from a notorious object of scorn to a popular celebrity. Over the six years studied here, Woodhull became one of the modern world’s first celebrities. Her longevity in the public eye was the key to her fame—to paraphrase Daniel Boorstin, she was “known for [her] well-knownness.” Woodhull’s well-knownness was a fluke of timing; she came to prominence in the midst of a graphic revolution and used its tools to further her fame. Graphic media took off after the Civil War. Popular images gave Americans easy access to popular spectacles, and created a perpetual demand for new visual stimuli. Woodhull satisfied this hunger. As a favorite subject in men’s sporting news, she reached a mass audience in poses ranging from prostitute to public teacher to entertainer. Such popular illustrations, though they tended toward the satirical, made her ubiquitous; her image became a metaphor for radical social critique that could not be fully disregarded. Woodhull catered to the public desire for flamboyant individual figures by staging dramatic public events, by courting newspaper attention, and by selling publicity photographs and lithographs to fans. Celebrity, as David Marshall notes, is a function of consumer culture, but also promises democracy by advertising the notion of possibility. Woodhull and her “rags-to-riches” story—as well as the populist message she drew from it—probably appealed to Americans’ need for hope in a turbulent era of social and economic change.25
Notorious Victoria Woodhull
This study seeks to reconcile competing views of Woodhull and Claflin as sex radicals and sexual objects in sporting news. The story begins with representations, particularly illustrations in the sporting press. Historians have only begun exploring the realm of cheap illustrated news.26 The use of sporting papers as sources poses a formidable research challenge. They were both sensational and cheap, which made them less likely to be preserved than the average commercial newspaper. Despite the relatively high circulation they enjoyed, two of the three most popular sporting papers were not preserved in complete sets for the early 1870s. The Days’ Doings (New York) is the only such paper still available in a complete run for these years. Frequent references to this paper in contemporary sources name it almost interchangeably with the National Police Gazette (New York) and the Illustrated Police News (Boston); I take it as a representative of its kind, though I do supplement it with available copies of the other two major sporting papers.
Historians have overlooked Woodhull’s extensive coverage in the sporting news, yet this was precisely where her notoriety took hold. In 1870, people across the nation knew that Woodhull was not respectable, because her image was on the covers of the men’s newspapers displayed in newsstands, cigar shops, barbershops, and barrooms. Papers like the National Police Gazette and The Days’ Doings regularly reported on “the Woodhull” and used her to sell papers. Catering to a male clientele, the papers were part of the social coming-of-age—an initiation ritual—for young men, who read them in public, exclusively male environments. Their pages showcased feisty and often violent women in ways that emphasized their bodies and sexual availability. In the three years following their brokerage debut, The Days’ Doings featured Woodhull and her sister more than any other celebrity or event.27 Typical renderings gave the sisters shortened skirts and suggestive postures. Such visual cues denoted “fast” women and marked them for viewers as sexually depraved.28 Woodhull’s very public life made her prime fodder for such papers. Regardless of the content of stories about her or even the actual depictions of her, her regular presence in the sporting press classed her as a notorious and disorderly woman;29 portrayal in such papers made her as sexually suspect as the other women who appeared in the same pages.
In the 1870s, there was a growing commercial market for distorted, sexualized representations of women in the popular men’s sporting newspapers like The Days’ Doings and the Police Gazette. As the images from the brokerage opening suggest (Figures 1–5), they were more than neutral renderings of “authentic” scenes; they conveyed complex meanings through the arrangement of the players in the frame. Commercial illustrators in the nineteenth century, like those producing images for the popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, created a partial view of reality. As Joshua Brown demonstrates, narrative and technical strategies made illustrations dramatic and visually striking, but also constructed or reinforced stereotypes about class, race and gender.30 That paper’s tawdry cousin The Days’ Doings (also produced by Leslie), and other sporting papers, were less subtle because more specialized: they offered white male spectators sensational narratives of women’s duplicity, fallen women doomed to prison or death, and other fables of women’s subordination. These visual tableaux depended on and reinforced negative stereotypes of women. Woodhull’s presence in such a forum established her disreputable social standing, even as it brought her fame.
Tennessee Claflin exaggerated her sister’s notoriety in sporting news, because she was if anything less respectable than her sister. Woodhull’s sponsors frequently promoted Claflin as a surrogate for her older sister. Together, the sisters came to embody a cultural radicalism that arose not only from their daring sexual politics, but also from the coded class and gender positions they represented. Claflin would mirror Woodhull’s actions during these years. They ran the stock brokerage business jointly, Claflin ran for Congress after Woodhull ran for president (unofficially, and neither was elected), and she also published and spoke about free love. The twinning of the sisters is not surprising in a nation that was, at the time, obsessed with twins and duality. It is informative to view the sisters as they appeared in contemporary sporting news, with Woodhull as the representative public woman, and Claflin as her more rambunctious alter ego.31
What is interesting about Woodhull is her insistence that her reputation, especially the sensational version filling the pages of the sporting press, was irrelevant to her ideas. She was attempting to create a new definition of public womanhood in the nineteenth century, when political activism was still a rather controversial activity for respectable women. This was not a new feature of women’s public lives: before the Civil War, critics used sexual innuendo to discount female activists ranging from Quaker abolitionists to free thinkers like Frances Wright, regardless of their actual behavior; even after the war, critics sexualized women’s rights advocates to discredit them.32 There were two reasons for this. First, many believed that, without the protections of home and family to keep her chaste, a woman in public would become immoral. In addition, the challenges by female activists to women’s subordinate, dependent role in the traditional family aggravated this fear; their ideological challenge to woman’s domestic nature left them vulnerable to speculation about their sexual lives. Women who were sex radicals explicitly discussed questions of sexuality and reproduction. As the daily labor paper, the New York Standard, put it in 1871 “How is it that woman’s rights, and shrieking for suffrage, and women speaking in public, always seem to be inseparable from nastiness?”33
Woodhull and the social radicals in her network sought to make accusations of nastiness irrelevant to the lives of public women. Words alone, they believed, would never change women’s position in society. Only individual acts of defiance in local situations would force people to recognize the artifice behind what everyone thought of as “normal.” Dress reformers—women who risked ridicule, harassment, or jail by wearing pants in public—knew this well. Many made personal sacrifices to further the cause of women’s equality. Sex radical Laura Cuppy Smith, for example, offended her neighbors by walking through town with her pregnant, unwed daughter to defy the double standard that blamed the woman for the mutual offense of extramarital sex.34 Woodhull and her supporters were for a time determined to do whatever it took to eradicate social inequality. From small acts of defiance to civil disobedience, Woodhull demanded that her contemporaries recognize their own preconceived notions of women’s nature as nothing more than social constructs.
In styling herself a public woman, Woodhull sought a female analogue of the public man of politics. This was a hazardous undertaking. The common usage of “public woman” literally meant a street prostitute, and conservatives deliberately blurred the distinction between the two. Most public work for women at the time had immoral connotations; even middle-class women who ventured into public occupations, such as