Topic: Women's History Month
Victoria Woodhull was one of those wild and feisty women who defied all the conventions of her time, and did so publicly and audaciously. She is the stuff of legend, the sort of person whose life reads like a novel.
Woodhull grew up in her father's (Buck Claflin) traveling medicine show. In these early years, she learned how to hold s?ances, read palms, practice psychic medicine, and she held a supernatural belief in the occult for the rest of her life. In this traveling medicine show, Woodhull cultivated the charisma that would help her get around breaking just about every taboo known to humanity regarding women.
She married Dr. Canning Woodhull ay the tender age of fifteen and they had two children, a daughter, Zulu Maud and a retarded son, whom she ultimately abandoned to her family. She and her sister, Tennessee, took Zulu Maud and blazed a trail of criminal notoriety across the Midwest. In the process they were charged with such crimes as prostitution and blackmail, but rather than serve jail time, law enforcement officials just ordered them to leave town.
After divorcing Dr. Woodhull, she married Colonel James Blood, but kept her previously married name. Both believed in the concept of "free love" and the marriage was an open one.
Woodhull and her sister might not even be footnotes in history were it not for Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had an interest in the occult and a sizable fortune to blow exploring it. As Vanderbilt's relationship with the sisters developed, he began to finance some investments for them in real estate then the stock market. In 1870 they opened their own brokerage firm (Woodhull, Claflin & Co.) with the wealth they'd accumulated, and the firm did very well financially. Living with her odd extended family with an open marriage and a successful brokerage firm, Victoria Woodhull was a hot topic for discussion in NYC.
She decided to capitalize on her notoriety and declared herself a candidate for President of the United States that same year. This news hit the nation and, in particular, the suffragist movement, like a bullet, violently splitting opinion both within and outside the movement. For two years she campaigned on a platform that included dress reform and suffrage. She advertised this campaign through her newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which, incidentally, was the first newspaper to offer an English translation of Marx' Communist Manifesto. Woodhull ran under the party she created, the Equal Rights Party.
Woodhull was able to use her charisma to overcome much of the initial rejection of the suffragist movement, but made a fatal mistake of declaring Frederick Douglass her running mate despite his protests. That, coupled with her publication of an affair between Henry Beecher--a Boston reverend who had publicly rebuked her for allowing her ex-husband, Dr. Woodhull to reside with her and her then-husband Colonel Blood--and Elizabeth Tilton. Both Beecher and Tilton were married and Woodhull claimed she was just revealing Beecher for the hypocrite he was. It effectively ended her campaign, however, as a young Anthony Comstock began his lengthy censorship career by arresting the sister within hours of publication of the article. They spent the next seven months in jail. Shortly after their release, they sailed for England, where the sisters married wealthy Englishmen and lived until their deaths, visiting America occasionally. The continued their political radicalism in London, and continued to successfully publish their unusual ideas.
Posted by Anna Belle
at 6:05 PM EST
