Victoria Woodhull

American social reformer

• Born: September 23, 1838
• Birthplace: Homer, Ohio
• Died: June 10, 1927
• Place of death: Bredon's Norton, Worcestershire, England

An impassioned advocate of woman suffrage, racial and sexual equality, and spiritualism, Woodhull ran for the office of United States president, established a New York brokerage firm, and edited a radical newspaper.

Early Life

Victoria Woodhull was born Victoria Claflin and was one of nine surviving children of Roxanna (Anna) Hummel Claflin, a religious fanatic, and Reuben Buckman “Buck” Claflin, an unsuccessful Ohio businessperson and criminal. Woodhull had only three years of formal education, but from childhood thought that she was a vehicle for spirit voices and believed herself to be a faith healer. To exploit her apparent gift, her father set up her and her sister Tennessee (later Tennie C.) as faith healers. The sisters became and long remained the primary source of their large family’s income.

To escape the life into which her abusive father was driving her, Victoria married a physician, Canning Woodhull, on November 20, 1853, when she was fifteen years old. However, her husband proved to be an alcoholic and morphine addict. When their first child, Byron, was born in 1854, Victoria blamed her husband’s alcoholism for the infant’s severe brain damage. For some years, the family traveled widely, ranging as far as California. Victoria gave birth to a daughter, Zulu (later Zula) in 1861. Delivered under her husband’s drunken care, the baby almost died, and Victoria decided to divorce her husband.

By 1863, Victoria’s father, Buck Claflin, was advertising himself as a curer of cancer and was operating an infirmary in Ottawa, Illinois. Conditions in the place were squalid, and after a patient’s death in 1864, Victoria’s sister Tennie C. was indicted for manslaughter.

In 1864, Victoria was in St. Louis, Missouri, where she met Colonel James Harvey Blood, a wounded Union Army veteran who was working as the St. Louis city auditor and serving as organizer of the St. Louis Society of Spiritualists. Blood left his wife and reputation behind to leave St. Louis with Victoria and her children. Victoria married Blood on July 12, 1866, in Dayton, Ohio. Blood also took Tennie C. under his protection, earning the undying hatred of Victoria and Tennie’s parents. After Victoria’s departure at fifteen, Tennie C. had supported the extended family.

Life’s Work

Victoria, Tennie C., and Blood moved to New York in 1868, taking with them their extended family of fifteen, including Woodhull’s parents. There Victoria and Tennie C. met Cornelius Vanderbilt, a seventy-three-year-old railroad pioneer who was probably the richest man in America. Fascinated by clairvoyants, Vanderbilt was so charmed by Tennie C. that he established Victoria and her as the first women stockbrokers under the company name “Woodhull, Claflin & Company.”

With Vanderbilt’s backing, the sisters’ firm was highly successful and earned Victoria the fortune she needed for her political goals. Although woman suffrage leaders did not generally support her efforts, Victoria wanted to be numbered among the reformers. She was a powerful speaker and became a popular lecturer. Her experiences as a medium and faith healer had exposed her to the misery underlying many marriages in which women had no control over their money, children, sex lives, or childbearing. Victoria wanted more than the vote for women; she wanted full equality between men and women and—as she later added—full equality among all races and religions. After surveying the badly fragmented woman suffrage movement, she chose a new direction. On April 2, 1870, she announced her candidacy for president of the United States, explaining that her business success demonstrated both her ability, and that of other women, to succeed in public life. For a brief time, she was, indeed, partially successful.

To support her political candidacy, Victoria began publishing Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly on May 14, 1870. Much of the writing for the paper was done by Blood and Stephen Pearl Andrews, a left-wing reformer whose extreme radicalism caused the papers’ editors to run occasional disclaimers indicating that they did not stand behind every opinion they printed. Andrews occasionally even attacked the popular Protestant preacher Henry Ward Beecher, whose Brooklyn church was an important center of political power. At a time when the corruptness of President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration was becoming known, the laboring classes increasingly saw corporate America as their enemy, and Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly and its editors became associated with the socialist movement. On December 30, 1871, the paper published the first United States publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). These publications and the paper’s support of radical proposals such as a woman’s right to divorce and free love, as well as attacks on fraudulent corporate practices, all made enemies.

By late 1870, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly had a circulation of twenty thousand, and Victoria and Tennie C. were the subjects of positive stories in other papers. With the woman suffrage movement split and devoid of ideas, radical leaders such as Susan B. Anthony briefly welcomed Victoria’s ideas and financial support. Influenced by Benjamin Butler, a retired Civil War general and former congressman, Victoria based her political candidacy on the idea that women did not need special legislation to win suffrage, as they already possessed it because the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which defined voting rights and citizenship, referred to “persons” and “citizens,” not to “men” or “women.” Victoria took the position that if all Americans were citizens, then they all had the right to vote. She wrote a memorandum on that subject that was printed and sent to the U.S. Congress’s House and Senate Judiciary Committees for consideration. In 1871, she became the first woman to testify before a congressional committee.

Woodhull began to fall from fame into scandal on May 15, 1871, when her mother instituted court proceedings against James Harvey Blood, claiming that he had tried to kill her. She eventually lost her case, but the trial focused on Victoria’s domestic life, not the attempted murder charge. Reporters learned that Victoria’s former husband, Canning Woodhull, was now a helpless drug addict whom Victoria supported. Every aspect of Victoria’s domestic life was sensationalized in the press, which implied that she shared herself with two men. Victoria explained that she was supporting a large extended family, but the public focused on scandal.

Despite the growing scandal, in 1872 Victoria became the presidential nominee of the Equal Rights Party, a party of working-class people. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, was the party’s vice presidential candidate. Although the party’s ticket was destined to failure, Victoria’s candidacy nonetheless marked a new step toward sexual equality in the United States.

Increasingly under siege for her controversial views and apparently scandalous life, Victoria realized that, despite her successes, she was still victim of a double standard of morality, and she began an attack on the sexual hypocrisy of the womanizing preacher Henry Ward Beecher. However, Beecher was so powerful that Victoria’s support faded away, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beecher’s sister, joined Victoria’s enemies. The famed author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Stowe satirized Victoria as Audacia Dangyereyes in My Wife and I , a novel that she serialized in The Christian Year in 1871. Among the forces of conventional morality arrayed against Victoria, one of the most influential was Anthony Comstock, the self-appointed censor for the United States Post Office. He initiated a series of arrests on trumped-up charges that eventually bankrupted Victoria. Victoria’s brokerage firm was gone, her newspaper limped to a halt, and her money was exhausted on legal fees.

After Victoria divorced Blood in 1877, she fled to England—probably financed with Vanderbilt’s money—with Tennie C., her children, and part of her extended family. There she met John Biddulph Martin, an heir to a banking fortune. Martin defied his family and polite society by marrying Victoria on October 31, 1883. Letters published by Mary Gabriel in 1998 suggest this union was a genuinely affectionate marriage until Martin died on March 20, 1897. Meanwhile, Tennie C. married Francis Cook, a successful businessperson who possessed the title of viscount of Monserrat and a castle in Portugal. Tennie C. thus became Lady Cook, the viscountess of Monserrat.

While attempting to rewrite part of the past for the sake of her new marriage, Victoria retained her old vigor. With her daughter Zula, she edited The Humanitarian (1892-1901). She also took up bicycling, became the first woman motorist to drive through the English countryside, and was among organizers of the Ladies Automobile Club. With her daughter, she turned the manor house in which she lived in Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, into a woman’s agricultural college and established a private model school in the village in 1907. She sponsored youth groups. After the outbreak of World War I, she actively engaged in fund-raising and the entertainment of wounded soldiers. After a full and busy life, she died in Bredon’s Norton on June 10, 1927.

Significance

Despite her poverty-stricken and unsavory background and lack of education, Victoria Woodhull became a key figure in the spiritualist, women’s rights, and racial and sexual equality movements of her time. However, after scandal overtook her, she was essentially written out of histories of those movements, and her contributions were largely forgotten.

During the nineteenth century, spiritualism was a widespread movement that was especially important to women. Denied public utterance in conventional churches, spiritualist women were encouraged to demonstrate their abilities in public. Denied self-confidence because of conventional notions of female inferiority, they found self-assurance in the faith that voices other than their own were speaking through them. Victoria also brought wealth and new vitality to the badly fractured woman suffrage movement.

Woodhull’s nomination, with Frederick Douglass as her vice presidential nominee, marked the first time that either a woman or an African American was a candidate for high political office. Her public speeches on the need for women to gain rights over their own bodies and her public denunciations of marital rape and the exhaustion inflicted on many women by repeated childbearing placed her far in advance of her time.

Bibliography

Frisken, Amanda. Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Describes how Woodhull engaged in political theatrics to manipulate the popular press and culture and accomplish her political goals.

Gabriel, Mary. Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998. Straightforward biography that contains a lengthy account of Woodhull’s life in England.

Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Although accepting the most scandalous interpretations of Woodhull’s activities, Goldsmith also offers a comprehensive view of post-Civil War racial, political and religious problems and scandals that affected her.

Underhill, Lois Beachy. The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull. Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Bridge Works, 1995. Emphasizes American conflicts and has an introduction by the modern feminist Gloria Steinem.