decades to secure. Instead, they wallowed in materialism and incapacitated themselves with high heels and extreme diets. “They even think they have discovered Sex—which we knew all about three generations ago and did not think we had invented then.”15
True to its times, sex rather than responsibility was the focus of Sachs’s biography, “The Terrible Siren”. Writing in the commercial, sexualized climate of the Roaring Twenties, Sachs unearthed the old stories and scandals to produce a muckraking biography that appeared in 1928, a year after Woodhull’s death. Sachs rightly questioned Woodhull’s adopted British respectability and criticized her for her hypocrisy in denying free love, but also reduced her to a ridiculous figure. The Red Scare and attendant dismissal of reform in the 1920s made it easy to trivialize Woodhull, her paper, and the radicals who supported her. The book’s widespread popularity thwarted Zula Maud Woodhull’s dying wish to have her mother’s biography written in a more favorable light. Sachs’s lively, scurrilous biography became the master narrative on Woodhull for the next forty years.16 Subsequent biographies through the McCarthy era represented the sisters as lunatics, eccentric icons from the annals of Americana. Antagonism for the American left and tacit adherence to the new domesticity made Woodhull into a cartoonish foil for the post-World War II American woman.17
It took the reemergence of feminism to challenge “The Terrible Siren”. In 1959, Eleanor Flexner questioned the notion that Woodhull singlehandedly put women’s suffrage back half a century. Feminist scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s highlighted the sisters’ brokerage business as a milestone for women. Woodhull also began to resurface as a major player in the struggle for women’s equality. Two collections sidestepped the question of provenance and published the articles and speeches that bore Woodhull’s name as if she had written them herself.18 More recently, a new focus on the political significance of the “New Departure” theory has revealed how this argument for woman suffrage, developed by activists in the late 1860s, gained national publicity by Woodhull’s memorial to Congress in early 1871.19 Woodhull’s connection to international socialism has resurfaced in new studies that show her in a broader role in that movement than previous scholars of socialism had allowed.20 These looks at the 1870s reveal that Woodhull had important interactions with the period’s radical political movements.
In the wake of second wave feminist scholarship, three new biographies shed new light on Woodhull’s remarkable life. The first to appear, Lois Beachy Underhill’s The Woman Who Ran for President (1995), is a thoughtful recovery of Woodhull as a political actor and thinker in her own right with strong connections to other social radicals. Underhill also tackles the difficult question of Woodhull’s authorship; she goes so far as to analyze the handwriting on autobiographical notes written, she says, by Woodhull herself. Underhill’s discovery of these notes through the Holland-Martin family (descendants of Woodhull’s third husband, John Martin) is a major new source of historical information about Woodhull, particularly her life after her marriage to Martin. Two other biographies published in 1998 offer fascinating interpretations of Woodhull’s impact on her contemporaries. One, by journalist Mary Gabriel, salvages extensive newspaper coverage from the period in a way that illuminates several episodes of Woodhull’s life, particularly her relationship with the International Workingmen’s Association. Barbara Goldsmith’s biography, on the other hand, celebrates a more sensational reading of Woodhull reminiscent of “The Terrible Siren”, but rightly focuses on the centrality of Spiritualism to Woodhull’s influence and popularity. Together, the three biographies round out Woodhull as an individual, and clarify her relationships with notable personalities of the 1870s.21
Woodhull the person, however, can only partly explain her historical significance; it is as a phenomenon that she most influenced the period. For example, her exposure of Henry Ward Beecher was a watershed event in the nineteenth century. The ensuing Beecher-Tilton scandal sent shock waves through contemporary views about personal life and religious faith. Richard W. Fox has argued that the scandal reflected shifting popular ideas about intimacy, marriage, sexuality and divorce. Its significance far transcended the actors themselves. Beecher and the Tiltons, like Woodhull and Claflin, were merely dramatizing prevailing views in a turbulent moral climate. It was a media event that fed off popular fascination for celebrity. It also provoked a religious controversy within the Protestant faith; as Altina Waller shows, conservative Protestants saw in it a way to halt what they saw as creeping liberalism among their flocks. Contemporary responses to the three principal actors were also revealing; many assumed Beecher’s guilt, yet found in Tilton an easier scapegoat, while his wife Lib Tilton gradually retreated into obscurity and (temporary) blindness.22 Thanks to Woodhull’s exposure, the scandal left a lasting impression on contemporaries.
This study attempts to place Woodhull in the larger context of the trial she set in motion. Her decision to expose Beecher, a spontaneous act apparently made on her own initiative, had profound consequences. It galvanized conservatives to act against what they saw as runaway social freedom that threatened to gain great commercial power. As Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz argues, Woodhull was on the cusp of a new sexual framework emerging in the nineteenth century that saw sex as essential to a full and happy life. As this view gained popular currency, formidable opposition arose to silence the open discussion (and sale) of provocative ideas and devices (like contraception). Young Men’s Christian Association activist Anthony Comstock capitalized on conservative disgust with Woodhull, and her very public accusation against Beecher, to enact a strict federal statute in 1873 called the “Comstock Law.” As the new law’s chief enforcer, Comstock oversaw public, commercial discourse about sexuality and contraception. Nevertheless, Woodhull’s flamboyant defiance meant that questions of sexuality entered contemporary discourse. Comstock slowed but did not halt the gradual liberalization of views about sexuality and reproduction. As Andrea Tone demonstrates, obscenity law often failed in the courtroom, as juries and judges downplayed the crimes of publishers and commercial contraceptive manufacturers in recognition of popular usage. Comstock was successful, however, in censoring the most outspoken sex radicals, and Woodhull was his big target.23
New scholarship on nineteenth-century sexual reform movements shows the strategic alliances and choices of far-flung activists as they faced the growing shift away from reform. Many radical reformers in Reconstruction had cut their teeth on the Spiritualist movement, which gave women a forum where they could meet, organize, and speak before mixed crowds of like-minded individualists. A small subset of this amorphous non-organization was an uncompromising network of sex radicals who saw the sexual liberation of women as the key to all other reform. Many independent-minded women, particularly in the midwest, found the ideas of the sex radicals compelling.24 Woodhull tapped into their broad-based network, as well as their local organizations and associations; her connection to these activists helps explain her popularity in rural areas of the country. Sex radicals demanded plain speech on the subject of human sexuality; they continually struggled to make simple, nonprovocative, scientific information about human physiology available in the public sphere. Woodhull brought this information into the realm of popular culture.
Woodhull’s revolution was cultural; she brought the ideas of