Victoria Woodhull—An American Progressive 150 Years Ahead of Her Time
Most of this musing was written back in 2002. This is somewhat a revised version. I reckon my wisdom has increased since 2002 but not my writing ability. My own biased interpretation is that while my perceptive abilities have not suffered all that much the last 14 yrs, my writing skills have taken a hit—not a major hit, but then they were never good enough to handle a minor hit. I reckon, most of those reading this, already know that.
Back in 2002 I had no idea who Victoria Woodhull was. She is barely mentioned in history books, if mentioned at all. Yet everyone living in the U.S., back when she became the first woman to run for President, knew her well—a sort of female Dennis the Menace of American Society back then. I was surprised, when reading a book about her that she had a 1960’s mentality—and beyond, almost right down the line—even though she lived her adult life in the period right after Lincoln’s assassination. She was born in 1838, a long time ago. This was a time when spiritualism was rampant—God spoke to you in visions, and there were those who claimed they could communicate with the dead and predict the future, that sort of thing. Victoria and her younger sister Tennie were very pretty girls, both charmers. In what was not unusual for those days, Victoria dated, at age 14, an older established member of the community, in this case a medical doctor. At age 15 she married him and they had two children, one a mentally handicapped son and a normal pretty girl. Her husband, Dr. Woodhull, turned out be an alcoholic, so she left him.
Her family, one consisting of herself, her two children, her sister Tennie, and her parents were poor, very poor. So the parents took advantage of the public appetite for child mediums. Thus, Victoria, at age 21 and Tennie, 14, offered people messages from absent friends and relatives, alive or dead, all for one dollar. At this point Victoria discovered the power she had over older men. Ignoring the sexual implications of their interest, she would patiently spend hours with them holding their hands, making them the center of her attention. She and her sister did not hurt for clients. One of the clients was Colonel James Blood, who had seen action during the Civil War in almost every battle on the Western front. He was said to carry seven bullets in his body and went to see Woodhull, the ‘spiritualistic physician’. At one session, she appeared to go into a trance and spoke so softly that Blood was forced to lean closely to her lips whereupon he heard that his future destiny was to be linked with hers in marriage.
Blood then left his wife and daughter, and went to Toledo, Ohio, and was joined there by Victoria Woodhull. At age 30 Woodhull and family now consisted of Victoria, Blood, her parents, her two children, and her sister Tennie. Cornelius Vanderbuilt, one of the richest and most powerful men in the country, was known to have a penchant for clairvoyants and a sharp eye for female beauty. He was aged 74. It was Tennie who went to work on the Commodore, offering touching and massaging as a means to transmit vital and healing forces. Tennie often read to him from newspapers and when he would fall asleep she would perch on his knee, pull on his whiskers, box his ears, and say, “Wake-up old boy”. Vanderbuilt had long since stopped loving his wife Sophia, and often sent her on long trips so that he could carry on affairs unnoticed., When this proved a hassle he had Sophia put into a lunatic asylum. These, I guess, were the ‘good ole days’ which modern conservatives yearn for so much. Sophia died in 1868 and Vanderbuilt shortly proposed marriage to Tennie. She was 24. Well, while Tennie thought it over, the Vanderbuilt family blocked it and Vanderbuilt married someone else.
It is fair to say that Victoria and Tennie marched to the tune of their own understandings of life, were bold, intelligent, and charming. They perceived, like many other women, that women were held to a double standard in terms of behavior, and treated as second-class citizens in all other respects. Vanderbuilt treasured his relationship with Tennie and Victoria. He loved their company and no doubt there was some sort of sexual relationship between he and Tennie, although what sort of form that took, considering his advanced age, is hard to say. The Vanderbuilt family put tremendous pressure on him to distance himself from the two sisters. Yet Vanderbuilt wanted to remain friends with them, and at this point Victoria and Tennie made their move. They asked Vanderbuilt to give quiet support to their opening a brokerage firm on Wall Street. Woodhull had already made a killing on Wall Street through tips from Vanderbilt. So the two sisters did open a brokerage firm, a move that normally would have been a disaster. There were no women on wall street except as secretaries and that ilk. Victoria and Tennis flourished because many powerful business men saw giving Victoria’s firm, called Woodhull, Claflin and Company, support as a way to please Vanderbuilt. The two sisters were plenty smart enough to run the firm and it did well and Victoria began to accumulate a lot of money.
At about this time Victoria decided to commit her life to female causes. She understood how the male world worked, and was herself in possession of the intelligence and beauty to manipulate men as they manipulated women. Her first area of attention was suffrage, the right of women to vote. She was absolutely nothing like any of the other female suffrage leaders. They were prim and proper, laid back, and anything but sexy. When Victoria started to attend suffrage conventions she kind of took these conventions by storm. The leaders needed her money and she was generous with it. When Victoria held a press conference it was mobbed, as at this time men loved her as some sort of interesting and harmless free spirit. By now Victoria had established herself in a expensive mansion with her whole brood—Blood, Tennie, her mother and father, her handicapped son, her daughter, and her former husband. Her former husband by now was a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict, but Victoria sheltered him anyway. Her home was a visual and perpetual open house. It was the place to go for stimulating discussions and to meet important people. The suffrage leaders resented her deeply but they were trapped. Because she bankrolled much of their activities she had to be allowed to speak at conventions. But when she spoke she charged up the participants like no one else could, leaving her as the defacto leader of these organizations.
At this junction Woodhull surprised all. While women could not vote, there was no apparent legal block to their running for office. So Woodhull announced her bid to be President with the following notice: “As I happen to be the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented class in the republic, and perhaps the most practical exponent of the principles of equality, I announce myself as a candidate for the Presidency. 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 prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of women with men, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should not be treated, socially and politically, as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics, and business and exercised the rights I already possessed….” Most of the suffrage leaders seethed with anger, this was not the kind of woman they wanted to lead their cause. But most women across the country admired the courage and intelligence of Victoria while men paid her no end of attention. Even President Grant gave her an audience in the White House and quipped: “Some day you will be sitting in this chair.”
To keep her name and her issues in front of the public, Victoria and Tennis started the Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a newspaper. This paper covered everything, from suffrage to financial matters, to the arts. Through her personal charm with the right politicians Woodhull was granted the opportunity to become the first woman to address a congressional committee at the highest level. Her presentation was impressive and for the purpose of space I will only quote one paragraph: “The American nation in its march onward and upward, cannot publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half of its citizens by narrow statutes. The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression of that will by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained. As the world has advanced into civilization and culture; as mind has risen in its dominion over matters; as the principle of justice and moral right has gained sway….as the might of the right has supplanted the right of might, so have the rights of women become more fully recognized…….”
As a candidate for President, Woodall then sought the support of labor and her weekly newspaper became, in effect, the first ‘muckraker’ publication as it sailed into corporate sins. She attacked the abuse of wealth as she attacked the abuse of women. Up till now the men who had a firm grip on the financial affairs of the country, including labor, had found Victoria a delight, a charming, intelligent, and a harmless enough adversary. After all, women were no where’s near getting the right to vote, so let her carry on. Woodhull went after big business with the same broadside she went after women’s rights: “Is it right that the millions would toil all their lives long, scarcely having comfortable food and clothes, while the few manage to control all the benefits? People may pretend that is justice, and good Christians may excuse it upon that ground, but Christ would never have called it by that name. He would have given him that labored but an hour as much he that labored all the day, but to him that labored not at all he would take away even that which he hath…A system of society which permits such arbitrary distributions of wealth is a disgrace to Christian civilization…..How is this to be remedied? I answer very easily….when a person worth millions dies, instead of leaving it to his children, who have no more title to it than anybody else’s children have, it must revert to the people….Christianity of today is a failure…..the church has allied itself with money and power, when it should be speaking for the powerless…..true religion will not shut itself up in any church away from humanity; it will not stand idly by and see the people suffer from any misery whatsoever…..it is foolish for a Christian to say, “I have nothing to do with politics’….It is the bounded duty of every Christian to support that political party which bases itself upon Human Rights, and where is no such party existing, then to go about to construct one.” In full gear now, Woodhull was nominated by a new party, the Equal Rights Party. She pushed into the party platform planks for graduated direct taxation, the regulation of monopolies, laws to protect laborers, a civil service to be based on merit, giving ownership of land, mineral, and water resources to the people, guaranteed employment to all, and the establishment of a universal government with international arbitration for wars. Except for the last two, all of these eventually became law far down the future path. It could be argued that if the last two are not accomplished today and rather quickly, then human destiny may well be in danger.
But Victoria had gone too far. She had now declared war on all the power bases in the country, including organized religion. Almost immediately she was shut out from the press and nothing she said or wrote could be published anymore except in her own weekly newspaper. Not wishing to engage her on any of the issues she raised, the preemptively and other centers of power decided to attack her on her sexual activities. This was an age when women were expected to remain sexually pure and loyal to their husband, at least certain women. It was also an age when prostitutes were an accepted alternative for men, and affairs for married men were widespread. The sexual double standard was firmly in place—-except for Victoria. She not only competed in the business world as a man, but she behaved sexually like one. The difference is that she was open about it. She was a female John Kennedy except she was more selective and more creative. For a start they went after the fact that she lived with two men, her former husband and her current husband. Here was her response: “one of the charges made against me is that I live in the same house with my former husband, Dr. Woohull, and my present husband colonel Blood. The fact is a fact. Dr Woodhull, being sick, ailing, and incapable of self-support, I felt it my duty to myself and to human nature that he should be cared for, although his incapacity was in no wise attributable to me. My present husband, Colonel Blood, not only approves of this charity, but co-operates in it. I esteem it one of the most virtuous acts of my life.”
Woodhull probably could have survived the attack on her living arrangement, but she was guilty of various sexual trysts with various men, many of them married, and she made little attempt to deny it, and in fact expanded her political views to include the sexual liberation of men and females. To most anyone’s standards she operated sexually with a mode that was, if not offensive, certainly different. What is probably most outstanding about Woodhull is her absolute public honesty about sexual matters. Here are some comments from her public pronouncements, keeping in mind that she was a suffrage leader, a labor leader, and a candidate for President: “I am fully persuaded that the very highest sexual unions are those that are monogamic and these are perfect in proportion as they are lasting…but relations between the sexes are matters of emotions that the government has no right to control….women have a right to say no to a loveless marriage and no to unwanted sexual advances…I advocate free love in the highest purest sense as the only cure for the immorality, the deep damnation by which men corrupt and disfigure God’s most holy institution of sexual relations…I claim the right to the same free-from-rules by which men play, the same sexual freedom many of them practice…to preach against free love openly and practice it secretly is cowardly…I know, that marriage as it exists today, is the curse of society….marriage is of the heart, not of the law, and when love ends, marriage should end…if the motives are pure and genuine affection felt, untainted by exploitation, then sexual experimentation is a matter of individual choice and individuals have a right to other kinds of relationships, to serial monogamy or exclusionist free love or varietist free love….Yes I am a free lover. I have an inalienable constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you frame have any right to interfere…” It is hard to comprehend the shock these inflammatory words must have created back in 1872.
Victoria’s marriage to Blood was itself unique. While they remained married for most of her life, he found no fault with trysts and whenever the need arose, he made himself scarce, even sleeping sometimes in another bedroom so as not to interfere. It was Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy in reverse: perhaps Blood himself engaged in endless trysts, this I don’t know. It was sort of like Blood was her true love and the others were entertainment. But then, can true love exist along side sex with others? While others drank alcohol to satisfy their emotional needs at her constant social and political gatherings in her home, she didn’t drink, and seemed to use a sexual session with a selected person at the end of some nights to relax her.
So what do we make of all this? First, her male partners never had their careers damaged by any trysts with her, the only one who came under fire was her. So there was obviously a double standard. Of course she was a whore if having sex with someone else for reasons that have nothing to do with real love, is the definition of a whore. But even here it gets confusing. The tramp in the ghetto who has sex for $25 is certainly a whore in everybody’s mind. Sex for money, pure and simple. But what about those high class women who marry for money or power? Isn’t that being a whore? Jackie Kennedy made little pretense that she cared most about money and power, sex was not very important to her. Her nickname for Jack was ‘bunny’ and one gets the impression she was relieved that she did not have to endure as the only focus of Jack’s sexual energy. Many females marry the one they marry in varying degrees because of the financial or social position of the male involved, sex being just part of the cost. Men can be guilty of this too.
Victoria’s response to allegations of her sexual affairs struck me as somewhat amazing. There was no “we all sin and I am sorry” or “I refute these scandalous charges that I had sex with these men” or “I find it undignified to respond to such personal charges” etc. Instead she hit it head-on, more in the vain, “is that so?” She reminded people that she was no different than the Vanderbuilts, or the Henry Ward Beechers, or the Theodore Tiltons, or an array of prominent politicians, all of whom she named. Henry Ward Beecher was a prominent preacher and advocate of women and minority rights, as was Theodore Tilton. All of these prominent public figures denied they were unfaithful to their wives, that Victoria should not be believed. Woodhull responded that she knew about what she talked since she was aware that Beecher had a longstanding affair with Tilden’s wife and that she had engaged in sexual relations with both Tilden and Beecher. At this point all the sex charges against her were published in the major papers while her responses only were covered in her own weekly paper. Sales of her weekly paper soared. Woodhull never relented claiming “I believe it is my duty and mission to carry the torch to light up and destroy the heap of rottenness which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity, and social purity, now passes as the social system”
Then things got worse. At that time a self appointed guardian of the public morals, Henry Comstock, the head of the YMCA’s Committee for the Suppression of Vice, decided to go after Woodhull and had her arrested for distributing her weekly paper, which he claimed was a form of pornography. Of course none of the papers that made the sexual charges against her were charged, only her paper which contained her responses to the charges. Woodhull was jailed several times, but each time a jury declared her not guilty. The whole case was complicated by the fact that none of the people who knew her personally ever joined in denouncing her and no one ever came forward and claimed they had been sexually ‘used’ or ‘corrupted’ by her.
After being freed from jail one time she went before a national convention and declared: “I never had sexual intercourse with any man of whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world….I am not ashamed of any act of my life. At the time it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any desire that has been gratified or of any passion alluded to. Every one of them are a part of my own soul’s life, for which, thank God, I am not accountable to you….and this sexual intercourse business may just as well be discussed now, and discussed until you become so familiar with your sexual organs that reference to them will no longer make the blush mount to your face any more than reference to any other part of your body. My life has been my own. I have nothing to apologize for. Sexual intercourse that is in accordance with nature, and is therefore proper, is that which is based upon mutual love and desire, and then ruminates in reciprocal benefit (orgasm)…First love; Second, desire based on love; and Third mutual happiness the result. Fully half of women seldom or never experience any pleasure whatever in the sexual act and almost every women, at some time in her life, has suffered from false sexual relations (no orgasm) which left a void in the inner soul”. In some respect Victoria Woodhull was a female Terrell Owens defending herself and her character by fueling the flames of her attackers and throwing caution to the wind. It does seem a tad odd that defending your own character becomes a reason for criticism by the character assassins themselves.
Hardly anyone has ever escaped from sexual controversy over their personal behavior unharmed. Woodhull was no different. It is a guaranteed way to destroy a person’s credibility with a certain segment of any population. It works either way, whether the person is painted as some sort of harlot, or some sort of sexually repressed hypocrite. As long as human sexuality is so varied from one person to another, whether based on moral beliefs or genetic nature, the topic is always a wash, with each side claiming the moral ground. Woodhull was no different. Victoria’s career as a politician was over, so was her marriage, the usual consequence of any public sexual assault on any marriage. Woodhull, exhausted from it all, moved to England.
While in England she met and then married a wealthy English nobleman and businessman named John Biddulph Martin. His family of nobility was aghast but Martin prevailed and eventually the whole family accepted Woodhull. Martin wrote to a friend: “There are only two sorts of women, the ones in whom you lose yourself, and the ones in whom you find yourself. She was more alive than anyone I have ever met. Ordinary words don’t describe her. When you were with her everything became so thrilling, so worthwhile. You looked at the world through her eyes and you saw miracles all around you. The commonplace, the dull, the everyday had disappeared. She believed that people were interesting and wonderful and they became it. She wanted people to be happy and she made them happy.” An interesting side point here is that Martin suffered from ‘sexual incapacity’ which Victoria purportedly corrected. Maybe it was her experience. Whatever.
Woodhull never quit. She returned to the U. S. and yep, she ran for President again in 1892, twenty years after her first run. She lost again and at a press conference made this statement: “To be perfectly frank, I hardly expected to be elected. The truth is I am too many years ahead of this age, and the exalted views and objects of humanitarianism can scarcely be grasped as yet by the unenlightened mind of the average man”.
Woodhull was no minor figure during her lifetime. She dominated four major suffrage conventions, she ran for president twice, she was the first major female player on Wall Street, the first Woman to be granted high level appearances before Congress, a major focal point in the national debate over pornography, the major figure to exploit and condemn the double standard for one in business and sex, a major publisher of popular weekly newspaper that served as an outlet for alternate political and social views, a major supporter of labor rights, of environmental protection, and of the need to regulate and limit corporate excesses.
I find two things truly amazing about Victoria Woodhulll. First, she surely must be the first ‘true’ hippie. Everything about her fits the 1960’s which came 100 years after her first run for President. Secondly, history books ignore her almost completely, like sometimes happens in Communist countries. Maybe a sentence or two, and always related to the ‘free love; business. That seems quite unfair, the ‘free love’ business came at the end when the major political power centers in the country decided to destroy her. These power centers cared little about her ‘free love”, but they did care about all the changes in society of which she began to effectively generate public interest. Whatever else, she handled all the sex accusations honestly. As for all the free love stuff, it is too complicated for me to digest, but her own family life, in reality, consisted of a large extended family unit that remained with her throughout almost her entire life. With the exception of Blood, no one ever fell by the wayside, and all lived with her until they died. She was ‘family values’ throughout her life. Most of them died before she did, except her daughter and son. To my knowledge, no friend, of her many many friends, ever turned against her. I think that says a lot about Victoria Woodhull. It poses an interesting question. Can a person really be a moral depravate if he/she has an army of reputable friends, none of whom find anything morally depraved about him/her?
Postscript. Colonel Blood puzzles me. He seemed a little too accommodating even for an open marriage. For a man who had been in every civil war battle on the western front and carried 7 bullets in him, perhaps he was no longer sexually potent. He and Victoria never had any children. If that were the case it would better explain his support for Woodhull’s sexual trysts. Be all that as it may I have come to be awful careful how to judge any couple’s sexual behavior. What works for them is fine with me as long as it is consensual and does not involve minors. And I am kind of practical about his ‘free love business’. If this were widespread wouldn’t it cut down on most of sexual actions? I mean, there would be this handful of males and females in the neighborhood who would monopolize all the orgasms. “Not tonight dear, I stopped by neighbor Harry’s house on the way home and three of us gals had a wonderful time with him. He really turns me on. Maybe tomorrow if the grade A candidates are all busy.” Sex just seems one area of human life that can’t be corralled and fit into any logical or reasonable box. As much as sex provides orgasms, it also creates a lot of frustration and turmoil in the lives of many people, including couples. A porn site might have over 50 categories of sex to choose from. How much simpler and time saving sex is in other animals where hormones simply generate specific sexual activity which rarely lasts very long. In most animals there is a normal pattern of sexual behavior. In humans the diversity of sexual behaviors and turn ons is overwhelming and frankly, makes sexual compatibility a major challenge for many couples. Add to that the likelihood that sexual preferences and sexual drive may change over time and we are left with a very tricky long term situation. Human sexual behaviors are simply not very subject to rational reasoning. If someone says they are turned on by anal sex while swinging from the chandelier what are we suppose to say? Maybe that is why sex should be listed under comedy and it sure as hell serves as the subject matter for our most hilarious jokes—unless we are in the middle of a sexual quagmire ourselves, then the humor is lost, and in fact, we might end up in jail or divorced.
Be all this as it may, Victoria Woodhull was a fascinating national figure, full of enigmas, shocking honesty, and intellectually challenging rhetoric. Victoria’s policy stands, which her generational leaders despised, are today’s social and political norms. What does seem to remain is her effective elimination from our history books. She certainly was not ignored during her lifetime. Practically everyone knew about Victoria Woodhull back then, albeit only establishment attacks on her were in the major newspapers. Her defense was limited to her own weekly newspaper. Imagine if there had been TV and radio, and internet back then. Her life was wild and intense theatre. Well, not to be too depressed. We have Trump. One genuinely loved just about every group imaginable and the other genuinely dislikes most every group different from himself. We will all, like it or not, get to see how that works out.
