should have the freedom to choose a lifelong mate carefully based on spiritual and physical affinity; within the current, imperfect state of marriage, they felt, a woman had the right to refuse her husband sexual access. Others, who might be termed “serial monogamists,” wanted to abolish marriage, which they saw as a form of sexual slavery for women, but advocated enduring free relationships based on mutual attraction. Most extreme were the varietists, who opposed any social restraints on sexuality whatsoever; only individual attraction, rather than social sanctions, they held, should dictate the frequency and permanency of sexual partnerships. From its publication, all these strands of the debate over social freedom filled the pages of the Weekly; sex radicals like Andrews, Ezra Heywood, Juliet Severance, Olivia Freelove Shepard, Lois Waisbrooker, Moses Hull, and Francis Barry wrote regularly about prostitution, the abolition of marriage, the single sexual standard, and dress reform.3 Their writing strove to raise consciousness about sexual inequality, to eliminate exaggerated indicators of sexual difference, and to destroy the double standard that forgave men for behavior condemned in women.
Most sex radicals were also Spiritualists. Spiritualism was a loosely connected movement of Christian nonconformists and freethinkers who believed that the spirits of the dead could, if properly understood and heeded, make a positive contribution to the world of the living. Spiritualism empowered the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement because Spirit guidance gave female activists the cultural authority to lead public lives.4 Female mediums and especially trance speakers claimed to channel male spirit voices, which freed them from conventional gender roles, and allowed them to speak in public and instruct audiences in the parlor and on the stage. Spiritualists’ emphasis on women’s rights posed a very real threat to traditional marriage; the goal was to free women from conventions and appearances (including clothing) that demonstrated their subordination to men. Woodhull’s new allegiance to Spiritualists and dress reformers, for example, was evident late in 1870 when she adopted a variant of the reform costume—leggings under a flowing shirt and a man’s jacket. All but the most extreme Spiritualists had abandoned the reform dress after the Civil War: sex radicals used such controversial displays of reform dress to exhibit their struggle for women’s complete sexual liberation. They lived their principles publicly and dared the rest of the world to do the same.5
Sex radicals believed that hypocrisy tainted the social order and made class and gender equality inaccessible to women. To illustrate this point, they frequently wrote about prostitution, which they saw as a disease, caused by the economic exploitation of women, that “festered in silence.” Only equal economic rights for women would cure it. “Remove the causes and the effects will cease,” argued a typical Weekly editorial. “Give woman employment and you remove her from the need of self-destruction.” Desperation drove many women into abusive or exploitative relations with men purely for survival. “We hope all our girls and women will soon be educated up to the standard of preferring the glorious freedom of self-support, even as washerwomen and ragpickers, to holding legal or illegal sexual relations undictated by attraction. She who marries for support, and not for love, is a lazy pauper, coward and prostitute.” In advocating social and economic remedies for prostitution, sex radicals went beyond a demand for the vote.6 By referring to marriage as legal prostitution, they insisted that both groups of women exchanged sexuality for material benefit, but men held up married women as exemplary, and disparaged the prostitutes they secretly visited. This double standard punished women for sexual behavior forgiven in men; silence, sex radicals maintained, only made women more vulnerable to exploitation.7 Their demand for an open assessment of men’s role in perpetuating the social evil became the backbone of Woodhull’s free love philosophy.8
Beneath these calls for economic equity and sexual openness lay the belief that women, like men, were sexual beings. Prostitution, “the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors,” was a natural consequence of denying women’s sexual agency. “Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society,” a Weekly correspondent insisted. Most provocative here was the assertion that society’s denial of a woman’s natural appetites essentially forced her into prostitution. The idea that women experienced sexual desire—even if it led them astray—contradicted more palatable claims of victimization offered by earlier reformers. The assertion of female sexual agency undermined the Victorianism of some pre-Civil War women’s reform movements: as spiritual rather than physical beings, the argument said, women would purify political corruption.9 Woodhull’s insistence on female sexual agency, but more important, her determination to end the silence on the subject, scorned the idea of women’s moral superiority to men. Instead, she insisted that both sexes be held to the same standard: a moral order that shielded men and condemned women for the same act was not worthy of protection. Only honest scrutiny of social problems could bring about their solution.
The Woman Suffrage Movement
Woodhull’s social activism also had a political bent, evident in her self-nomination for president, which attracted her to the woman suffrage cause. She forced the connection in January 1871, by presenting a powerful suffrage Memorial to the House Judiciary Committee. It was one of Woodhull’s few public ventures that garnered respectful treatment in illustrated news (Figure 6). The Memorial encapsulated a recent shift in legal theory on women’s right to the vote. Suffragists had divided in 1868–69 when the Fifteenth Amendment, which had granted federal protection of the vote regardless of race, left women out of the franchise because the Fourteenth Amendment referred to citizens for the first time as “male.” Most woman suffrage activists saw no other option than to pursue a “Sixteenth Amendment” enfranchising women. Woodhull’s Memorial brought national attention to a legal strategy known as the “New Departure.” Ignoring the word “male,” it argued that the Fourteenth Amendment had indeed made women citizens (by virtue of being born in the United States), and demanded Congressional action to enforce women’s right to vote. The New Departure gave suffrage women a way to mend fences following the heated racialized debate over the Fifteenth Amendment. It also offered them an appealing route to the vote by direct action at a local level that would avoid the tedious and probably doomed attempt to pass a separate amendment.10
Suffrage women were both intrigued and repelled by Woodhull’s flamboyant public life. Even members of the more militant wing of the suffrage movement, the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), were reluctant to attend Woodhull’s Memorial: her visibility in illustrated sporting news like The Days’ Doings made her anything but respectable. NWSA leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were hard pressed to persuade Connecticut suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker to attend Woodhull’s presentation. Hooker, a new member of the NWSA, hoped to give the movement an aura of respectability, but Woodhull’s financial and political resources soon overpowered Hooker’s genteel reservations. When Woodhull repeated the Memorial before the suffragists’ convention later that day, she also pledged $10,000 to the cause; while the money never explicitly appeared in the organization’s coffers, it is possible that she contributed as much in kind by publishing the Weekly and circulating other literature for woman suffrage. NWSA leaders tapped Woodhull for copies of the Memorial and the Judiciary Committee reports it generated to spread the word about the “new departure.” Such potential contributions to the movement, particularly her willingness to speak publicly for an unpopular cause, made Woodhull too powerful an asset to ignore.11 Trance speakers had long proved attractive spokeswomen for suffrage, and Stanton saw in Woodhull a new charismatic figure on the rostrum. “Neither Anna Dickinson nor Kate Field ever [thought] enough of our movement to make a speech on our platform,” Stanton wrote to a friend soon after meeting Woodhull, referring to the two most popular female lecturers of the period. Woodhull’s potential to publicize the cause proved hard to resist.12
Women opposed to suffrage seized on Woodhull’s new prominence in the movement to discredit the idea of the woman’s vote. For these anti-suffrage women, Woodhull was the perfect illustration of the dangers that public life posed to women’s special status as guardians of domestic virtue. Their paper, The True Woman, saw Woodhull’s unsavory reputation as eroding women’s respectability.