Notorious Victoria Read online

  The women’s rights veteran Paulina Wright Davis walked to the footlights to address the gathering. The previous October she had mused aloud at the National Woman’s Suffrage Association gathering whether the women’s movement had become a “monument of buried hopes” and whether women were, in fact, condemned to a life of fashion and folly. But that night she recognized that a new energy had revitalized the cause: “When the English statesmen were all at fault and could see no way out of their embarrassments, in relation to chattel slavery, a woman, with a large brain and a larger heart, wrote out the simple sentence, ‘Immediate and unconditional emancipation,’ and the West India question was peaceably settled in seven years. . . . They recognized the divine inspirant and now when another woman comes in a like inspiration and offers to show the way out of a still more intricate and embarrassing question—not the giving of freedom to a small race but to one half of the inhabitants of our country—a few of our statesmen recognize her inspiration, and gladly seize upon it to solve the problem.

  “To Mrs. Woodhull’s active energy and judicious conduct of her work in Washington, we, as the disfranchises [sic] class, owe a deep debt of gratitude.”

  For the next two days the women’s convention met at various locations, settling business matters, formulating agendas, and waiting for the return of the Judiciary Committee’s recommendation on Victoria’s memorial. Victoria was named to the group’s National Committee of Women, which was instructed to stay in Washington for the remainder of the congressional term to continue to press their cause. The group was also desperate for funds and pleas were sent out for contributions. While most women contributed between one and five hundred dollars, Victoria pledged ten thousand.

  On the last day of the convention, Susan B. Anthony delivered an address. At fifty-one, Anthony was every bit the school matron she had been as a young woman. Her figure was solid, though now somewhat stooped. Her hair, pulled tightly back on her head, was separated by a strict part in the middle. Her glasses rode low on her nose, revealing a crossed right eye. She had been called a “slabsided spinster” and a “grim old gal with a manly air” and she was the physical embodiment of what, up until that time, the women’s rights movement had been: homely, severe, and “unsexed.”

  Anthony told the gathering that a year before she had heard that a pair of women had rented an office on Wall Street with the intention of opening a brokerage firm: “I, with the thousands of others, who, out of curiosity, went to see these daring maidens, wended my way to their office to ascertain for myself their chances among the motley crew that operates on change. I found two bright, vivacious creatures, full of energy, perseverance, intellect, and pluck, and I said to myself, here are the elements of success. I addressed myself to them upon the subject in which we are so deeply interested. I asked them how they stood on suffrage.

  “They said, ‘We are all right; just wait until we get ourselves firmly established in our business, and we will show you what we will do for the rights of our sex.’ I went away, feeling that we could rely at least upon their cooperation. I never saw them before that day, nor have I seen them since, until the meeting of this convention, nor had any intercourse with them whatever, but I felt assured that we might expect something from them.

  “What has been the result? The changes of a year has found this trial successfully established in one of the most difficult avocations that belongs to human kind. And this is not all. When I arrived here to attend this convention, I found we had been preceded by them, and that one of them, a poor lone woman, without consultation even with any one of those who had labored for years in the great cause of female suffrage had already presented her petition to Congress, asking them to pass a declaratory act that would define the rights of our sex under the fourteenth amendment. This was something we had not expected. We, that had labored so long, had expected to labor on in the old way for five, ten, fifteen, or perhaps twenty years to come, to secure the passage of another amendment to the Constitution, known as the sixteenth amendment, but we were too slow for the times. . . .

  “In this age of rapid thought and action, of telegraphs and railways, the old stage coach won’t do, and to Victoria C. Woodhull, as well as to her partner, perhaps, Tennie C. Claflin, who caught up the spirit of the age, and made this advance movement, we owe the advancement of our cause by as many years at least as it would take to engineer through the various ramifications of an amendment to the Constitution.”

  The extent of the flattery may have been too much for Victoria. Throughout Anthony’s address she sat “sphynx-like”; one reporter described her as pale, sad, and unflinching. Victoria had been working toward this moment for three years, but she may have been surprised by how easily her position among the reformers was attained. It took nothing more than guts and money—the old Claflin family formula for success. As for Tennie, apparently she had abandoned the reformers’ meetings altogether for the more exciting halls of Congress. While her sister was embarking on a deadly serious mission, Tennie was winning the hearts of lawmakers and journalists alike. One reporter asked on the final day of the convention, “But where was the lost Tennie Claflin? The roguish peaked hat and dainty coat tails were besieging the doors of Congress. Whilst women were wasting breath in the convention, she was anywhere and everywhere to be found, where a worker ought to ‘turn up,’ when a favorite measure is before Congress. O, the irresistible Tennie!”

  It isn’t clear what Tennie actually thought of the women’s movement, or if she thought of it at all. Perhaps for her the fluttering of skirts and the earnest whispers of movement women were just a new bit of fun. The suffragists themselves were not entirely sure what to make of her, either. When one of their group called on Victoria and Tennessee, the suffragist chided her husband for putting his arm around young Tennie. But he defended himself saying, “My dear, when you take me into a house where a damsel as plump and pretty as Miss Tennie C. sits on the arm of my chair and leans over until I suspect there is very little if anything underneath the Mother Hubbard she is wearing—then how can you blame any man for putting his arm around the damsel to verify such a suspicion?”

  WASHINGTON, D.C., FEBRUARY 1871

  As promised, Judge Loughridge of Iowa returned his report on Victoria’s memorial by the end of that week. He and Ben Butler were the only two members of the committee to write in support of granting women the right to vote. John Bingham of Ohio wrote the majority opinion, which said the issue was not one for Congress to decide but was up to the courts and the states. That said, he wrote that the memorial should be laid on the table and “the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from the further consideration of the subject.”

  Victoria wasn’t discouraged by her initial loss. She said later, “Were there no prejudices to be overcome or established order or rather conventionalism to be shaken, the man or woman who dares fight for a truth might win an easy victory.” It is not clear, though, if she realized how many obstacles she would face as a woman or how entrenched were the prejudices against her sex.

  Victoria remained in Washington to renew her push for congressional action on her memorial while Blood managed the brokerage house and Andrews the newspaper in New York. Washington in the winter was bustling. The city awoke early and political commerce began over breakfast at the hotels, where women occupied sitting rooms upstairs, away from the haze of tobacco smoke and the boisterous crowd of governors, senators, clerks, and contractors below. The politicking ended late at night with more smoke and more crowds and the disappearance of lonely lawmakers into the chambers occupied by lady lobbyists of often dubious repute.

  Despite the persistent rumors about her, Victoria’s objective in Washington was upright. Hers were among the many skirts rustling swiftly through the halls of Congress to the richly carpeted ladies’ reception room in the Senate or the frescoed and secluded House reception room for female lobbyists. But she was not in Washington to remain in rooms reserved for women. She was in Washington to take her
place as a citizen, however often those efforts were thwarted or misunderstood. Victoria had tried to secure a seat in the reporters’ gallery of the House of Representatives as a correspondent for Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, but she was told that all the seats were taken. She was offered instead a permanent seat in the women’s gallery, which she refused. An uncomprehending reporter remarked, “She wanted, for some vague and shadowy reason, to be placed especially among the men.”

  Victoria was also hoping to gain approval to hold a public meeting on her memorial in the House of Representatives, but early in the month, on February 6, her request was rejected, with only forty-two House members voting in favor of the plan. There had been new pressures on Congress since its members so graciously received the ladies in early January. A group of women numbering one thousand, including Catharine Beecher, General William Sherman’s wife, and the wives of senators, congressmen, and prominent businessmen, had signed a petition against female suffrage. They claimed to represent the majority of women in the country in the belief that the “Holy Scripture inculcates for women a sphere higher than and apart from that of public life; because as women they find a full measure of duties, cares and responsibilities and are unwilling to bear additional burdens unsuited to their physical organization.”

  The growing opposition only added to Victoria’s resolve. She had gained confidence during her tenure in Washington; it would have been difficult for her to do otherwise, with so much praise directed her way. She was being pushed to the front of the women’s movement by hundreds of soft hands searching for a leader who would prove that a woman’s “physical organization” was well suited to public life and that her “duties, cares and responsibilities” included winning her own rights.

  ON FEBRUARY 16, the women reformers returned to Lincoln Hall with Ben Butler on the platform. The movement had attracted a new and larger following in just one month, including men and women who may not have been women’s rights sympathizers but whose curiosity was piqued by the new argument and the new suffrage leader. Paulina Wright Davis began the proceedings and introduced Victoria, who sat with apparent perfect composure during Davis’s opening remarks, although it was evident to those who knew her that she was mounting a tremendous effort to remain calm.

  When Victoria rose to speak her voice was clear, distinct, and without a tremor. She said that while she had invited those present to listen to her argument, she must acknowledge that she made no pretensions to oratory. She then began her address. A reporter at the scene remarked that her confidence appeared to waver and her face went colorless. The problem may have been, in part, an unfamiliarity with her written text, which reflected Victoria’s ideas but was likely written by Blood. “I come before you,” she hesitated painfully between phrases, “to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

  She hesitated again, attempting to regain her composure. “The first two I cannot be deprived of except for cause and by due process of the law,” she paused again for strength, “but upon the last, a right is usurped to place restrictions so general as to include the whole of my sex, and for which no reasons of public good can be assigned.

  “I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.”

  Victoria began to warm to her subject, perhaps inspired by the importance of what she was saying but also angered by the injustice she described. Her face flushed and her eyes flashed. As she would in delivering countless addresses, she seemed to become possessed by the words and forgot whatever inhibitions had caused her to stumble. She had a great natural gift of speech and needed only the fire of conviction to release it.

  “I and others of my sex find ourselves controlled by a form of government in the inauguration of which we had no voice, and in whose administration we are denied the right to participate, though we are a large part of this country.

  “I am subject to tyranny! I am taxed in every conceivable way. For publishing a paper I must pay—for engaging in the banking and brokerage business I must pay—of what is my fortune to acquire each year I must turn over a certain percent—I must pay high prices for tea, coffee, and sugar: to all these must I submit, that men’s government may be maintained, a government in the administration of which I am denied a voice, and from its edicts there is no appeal. . . . I am compelled to pay extravagant rates of fare wherever I travel, because the franchises extended to gigantic corporations enable them to sap the vitality of the country, to make their managers money kings, by means of which they boast of being able to control not only legislators but even a state judiciary.

  Susan B. Anthony (left) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (right) were the two pillars of the early women’s movement. They initially embraced Victoria, then shunned her because of her radical views.

  (Alberti and Lowe Collection, date unknown)

  “To be compelled to submit to these extortions that such ends may be gained, upon any pretext or under any circumstances, is bad enough; but to be compelled to submit to them and also denied the right to cast my vote against them, is a tyranny more odious than that which, being rebelled against, gave this country independence.

  “It is not the women who are happily situated, whose husbands hold positions of honor and trust, who are blessed by the bestowal of wealth, comforts and ease that I plead for. These do not feel their condition of servitude any more than the happy, well-treated slave felt her condition . . . but for the toiling female millions, who have human rights which should be respected.

  “If there are good and consistent reasons why some should not be electors let them be applied without regard to sex or any other general condition. Let men as well as women be subject to them. . . .

  “If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women. . . .

  “Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left [for] women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?

  “There is one alternative left, and we have resolved on that. This convention is for the purpose of this declaration. As surely as one year passes from this day, and this right is not fully, frankly and unequivocally considered, we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government, complete in all its parts and to take measures to maintain it as effectually as men do theirs.

  “We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from consent of the governed, but shall do so in reality.”

  An auditorium of female hands waving fluttering handkerchiefs greeted Victoria’s call for revolution. Susan B. Anthony wrote from Columbus, Ohio, “Dear Woodhull, I have just read your speech of the 16th. It is ahead of anything, said or written—bless you dear soul for all you are doing to help strike the chains from woman’s spirit.”

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 1871

  Victoria returned to New York. She had not won the vote for women, but she had gone a long way toward energizing the movement. The editorials in the press were now more heated, the debates among the various women’s factions more vehement. The controversy, however, was not necessarily generated by what Victoria had said—despite her bold call for secession—but by who she was. Newspapers began taking a second look at this woman they had so eagerly embraced as a broker and a publisher and found they were less enamored of her as a reformer and a politician. And in the drawing rooms where ladies critical of the winter events in Washington gathered, the comments were less about the new message than the new messenger. It was a familiar tactic for women who wanted to influence society but had no political voice—gossip was
one of their only tools.

  Reports filtered in from the Midwest that Victoria was thought to be “unprincipled” and not the “saint” her colleagues in the women’s movement claimed her to be. It was whispered that she was a disreputable businesswoman who engaged in blackmail schemes through her newspaper. The gossips tarred and feathered Victoria for Tennie’s excesses—in the public’s eye the two were largely the same person. Victoria’s weakness for men with ideas was generally interpreted to be a weakness for men. And worst of all, she was accused of being ambitious. Society dragged out one of its favored epithets for women who dared to rise above their sex and caste—it called Victoria a Jezebel.

  While society would chalk up a man’s early escapades to youthful folly, or excuse his double-dealing in business as typical of life on the “street,” a woman was held to a much higher standard. The married trader Jim Fisk could parade his mistress Josie Mansfield in public, or bring risqué productions to his opera house, but rather than face censure he was slapped on the back and lovingly called Gentleman Jim. The Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr., could run naked through the countryside shouting like a madman and he was regarded as simply eccentric. William Marcy “Boss” Tweed and his henchmen in state and city government could rob public coffers of hundreds of millions of dollars and still win reelection. But no such leniency was afforded a woman who dared leave her proper place in the domestic sphere to enter public life, no matter how good her intentions. She had to be free from taint. Victoria was not.

  A court case in late February 1871 only added to the growing controversy about her. A woman named Annie L. Swindell, who called herself a governess, brought Woodhull, Claflin & Co. to court charging that she had invested five hundred dollars with the sisters on the assurance that she would be protected from all loss, but when she returned in a few weeks to check on her money, she learned only eighteen dollars remained. She sued the brokerage firm to recover her initial investment. The press headlined the story “Female Financing, Woodhull & Claflin in a ‘Corner.’” Tennie and Victoria were back in court defending themselves in a civil suit.