A Bit More on Victoria Woodhull

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money wrote a great piece on the self-appointed censor of the Gilded Age: Anthony Comstock. Comstock was one of the great enemies of free thought, free love and free expression, and his enforcement of censorship laws over material sent through the mail represents one of the low points in American freedom.

Loomis followed this up with a piece on one of the most interesting people in American history, Victoria Woodhull. Woodhull was briefly a major figure in the battle for women’s equality. Historically, there are times when her contributions are overlooked and times when she receives a great deal of attention. The past decade or so have been a time of great attention, with half a dozen biographies. David Sehat spends some time on her in The Myth of American Religious Freedom as part of his coverage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Woodhull’s friend and ally and one of Sehat’s liberal heroines.

Unfortunately, the attention she receives is not always the good sort. Woodhull was scandalous, and that makes it hard to tell fact from rumor and salacious allegation. Loomis plays it safe, but in the process has to leave out some of the great stories that surround Woodhull. I shall relate some of them, while still providing the sort of historical discernment you’d expect from a semi-anonymous internet blogger.

(and since this turned out to be much longer that I anticipated, I’ll stick it below the fold)

Sex and Spirits

Born Victoria Claflin, Victoria married a physician named Calvin or Canning Woodhull at the age of fifteen. She then found herself in the predicament that suffragettes and temperance women warned about: Calvin turned out to be an alcoholic, and he was unable to support her or their two children. Since the laws of the day gave Victoria almost no power, she was forced to find some means to provide for herself.

This is where it gets hard to sort through scandal and find fact. What does seem true is that Woodhull spent some time as an actress and a casual prostitute. She also became a Spiritualist and a spiritual healer. At some point in the mid-1860s she left her husband, entered an open relationship with the wonderfully named Colonel James Harvey Blood and fled to New York.

Then things get weird. Woodhull, along with her sister Tennie C. / Tennesse Claflin, took up with the industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt. At that point, Vanderbilt was looking for spiritualists who could help him contact his departed mother and son. Tennesse became Vanderbilt’s mistress, and Victoria became his spiritualist.

In the work Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, Barbara Goldsmith relates a fascinating story that may or may not be true. Goldsmith suggests that Woodhull used her connections among New York prostitutes to gain information from the mistresses of Vanderbilt’s competitors. Woodhull then passed on this information “from the spirits” during her spiritual sessions with Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt was so impressed by the spirits that he supported the sisters in founding a brokerage firm, Woodhull, Claflin & Company.

While it is true that Vanderbilt backed the sisters in their brokerage, it’s impossible to know if Woodhull was really engaged in this … unique form of industrial espionage. Which doesn’t stop some historians from passing on the story. And me. *cough*

Moderates and Hard-Liners

Woodhull’s ascent was rapid and impressive. Using her new fame, money, and a newspaper called Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, she threw herself behind the movement for women’s rights. The movement was at a low point when Woodhull showed up, and her notoriety and $10,000 earned her a position of influence.

But the movement was already divided, and Woodhull exacerbated the problem. There was the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in bustling New York City, and the American Woman Suffrage Association in genteel Boston. The NWSA was the more radical wing, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The AWSA was more staid. It’s titular head was Henry Ward Beecher, one of America’s most famous preachers and part of the influential Beecher family.

The liberal NWSA supported a much broader agenda than the AWSA. This was particularly true of Stanton, who wanted a breakdown of the moral establishment. Beecher, on the other hand, was committed to the moral establishment. He was arguing what we’d now call a “complementarian” role for women that included voting.

Not surprisingly, Woodhull allied herself with Stanton and the NWSA. She had already delivered a speech before a congressional judiciary committee in support of women’s suffrage. Titled Constitutional Equality, It is actually one of the clearer statements of individual rights from the era:

One portion of citizens have no power to deprive another portion of rights and privileges such as are possessed and exercised by themselves. The male citizen has no more right deprive the female citizens of the free public, political expression of opinion than the female citizen has to deprive the male citizen thereof.

In contrast, Beecher thought that women were morally superior to men in many ways, and that women’s suffrage would fit in with women’s role as the guardians of the Republic’s morals. Though their goals were sometimes the same, Woodhull and Beecher were exact opposites in their beliefs.

Not Ready for Free Love

Woodhull’s fame began a slide into infamy as her past and unorthodox relationships began to come to light. Woodhull cemented this reputation by delivering a speech on “the Principles of Social Freedom.” This was another bold statement of individual rights:

If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights in the individual, and government is based upon that inalienability, then it must follow as a legitimate sequence that the functions of that government are to guard and protect the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to the end that every person may have the most perfect exercise of them. And the most perfect exercise of such rights is only attained when every individual is not only fully protected in his rights, but also strictly restrained to the exercise of them within his own sphere, and positively prevented from proceeding beyond its limits, so as to encroach upon the sphere of another: unless that other first agree thereto.

Over the hissing of the crowd, Woodhull tied the notion of women’s rights to the cause of free love, Like “free thought”, “free love” is a phrase that’s hard to pin down. But to Woodhull, it represented the keystone of individual freedom. Individuals should be free to make and enter contracts – legal or romantic – on their own negotiated terms without the interference of society, “If it be primarily right of men and women to take on the marriage relation of their own free will and accord, so, too, does it remain their right to determine how long it shall continue and when it shall cease. ”

Only the extremely liberal members of the movement were willing to fight for free love. Many suffragettes, including Susan B. Anthony, began to pull back and disassociate themselves from Woodhull. This, unfortunately, also drove a wedge between Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Stanton would go on to become more radical, as she took aim at the connection between religion and state, arguing that the authority of Christianity over public life had to be stripped away for women to attain equal rights. Anthony became more pragmatic, and made common cause with people who agreed with Beecher. Anthony would be more successful, and Stanton would be largely forgotten.

Thrown Under the Bus

Members of the movement were now afraid that Woodhull was doing more harm than good, and many turned against her. Some of Henry Ward Beecher’s sisters, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, began to publicly accuse Woodhull of licentious behavior. Like Frances Wright before her, Woodhull was exactly what opponents of individual rights were afraid of: a woman who had broken free of her assigned social place and was encouraging other women to do the same. Many were afraid that her ideas would lead to social anarchy.

Woodhull fought back. Privately, she began threatening to reveal the sexual histories of the women’s rights leaders who were either attacking of failing to support her. For Woodhull’s defense, it could be said the she was forcing people to recognize that they accepted the tenets of free love in private, while reviling them in public. She was merely exposing the hypocrisy of those who were, after all, slandering her. Against her defense, this was blackmail.

Her most famous target was Henry Ward Beecher himself, who had engaged in an affair with a parishioner named Elizabeth Tilton. The whole thing seems to have been a poorly kept secret, and Woodhull probably found out through some mutual friends. In a speech as president of the National Association of Spiritualists, Woodhull came clean about her open relationship and her various lovers. She then compared herself to Beecher by revealing her knowledge of Beecher’s relationship to Elizabeth.

David Sehat calls it a “stunning act of self-immolation.” It might have seen canny at the time, but Woodhull underestimated the media frenzy that would result. I’m not sure what the best analogy would be, but I’m guessing that if you caught Rick Warren having a gay tryst with Franklin Graham then the results would be about the same.

By exposing Beecher, Woodhull had almost undermined one of the moral establishment’s leading proponents. Some of the media firestorm was carried in Woodhull’s paper. Anthony Comstock stepped in and arrested Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin and Colonel Blood. Officially this was about obscenity, unofficially it was to silence some of the strongest critics.

If it is difficult to find the real Woodhull underneath all the scandal, it is even more difficult to asses her long term impact. I’m afraid I have to agree with David Sehat’s estimation that the Beecher-Tilton scandal ultimately backfired on the opponents of the moral establishment. Still, during her brief public career, Woodhull and her supporters were able to articulate a strikingly clear vision of individual freedom that stands up well even 150 years later.