Notorious Victoria Read online

  Swindell described her loss, which Victoria in her turn on the witness stand dismissed as typical business on Wall Street. She said she had warned Swindell that the investment would be risky and later, after her loss, had even employed Swindell at the brokerage to help ease her financial troubles. But in the end the court ruled in favor of Swindell, ordering Woodhull, Claflin & Co. to pay the plaintiff $358.54, plus a $25 allowance.

  Swindell’s case was a nuisance suit that would have gone unnoticed if it had involved any other Wall Street firm, but because it involved the female brokers, it was covered by the press and undermined Victoria’s credibility as a business-woman—and thereby cut into her income from the brokerage firm.

  ONE OF VICTORIA’S notable supporters, Isabella Beecher Hooker, had embraced Victoria as her “queen.” But she recognized her as a flawed sovereign. Victoria was not of the class that had previously adorned the stage of the women’s movement—women from monied families or those with links to the abolitionists, or wives of prominent men whose names had histories. In her extreme naivete, Hooker thought she could reinvent Victoria—it was simply an issue of packaging.

  In brief notes that included such instructions as “please destroy this as soon as read” or “burn this as soon as read,” the forty-nine-year-old Hooker advised her thirty-three-year-old friend on the proper way to rule: “I want you to use nice note paper hereafter—plain envelopes. You are no longer a banker nor business woman—but a prospective queen—a lady in every sense of the word. Those envelopes have been a dreadful eyesore to me for a long time . . . and so mannish—but I had no right to complain. But now if you are to be our accepted standard bearer—be perfect—be exquisite in neatness—elegance & decorum. You have the means & the furnishings in your house shows that you know how to use them.”

  Hooker’s schoolgirl instructions illustrated how distant Victoria was from even her most ardent supporters. Winning acceptance as a radical reformer with working-class roots in a world where even wealthy women were seen and not heard would require more than changing stationery. Victoria was about to face pitched battles and to be attacked from all sides. As a suffragist, Hooker might have endured mild criticism from ladies who believed her time would be better spent at home with her children, but Victoria, who didn’t have the Beecher name to protect her, would be dragged into a bloody fight. Unlike Isabella Beecher Hooker and her ilk, Victoria stood to lose everything.

  Envoys representing businesses that had been unmasked as corrupt in the Weekly’s pages were visiting the paper threatening to shut it down unless it closed its doors, and other newspapers were trying to cut the Weekly’s circulation by petitioning newsmen to take the paper off their stands. The Weekly was scrutinized by hostile rivals, especially Horace Greeley’s Tribune, which picked apart its pages for evidence that it was reckless and radical beyond all measure; The Tribune reprinted damaging excerpts, attributing them to Victoria despite repeated reminders in the Weekly that the paper was open to all ideas and its proprietress did not necessarily subscribe to any of them.

  Victoria pretended not to be disturbed by the vehemence of the attacks, but in a letter to Isabella Beecher Hooker she confided her surprise at the criticism: “Under all the curses and imprecations which are being heaped upon me, strong though I feel, I need some little kindness . . . from those who I believe comprehend me. When I went to Washtn. entirely upon my own account I did not desire to arouse all the petty fiendishness that has developed itself since then. . . . I must confess to not a little surprise that whatever I have done or may do is at once denounced as imprudent, unwise (etc) and the endeavor made to stigmatise me as a very improper person. . . . I thought this was a question of Right under the Constitution. I did not know it was a question of Antecedents. Had I, it is quite likely I could have shown as pure a record as they who seek to defame me can. . . . I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it. I have a consciousness within which is above all such petty malice, yet it grieves me that there should be anything to interfere with obtaining justice at the earliest possible moment. Some say they would rather never obtain it than that it should come from such a source.”

  Publicly, on the lecture circuit, Victoria graciously told audiences that she had neither the time nor the inclination to respond to her critics. For the moment, she let others respond for her.

  Victoria had been working closely with the women reformers for five months but still had not met one of their leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton had been traveling in the West during the winter and though she had heard of Victoria, read her speeches, and even written her congratulatory messages, their paths had never crossed. In April 1871, though, Stanton began receiving letters from other members of the movement expressing concern that Victoria could do more harm than good. As was her way, Stanton responded swiftly and decisively. To one Milo A. Townsend she wrote: “Have just returned from Phila. where I visited Lucretia Mott. Mrs. Woodhull had just spoken there, and visited with many of our Quaker friends, & one & all were charmed with her. I have not been associated with Mrs. W. as all my time this winter has been passed in the West; but all the women most interested in our cause feel that she is a valuable addition. Neither Anna Dickinson nor Kate Field ever thot [sic] enough of our movement to make a speech on our platform, & it ill becomes them to question the wisdom of Susan B. Anthony or myself in welcoming any one to our ranks, who is ready to share our labors.

  “In regard to all the gossip about Mrs. W. I have one reply to make to my gentlemen friends: When the men who make laws for us in Washington, can stand forth before all Israel & the sun, and declare themselves pure & unspotted from all the sins mentioned in the Decalogue, then we will demand that every woman who makes a constitutional argument on our platform shall be as chaste as Diana. If all ‘they say’ is true, Mrs. Woodhull is better than nine tenths of the Fathers, Husbands, & Sons. . . .

  “When our soldiers went to fight the battles of freedom in the late war, did they stop to inquire into the antecedents of every body by their side? The war would never have been finished, if they had. Now altho I believe Mrs. Woodhull to be a grand woman, I should be glad to have her work for her own enfranchisement, if she were not, and I think she must become a better woman, by thus working, & by assuming all the rights, privileges & immunities of an American citizen. Yours Sincerely, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

  And Stanton wrote to Lucretia Mott in April: “I have thot [sic] much, since leaving, of our dear Woodhull, & all the gossip about her, & come to the conclusion that it is [a] great impertinence in any of us to pry into her affairs. How should we feel to have every body overhauling our antecedents, & turning up the whites of their eyes, over each new discovery or invention? There is to me a sacredness in individual experience, that seems like profanation, to search into, or expose. Victoria Woodhull stands before us today one of the ablest speakers & writers of the century: sound & radical, alike in political, religious & social principles. Her face, form, manners & conversation all indicate the triumph of the moral, intellectual, spiritual, over the sensuous in her nature. The processes & localities of her education are little to us, but the grand result is everything.

  “We have had women enough sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity. This is one of man’s most effective engines for our division & subjugation. He creates the public sentiment, builds the gallows, & then makes us hangman for our sex. Women have crucified the Mary Wolstoncrafts [sic], the Fanny Wrights, the George Sands, the Fanny Kembles, of all ages; & now men mock us with the fact, & say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record, & henceforth stand by womanhood. If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes, & plait the crown of thorns.”

  In Brooklyn, Victoria was being defended by another equally eminent person she had never met, Theodore Tilton. In his new journal The Golden Age, the gallant journalist and titular head of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association took h
er side against published accusations in the religious newspaper edited by Henry Ward Beecher, The Christian Union, which charged that the Weekly was in the practice of carelessly and maliciously printing libels. At issue was an article the Weekly ran on the actress Jenny Lind, who, the paper said, was abused by her husband, Otto Goldschmidt, and so had determined to separate from him.

  In The Golden Age’s April 22, 1871, issue Tilton wrote: “It seems to us that the unmeasured abuse heaped upon Mrs. Woodhull for publishing in her paper a paragraph about the alleged infelicities of Mr. and Madame Goldschmidt, is, if not wholly, at least partially, undeserved. The story has been current among American newspapers in various paragraphic forms, for several years. These paragraphs have, from time to time, appeared in most of the journals which are now combining to punish a woman for publishing in her columns simply what she extracted from theirs.” It would not be the last time Tilton was to defend Victoria.

  NEW YORK CITY, EARLY MAY 1871

  In May, bruised but unbowed, Victoria was back on the platform addressing a labor gathering at the Cooper Institute and a National Woman’s Suffrage Association convention at Apollo Hall. Her celebrity as a speaker and her notoriety in the scandal sheets had made her a favorite among audiences. She even energized the opposing American Woman’s Suffrage Association meetings by becoming the focus of their outrage. The notorious Victoria had given the moribund women’s movement new life: “The women’s suffrage conventions held in this city yesterday and the day before,” the Herald commented, “have been extremely interesting and quite successful. Indeed, it is a notable instance of the remarkable progress which this erratic doctrine has made that, whereas a few years ago it had few supporters and seldom could gather a corporal’s guard of listeners at its meetings, Steinway Hall, during the meetings of the last few days, has been crowded to repletion with as elegant and intelligent an audience as ever gathered within its walls to hear Nilsson sing.”

  The National Woman’s Suffrage Association met at Apollo Hall to ratify the initiatives decided upon in Washington earlier that year, namely Victoria’s position that women were guaranteed the right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. But the reformers were also on hand to ratify a series of resolutions, written by Stephen Pearl Andrews and submitted by Victoria, that expanded upon themes discussed in Washington.

  The gathering included all of the women’s rights veterans, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, but the convention’s unspoken leader that May was Victoria Woodhull. Her ideas dominated the proceedings. Coverage of the convention was headlined “Woman Suffrage Anniversary of the ‘Woodhull Branch,’” “The Anniversaries Woodhull’s Women,” and by the second day simply “Woodhull’s Women.” She had been in the movement only for a few months but was already its acknowledged leader. She was the future of the movement for better or worse.

  Victoria was the keynote speaker on opening night. Noise from wagons outside the hall threatened to drown her out. Windows were ordered closed and the proceedings continued with the muffled sound of horses’ hooves providing percussion as excitement grew inside the hall. Like the other speakers that day, Victoria spoke as if the vote had already been won and now it was the women’s obligation to decide how best to use that tool: “I have had ample occasion to learn the true worth of present political parties and I unhesitatingly pronounce it is as my firm conviction if they rule this country twenty years to come as badly as they have for twenty years past, that our liberties will be lost or that the parities will be washed out by such rivers of blood as the late war never produced.”

  She argued that the Republicans’ financial corruption and the Democrats’ link to the slave South made both parties objectionable: “Therefore, it is my conviction, arrived at after the most serious and careful consideration, that it will be equally suicidal for the woman suffragists to attach themselves to either of these parties. . . . I do not assume to speak for anyone. I know I speak in direct opposition to the wishes of many by whom I am surrounded. Nevertheless, I should fail to do my duty, did I conceal what I feel to be the true interests of my sex, and through them, those of humanity. . . .

  “Because I have taken this bold and decisive position; because I have advocated radical political action; because I have announced a new party and myself as a candidate for the next presidency, I am charged with being influenced by an unwarrantable ambition. Though this is scarcely the place for the introduction of a privileged question, I will, however, take this occasion to, once and for all time, state I have no personal ambition whatever. All that I have done, I did because I believed the interests of humanity would be advanced thereby.

  “Had I been ambitious to become the next president I should have proceeded very differently to accomplish it. I did announce myself as a candidate and this simple fact has done a great work in compelling people to ask: and why not? This service I have rendered women at the expense of any ambition I might have had, which is apparent if the matter be but candidly considered.”

  Victoria also read the platform of her new Cosmopolitical Party. It called for a complete overhaul of the current U.S. government: a one-term presidency with a lifelong seat in the Senate for former presidents when their term was up; reform of the civil service; an eight-hour workday; reform of the monetary system; reform of interstate commerce; tax reform; abolition of the death penalty; institution of a form of welfare for the poor; national public education; and the establishment of an international tribunal to settle international disputes and maintain an international army and navy.

  The platform presaged many issues that remain controversial today, but what was most unsettling for Victoria’s nineteenth-century audience was the proposal that would prohibit government from enacting laws that impinged upon individual freedom. She proposed a reform “by which the function of government shall be limited to the enactments of general laws; and be absolutely prohibited from enacting any special law upon any pretext whatever; by which all laws shall be repealed which are made use of by government to interfere with the rights of adult individuals to pursue happiness as they may choose; or with the legitimate consequences of such pursuit; or with contracts between individuals, of whatever kind, or their consequences, which will place the intercourse of persons with each other upon their individual honor, with no appeal, and the intercourse of the general people upon the principles of common honesty.”

  Victoria’s bold positions electrified the audience and the platform was adopted. In the next day’s headlines, the press cried “Free Love!”

  Free love, according to one social historian, was “perhaps the single most odious epithet one could attach to a respectable citizen of the post–Civil War era,” and it was used to sink more than one reformer. The phrase was coined in 1842 by Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a poem by that name in praise of spiritual freedom. Free love was practiced in reform movements before the Civil War to greater or lesser degrees as a kind of marital socialism and it was adopted in earnest by Stephen Pearl Andrews and Josiah Warren at their Long Island community, Modern Times. Some, in fact, viewed Andrews as the father of free love.

  In general, free lovers were opposed to marriage because, they said, it discriminated against women. They believed that the existing marriage laws bound a woman to sexual relations with a man even when she no longer loved him or even when he mistreated her. During the 1870s, 80 percent of men seeking a divorce stated as their reason “the failure of their wife to be submissive helpmates.” Free lovers did not believe women were obliged to be submissive; they believed that marital relations should result from mutual attraction, not forced obligation. Andrews preached marriage reform as part of a larger societal reform, but critics saw it as a threat to the very basis of society—the family—and they believed it encouraged infidelity and promiscuousness.

  But promiscuity was already rampant in late-nineteenth-century America. Men were practicing free love with little if any backlash. It was accepted
as a fact of nature that men would engage in sexual liaisons outside marriage with “fallen women” and that bachelors would have mistresses. What distinguished the radical reform movement’s interpretation of free love from contemporary social trends was that it gave “good” women, as well as men, the right to choose with whom and how often they would have sexual relations. At its most basic, free love gave married women the right to say no and single women the right to say yes without recrimination. Victoria herself believed that true love was monogamous, but she reserved the right to shift her affections to a new “exclusive” partner if her heart pointed her in that direction.

  After her speech, The Tribune ran a rare article praising Victoria’s courage. The paper’s editor, Horace Greeley, who was vociferously opposed to divorce (though his wife disagreed with him on the subject), had not changed his mind about Victoria; he simply took a few column inches to recognize a woman who stood up to defend her beliefs. After first chastising the other suffrage leaders for failing to announce their stands on marriage, the Tribune editorial said: “For ourselves, we toss our hats in the air for Woodhull. She has the courage of her opinions! She means business. She intends to head a new rebellion, form a new constitution, and begin a revolution beside which the late war will seem but a bagatelle, if within exactly one year from this day and hour of grace her demands be not granted out of hand. This is a spirit to respect, perhaps to fear, certainly not to be laughed at. Would that the rest of those who burden themselves with the enfranchisement of one-half our whole population, now lying in chains and slavery, but had her sagacious courage.”