of her family’s traveling show. From 1873 to 1876, Woodhull earned a small fortune spreading her version of the Beecher scandal. To the delight of sex radicals, Woodhull’s canny performances on the lecture circuit brought the notion of the single sexual standard before large audiences nationwide. But the popular appetite for her lectures, and the commercialization of Woodhull’s political message, coincided with the declining popularity of universal rights activism. Beecher was just one of several discredited Republican stalwarts during these years, and their shaming was yet another blow to the party’s moral authority. As Republicans during Grant’s second term eschewed the more extreme possibilities for racial reform, by 1876 Woodhull likewise abandoned her most controversial positions. Her later lectures replaced the abstract ideal of total sexual liberation with a more palatable notion of maternal “sexual science.” This deeply religious and proto-eugenicist argument for sex education, for the benefit of the race (initially the human race as a whole) became the underpinning of her later eugenics work in Britain in the 1890s. Woodhull’s retreat from her radical positions of 1872 coincided with the end of Radical Reconstruction, as well as the declining fortunes of international socialism and woman suffrage.
Many sex radicals were disappointed when Woodhull abandoned their most radical principles and sailed for England in 1877. Their most unconventional, powerful, and dramatic spokeswoman had apparently betrayed them to occupy herself whitewashing her own reputation. Hindsight suggests that their criticism was misguided, if not unfair. Reaction against Woodhull was both personal and political in nature, a backlash against both the woman and the liberal humanism she represented. Woodhull herself ultimately participated in this backlash. People expected impossible, contradictory things of Woodhull. Because she was one of very few women willing to take radical positions on women’s sexual rights in the public sphere, activists pinned extravagant hopes on her success. They wanted both the unlettered populist heroine from the Ohio frontier and the female scholar; the downgraded prostitute and the chaste reformer; the hero of the working man and the champion of bourgeois capitalism. It is not surprising that people wanted all this from Woodhull; she offered all these versions of herself to the public at different stages of her career. She was the ultimate performer, dramatizing every possibility of women’s advancement on the public stage. In the end, she personally underwent the reaction against a revolutionary historical moment.
Early women’s rights activists faced a host of obstacles inconceivable to male political contemporaries, invisible to twenty-first-century readers. Many would like to have a female Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, statesmen, public speakers, politicians. And they do exist: theoretician Elizabeth Cady Stanton, fiery rhetorician Sojourner Truth, uncompromising moralist Susan B. Anthony, principled conciliator Lucy Stone. But there was also Victoria Woodhull, and her prominence in contemporary culture makes her significant today. Her ambition and social obscurity enabled her to take risks most respectable women avoided. Stanton shrewdly recognized Woodhull’s significance in the aftermath of the Beecher-Tilton scandal:
Victoria Woodhull has done a work for woman that none of us could have done. She has faced and dared men to call her the names that make women shudder, while she chucked principle, like medicine, down their throats. She has risked and realized the sort of ignominy that would have paralyzed any of us who have longer been called strong-minded.39
To understand fully the continued, perplexing lag in women’s active involvement in public life, it is necessary to appreciate what put it beyond the reach of most women in the past. The historical origins of women’s exclusion from the public sphere are starkly evident in the experiences of those who dared to defy conventional wisdom. This book hopes to offer some insight into the resistance of modern political culture to the full meaning of equality.
Chapter 1
“The Principles of Social Freedom”
Ten weeks after the opening of Woodhull, Claflin & Company, Brokers, in 1871, Victoria Woodhull took another swipe at the male monopoly on public life; she nominated herself as a candidate for the 1872 presidential contest. She saw herself as eligible because she embodied the many facets of women’s rights activism. In an open letter to the New York Herald, Woodhull said:
While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; … while others sought to show that there was not valid reason why woman should be treated … as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised woman of the country, and … announce myself as a candidate for the Presidency.1
Soon after, Woodhull, along with her sister and a small network of social activists, began publication of a new radical press, called Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Woodhull used her new visibility and her newspaper to establish a coalition of reformers determined to erase class and gender inequality. Her social critique appealed for the support of activists housed in three distinct social movements: a revolutionary group of Spiritualists known as “free lovers,” women’s rights activists who sought equal political opportunities for women, and a splinter of labor reformers who sought recognition from Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association (IWA, the First International). To all three groups, Woodhull offered a blueprint for a new order that was based on a principle she called social freedom.
As a woman in public life, Woodhull regularly collided with gender and class prescriptions restricting womanly behavior. Society tended to see two kinds of women, those who were respectable and those who were not. Those who saw themselves as respectable women generally sought male protection and economic support in marriage and avoided public life: they saw their seclusion in the private sphere, in fact, as proof of their superior class status. Women activists and public speakers sought to challenge this limited view of respectability in a variety of ways, but only a few openly flouted the underlying sexual double standard. Woodhull’s apparent failure to shrink from public commentary marked her from the outset as not respectable, but she fought against the tendency to reduce all debate to her reputation. Her strategy, instead, was to call the double standard into question by insisting that her sexual life was irrelevant to her public image unless men upheld the same strict code of behavior they used to denounce her.
Creating a Reform Coalition
The Sex Radicals
The sex radicals—members of a faction of the Spiritualist movement that contemporaries often dismissed with the more disparaging term “free lovers”—were quick to recognize Woodhull’s political significance. Within weeks of the brokerage’s opening, anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews sought out Woodhull’s acquaintance; he saw her as an attractive spokeswoman for social reform, and probably helped her to draft her nomination letter to the New York Herald. Before the Civil War, Andrews had been an ardent abolitionist, socialist, Spiritualist and women’s rights activist. He was widely known for his advocacy of “social freedom,” a polite euphemism for the free love movement that had flourished in the radical press and a few experimental communities in the 1850s: Andrews himself had been associated with Long Island’s free love community, Modern Times (now Brentwood, New York). In 1853, Andrews published his views—a frank defense of free love and critique of the hypocrisy of conventional marriage—alongside opposing perspectives in a pamphlet entitled Love, Marriage and Divorce. He and other sex radicals based their ideology of social freedom on an Enlightenment belief in individual rights as applied to women. He introduced Woodhull to a national network of activists who believed, as Helen Lefkovitz Horowitz puts it, “that sex lay at the core of being”; for them, free love (defined in a number of ways) was the key to all other reforms. Andrews’s editorial influence over the Weekly brought it an agenda and a following, making it a forum for social freedom as the harbinger of revolution.2
Through the spring and summer of 1870, Andrews and his fellow sex radicals used the Weekly to articulate the most extreme claims to women’s political and social emancipation. They denied that sex was merely for procreation, insisting on women’s rights to sexual agency within and possibly even outside marriage. Even among these extreme reformers, there was a wide spectrum