VICTORIA WOODHULL

Submitted by: Roxann Ploss

When you think of women in the political arena, many names might come immediately to mind. Susan B. Anthony, Jeannette Rankin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Shirley Chisolm, Margaret Chase Smith, Barbara Jordan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, Hillary Clinton, maybe even Frances Perkins. Others, too…..but probably NOT Victoria Woodhull. That has been truly unfortunate because an important precedent-setter (and much time) has been lost.

Victoria and her younger sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, broke through the glass ceiling long before women like Gloria Steinhem and Germaine Greer made headlines of their own by protesting the suppression of women’s rights. Born in 1838, she married her (older) doctor at fifteen only to find early on that he was an alcoholic and a cheat. But as was common then, she found she had very few rights as a married woman. In truth, many contemporaries didn’t even feel that women were citizens. Trying to raise two children, one with a severe mental disability during an impossible marriage, she quickly developed her philosophy of “free love”…..not in the sense of the Haight-Ashbury for, indeed, she was a serial monogamist. However, she was adamant that a woman would never know freedom until she had the equal choice beginning or ending sexual (and marital) partnerships. After divorcing the not-so-good doctor, Victoria became increasingly forceful in public life.

She and her sister were the first women to be seated on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1870, they opened their own brokerage firm, aided by Victoria’s wealthy admirer, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Newspapers of the day either applauded these “Queens of Finance” or condemned them for leading other women down the paths of unrighteousness and prostitution. The profits from the business were used to publish a weekly newspaper which advocated things as varied as women’s suffrage, short skirts, vegetarianism and legalized prostitution. Always controversial, The Woodhull and Claflin Weekly published the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Manifesto in 1871.

Victoria, already labeled a firebrand, was breaking through the all-male wall of American politics. She was the first women to address the House Judiciary Committee. This was so radical in fact that the third annual National Woman Suffrage Association convention (1871) was postponed so the attendees could listen to her speech. In it, she argued that women already had the right to vote…..guaranteed by the 14^th and 15^th Amendments which granted the right “to all citizens”. All women had to do was use it. “Women are the equals of men before the law and are equal in all their rights.” This beautiful woman with the short-cropped hair-do became the overnight sensation of the suffragist movement.

Woodhull was only the second woman (the first was Elizabeth Cady Stanton) to petition Congress in person for these rights. In 1872, the newly formed Equal Rights Party nominated her for President of the United States. The legality of her run for the office has been questioned by some historically but it cannot be disputed that there was a campaign and she received votes on ballots printed and distributed by the party. Although Belva Lockwood would be nominated in the same fashion in 1884 and 1888, it would still take almost a century before a woman’s name (Charlene Mitchell, 1968) would appear on an official, government-printed ballot.

Woodhull’s residency was in New York, a state which had actually disenfranchised propertied women in 1777. Victoria registered to vote in local elections in 1871 but was summarily turned away from the polls on Election Day. A year later, she again could not vote (this time for herself) because she was in jail. Months earlier in her newspaper, she had reported the alleged affair between Elizabeth Tilton and prominent spiritual leader, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Highlighting what she saw as the sexual double standard angered “moralists” in New York. After weeks of outraged hoopla, Woodhull, her sister and her second husband were arrested for misuse of the mails (by circulating such scandalous material). They spent the next month in a jail set aside for hardened criminals. Acquitted on a technicality six months later, Victoria was vindicated three YEARS later when Tilton’s husband sued the Reverend for “alienation of affections”.

Whatever her reasons, possibly frustration with bad relationships or despair for the American system of government, in 1877, she left her second ex-husband and her country behind to start a new life in England. She made her first appearance there in December of that year, giving a lecture entitled “The Human Body, the Temple of God”. After marrying her third and last husband, she published a magazine called The Humanitarian from 1892 to 1901 using her new name, Victoria Woodhull Martin. Following her husband’s death, she retired to the Midlands where she died in 1927.

An emphatic life. A remarkable life. A remarkable woman.

Reference: Wikipedia