ideal of a strict division between public and private spheres had great power in the nineteenth century to define class and gender privilege. Many women led public lives, but often faced negative consequences that ranged from open taunting to covert criticism. Sex radicals located the heart of the problem in private relationships. Public men rarely faced negative consequences for illicit sexual behavior; women’s private transgressions, by contrast, infiltrated their public status. Woodhull’s exposure of Beecher’s sexual secrets in 1872 asked society to judge a charismatic public man on the same terms that it judged a public woman. According to the sex radicals, true equality demanded that scurrilous gossip be equally relevant to women and men, or irrelevant to both.
Woodhull was at first unfazed by her notoriety; after all, she invited the reporter from The Days’ Doings to her hotel, and she must have known how coverage in such a paper would appear to the public at large. The fact that she welcomed this publicity suggests that she was less sensitive to the hazards of public life than more respectable women. As a traveling healers, stage performers, and professional clairvoyants, she and Claflin were accustomed to public scrutiny. They may have had no conventional status to lose, in fact; there is conflicting evidence that the sisters may also have been occasional prostitutes, but even without that stigma they were far from respectable in the commercial northeast.36 To nineteenth-century readers, their flamboyant brokerage opening, as evidence of their penchant for media coverage, signaled their lack of delicacy; they deliberately flouted the decorum required of ladies. They dined, for instance, without a male escort at New York’s fashionable Delmonico’s Restaurant at a time when such behavior marked them as prostitutes.37 When Woodhull declared herself a presidential candidate in April 1870, and stood before a congressional committee to present a memorial on behalf of women’s suffrage the next January, she showed the world that she was not ashamed of being seen. When her private life became the subject of public criticism, she used the criticism as evidence of hypocrisy in high places. When newspapers linked her sexual nonconformity to her political ambitions, she made sexual liberation the cornerstone of her revolution.
Woodhull’s political performances exposed her to public scorn, but she appeared less anxious to deny accusations against her morality than to insist that they should not matter. In this sense her actions transcended the older choice women faced between seclusion and exposure. She “made a spectacle of herself,” to use Temma Kaplan’s formulation, as a tool of social protest. Political allies, from sex radicals to women suffragists to socialists, used her example to mobilize constituencies and to dramatize the contradictions that made women’s political life so fraught with tension to begin with. Social movements chose—even welcomed—Woodhull as a leader, attracted by her public flouting of convention. They applauded her disruptive inversion of power and legitimacy in the public sphere. Woodhull was an unruly woman who both galvanized support and antagonized opposition; she dramatized a comic upheaval of the sexual order, yet in the process significantly altered that order. Both heroine and folk devil, her disorderly conduct celebrated revolution and stimulated a sizeable conservative reaction.38
Victoria Woodhull and Her Sexual Revolution
Not all revolutions succeed unequivocally. In the 1870s, Victoria Woodhull staged a series of revolutionary events to challenge the existing social order, and eventually participated in the reaction against her earlier views. This study traces the waxing and waning of the sexual revolution Woodhull embodied for her contemporaries. The four chapters encapsulate four significant episodes of her career: (1) the early effort to forge a consensus about women’s sexual oppression; (2) the attempt to mobilize a broad constituency through acts of political theater; (3) a program of civil disobedience against laws designed to stifle opposition to the sexual status quo; and (4) the popularization and coincident taming of her radical critique of the social order. Woodhull’s story sheds new light on the intertwining of radical political movements in the 1870s. Her revolutionary program coincided with Radical Reconstruction; by 1876 both movements were in decline.
Chapter 1 describes the early phase of her political activism, in which Woodhull and a small group of radical freethinkers attempted to forge a consensus based on what they called “the Principles of Social Freedom.” Social freedom was a polite euphemism for a philosophy the press dismissed as free love. It held that social, cultural, and religious control over sexuality was harmful to society, and particularly to women. Woodhull attempted to unite a coalition that included socialists, sex radicals, and women’s rights activists. Her organizing principle was that women’s inequality stemmed from their economic dependence on men: marriage was a form of sexual slavery for women through which women exchanged sexual and maternal labor for economic security. She argued that exaggerated sexual differences, including prescriptions about woman’s proper place, reinforced the subordination of women. Sex radicals backed Woodhull to promote the idea that women should cast off the unnatural bonds of marriage as a first step toward liberation. Controversy fragmented the fragile coalition, and by 1872 only a small cadre of social radicals endorsed Woodhull’s Principles and her politics of defiance.
Chapter 2 provides an in-depth look at Woodhull’s nomination for president of the United States. This was a deliberate act of political theater designed to shake up popular notions about race and gender. When delegates of the Equal Rights Party nominated Woodhull for president of the United States at their convention in May 1872, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate, they wanted to send a symbolic message of universal rights to the world. Amid the political backlash against Radical Reconstruction, however, the press cast the nomination in highly sexualized and racist tones, revealing deep-seated resistance to the idea of universal rights. Woodhull was the national spokeswoman for social freedom (free love). Douglass, on the other hand, was the national spokesman for social equality (civil rights). He supported the controversial Civil Rights Bill, which sought to provide African Americans equal access to public institutions, including transportation, accommodations, courts of law, and public schools. His opponents accused Douglass of promoting interracial “mingling.” Douglass, not consulted before the convention, rejected the place on Woodhull’s ticket, but not before the nomination had generated satirical and racist press commentary. Because of their respective positions on sexual and social equality, the Woodhull/Douglass nomination laid bare the growing miscegenation hysteria of a critical election year. Vilified in the press, Woodhull turned to a more accessible and effective method of getting her message across.
Chapter 3 explores Woodhull’s use of “exposure” as a political tool, and a form of civil disobedience. Late in 1872, Woodhull exposed the nation’s most prominent Protestant minister, Henry Ward Beecher, for allegedly committing adultery with the wife of his good friend Theodore Tilton. The scandal allowed conservatives to discredit a generation of reform movements, from abolition to woman suffrage, that Beecher represented. The public “outing” of Beecher and a few other respectable men put the principles of the sex radicals into practice, and posed a dramatic challenge to sexual hypocrisy and the existing social order. At the same time, the Beecher exposure triggered the antagonism of moral crusaders, notably Anthony Comstock. He had both Woodhull and Claflin arrested repeatedly under obscenity legislation that he strengthened in the process with their punishment in mind. His relentless pursuit of the sisters crippled them both socially and financially. The questionable grounds of his actions, however, gradually generated popular backlash against the moral authoritarianism he represented. To dramatize the sexual double standard, Woodhull deliberately challenged Comstock and the federal government to act against her. Sex radicals used the Beecher scandal and Comstock’s actions to stimulate open debate on taboo social questions, including prostitution, adultery and divorce. Woodhull’s persecution in 1872–73 prompted anarchists and free lovers, as well as general commentators throughout the country, to question the rise of Comstockery. Her exposure and the subsequent popularization of the Beecher scandal marked the beginning of the end of the period’s revolutionary potential.
Most historians leave Woodhull after the Beecher exposure. Chapter 4 recovers from historical obscurity the last three years of Woodhull’s American career, during which