Women’s rights leader Victoria Woodhull, though not
especially well known today, once attracted more media attention than just
about any female in the United States. A jack-of-all-trades, Woodhull
alternately tried her hand at stockbroking, newspaper publishing, lobbying,
public speaking, clairvoyance and philanthropy, and even ran for president long
before women won the right to vote. Her unconventional lifestyle and radical
political views helped her make powerful friends and equally powerful enemies.
Check out some surprising facts about the colorful feminist trailblazer.
1. Woodhull received almost no formal education.
Victoria Claflin, later Victoria Woodhull, was born on
September 23, 1838, to an illiterate mother and a petty criminal father. One of
10 children, Woodhull did not start elementary school until she turned 8. She
then attended off and on for only three years before dropping out. Any hope of
further education was dashed at age 15, when she married a doctor who soon
revealed himself as an alcoholic philanderer. To make matters even more
difficult, Woodhull gave birth to a mentally handicapped son in 1854.
2. Woodhull worked as a traveling clairvoyant.
As a child in rural Ohio, Woodhull purportedly believed
that she could communicate with three siblings who had died in infancy and that
she could heal the sick. Always on the lookout for a good moneymaking scheme,
her father put her and her sister Tennessee to work telling fortunes and
contacting spirits. The family also went into the alternative healing business,
selling life elixirs, giving massages and offering cures for diseases ranging
from cancer to asthma. But although Woodhull later claimed to have made a small
fortune during the Civil War as a traveling medical clairvoyant, she and
Tennessee both had their share of setbacks. Tennessee, for example, was
indicted for manslaughter in Illinois after one of her cancer patients died.
3. Woodhull and her sister were the first female brokers
on Wall Street.
Upon moving to New York City in 1868, Victoria and
Tennessee began working as clairvoyants for the railroad baron Cornelius
Vanderbilt, who distrusted medically trained doctors. Tennessee also apparently
became Vanderbilt’s lover and may even have received a marriage proposal from
him. Stock tips gleaned from this relationship proved handy during an 1869 gold
panic, during which the sisters claimed to have netted around $700,000. With
Vanderbilt’s financial backing, Victoria and Tennessee then opened their own
highly publicized firm named Woodhull, Claflin & Co., becoming the first
female stockbrokers on Wall Street. Nonetheless, they never gained a seat on
the New York Stock Exchange, something no woman would achieve until 1967.
4. Woodhull was the first woman to address a
congressional committee.
Woodhull attended a female suffrage convention in
January 1869 and became a devout believer in the cause. Not long afterward she
befriended Massachusetts congressman Benjamin Butler, from whom she cajoled an
invitation to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. On January 11,
1871, Woodhull declared to the panel that women had already won the right to
vote under the recently enacted 14th and 15th amendments. Women are citizens,
she argued, and “the citizen who is taxed should also have a voice in the subject
matter of taxation.” Although the committee rejected her petition to pass
“enabling legislation,” her history-making appearance immediately propelled her
into a leadership position among suffragists.
5. Woodhull was the first woman to run for president.
In April 1870, just two months after opening her
brokerage firm, Woodhull announced her candidacy for president of the United
States. She campaigned on a platform of women’s suffrage, regulation of
monopolies, nationalization of railroads, an eight-hour workday, direct
taxation, abolition of the death penalty and welfare for the poor, among other
things. In addition to promoting herself in her weekly newspaper, Woodhull
organized an Equal Rights Party, which nominated her at its May 1872 convention.
Famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass was selected as her running mate. He
never acknowledged it, however, and in fact campaigned for Republican Ulysses
S. Grant. Woodhull was furthermore hurt by embarrassing details about her
private life, which came to light during a lawsuit that her mother brought
against her second husband. In the end, Woodhull’s name appeared on ballots in
at least some states. No one knows how many votes she received because they
apparently weren’t counted.
6. Woodhull spent Election Day in jail.
A few days before the 1872 presidential election
returned Grant to office, Woodhull published an article in her newspaper aimed
at exposing popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher as an adulterous hypocrite. The
backlash was immediate, as Beecher’s supporters helped garner arrest warrants
for Victoria and Tennessee on charges of sending obscene material through the
mail. They also faced libel charges over a second article that accused a Wall
Street trader of getting two teenage girls drunk and seducing them. Police took
the sisters into custody on November 2, and they remained in jail for about a
month. Additional arrests followed, including one after a briefly on-the-lam
Woodhull snuck up on stage in disguise in order to give a speech. The sisters
were eventually found not guilty, but not before taking a beating in the press.
Their harshest critics included Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beecher’s sister and the
author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” who called Woodhull a “vile jailbird” and an
“impudent witch,” and cartoonist Thomas Nast, who depicted Woodhull as “Mrs.
Satan.”
7. Woodhull was a proponent of free love.
Woodhull often spoke about sex on the lecture circuit,
saying, among other things, that women should have the right to escape bad
marriages and control their own bodies. Even more shocking to Victorian
sensibilities, she espoused free love. “I want the love of you all,
promiscuously,” she once declared. “It makes no difference who or what you are,
old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all
and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.” Woodhull practiced what
she preached, at one point living with her ex-husband, her husband and her
lover in the same apartment. Yet she also knew when to hold back her amorous
affections. “Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and
absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in
everything, and the victory would be won in a single week,” she wrote.
8. Woodhull spent over half her life as an expat.
When Vanderbilt died in January 1877, his children began
fighting in court over his $100 million estate. Rumor holds that Victoria and
Tennessee were paid off to not testify at trial. Either way, they left that
August for England, where Woodhull met her third husband, a wealthy banker. She
resided there until her death in 1927, devoting her later years to running a
new newspaper and preserving the English home of George Washington’s ancestors.
Woodhull also became an automobile enthusiast, donated money and services to
the townspeople around her estate, traveled overseas to run again for U.S.
president in 1892, founded a short-lived agricultural school and volunteered
with the Red Cross during World War I.
9. Woodhull lost the backing of other suffragist
leaders.
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other
giants of the women’s suffrage movement embraced Woodhull around the time of
her congressional appearance. But they soon had a falling out, in part over
Woodhull’s political ambitions and love of the limelight. She did not get
invited to speak at suffrage conventions following her first run for president,
and Anthony even advised a British suffrage leader not to meet with her. “Both
sisters are regarded as lewd and indecent,” Anthony wrote in a letter.
Moreover, when Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage published a
comprehensive history of the women’s suffrage movement in the 1880s, they
essentially left out Woodhull entirely.
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