The Highest Office in the Land

Victoria Claflin Woodhull

Victoria Claflin Woodhull was a woman like no other. She has a place in history—being the first woman to run for president—but her own story was so complicated, her own adventures so diverse, her own background so questionable, it is remarkable she managed even to live to her 88 years, much less achieve some fame and respectability.

She was born into a family of charlatans, liars, and dirt poor crooks in the middle of the U.S. in the 19^th century. There were seven children and two of the worst parents in American history, living in a chaotic house on bare land. Her mother, Roxy, was probably certifiably insane. At best she was schizoid and cruel. Roxy tormented and laughed at her children, and sent them to the neighbors to beg for table scraps to eat.  Victoria’s father, Buck Claflin, did odd jobs and looked for schemes to make big money, including selling patent medicine cooked up by his wife of alcohol, laudanum, herbs, and molasses, and setting up his daughters Vicki and Tennie, as psychics and fortune tellers, and likely prostitutes as they grew up.  

Even in childhood, even with this squalid background, little Victoria had a way about her. She was a pretty, soft-spoken child, and when she went to the neighbor’s house she did not ask for food but asked if there were some work she might do around the house. Rachel Scribner, the kindly neighbor, was touched by her innocent appearance, with her sincere blue eyes, and asked her in. Victoria was to remember her experiences with Rachel all her life. Entering that house, with red gingham curtains and clean floors, was the first time she had seen a semblance of a normal home. Rachel taught her to read and write and presented a picture of a balanced and somewhat prosperous existence. Rachel was taken by cholera and died suddenly, and dealing with this death gave Victoria her first brush with spiritualism. She was literally struck down,  passing out, and experienced a vision of a changed world, a paradise. After this she occasionally consulted with the spirits of a variety of bygone heroes, including, most often, Demosthenes, who told her of the future and consoled her in times of stress. Her sister Tennie, too, had a certain spiritual talent, saying she could read minds. Buck Claflin played these traits his daughters shared for all they were worth in an era when séances were common and crowds flocked to religious revival meetings.  

Victoria and Tennie made a small fortune as faith healers. Victoria married Canning Woodhull when she was 14. He was a small-town doctor who unfortunately had a serious drinking problem. The couple had two children. The first born was mentally defective, and Victoria, probably correctly, thought this was because of Woodhull’s alcoholism. The second was a girl they named Zulu (or Zula). She divorced Woodhull after the second child was born, but kept his name. Victoria nurtured these children, and the sick father, all their lives, but she was to go on to much grander things.

She had a variety of careers before deciding to get into politics. Having lived as a woman abused in many ways, she fought for the rights of women and admired the women who were working in the movement. In their travels as spiritualists and faith healers, she and Tennie came in contact with influential men, and began to advise them on the stock market. They opened the first women’s brokerage firm, at a prestigious address in New York City, and became darlings of the press and basically the talk of the town, advising the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was said to be contemplating marrying Tennie. Both young women were comely—Victoria was seven years older than her sister—and she had a line on stocks from other clients, giving her an edge with her advice to Vanderbilt. He was convinced that the tips she gave him were coming from the spirit world and believed her totally. However she got her information, Vanderbilt made millions from the deals she proposed.

Susan B. Anthony visited the brokerage house and was very impressed with the beautiful, competent Victoria, who espoused the Feminist cause of the day. Anthony had only good things to say about the future of the movement with such sleek young women involved. The suffragist movement was beginning to come to a head.

Victoria took it upon herself to speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee about women’s rights in 1870. It was unheard of that a woman would invade men’s domains in such a way, and she was shaky and terrified when she started her speech—but she did so, with help from Demosthenes and her other spirit friends, and made the point to the committee that women already had the right to vote as the 14^th and 15^th amendment stated that citizens of the United States automatically had that privilege. By now Victoria had several brilliant male allies, and had married Col. James Harvey Blood, a Civil War veteran. She and Tennie published a newsletter with a circulation of over 20,000 readers weekly. The main thrust of the newsletter was to promote Victoria as a candidate for President of the United States, but it was fearless in espousing such causes as sex education, free love, and spiritualism. Stephen Pearl Andrews was writing editorials, and he and Blood both wrote speeches for her as she began to make the lecture circuit. She had quite a following as a public speaker, and both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were pleased with her for a time. She ran for president as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party, and chose Frederick Douglass as her running mate, although he had not been consulted and never attempted to run. He was an acquaintance and had been a supporter of her efforts in women’s suffrage.

Victoria abhorred hypocrisy and made an enemy of the powerful Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher by uncovering his sexual affairs with a number of his parishioners. She believed in free love and advocated for it, and called upon this man to reveal his own proclivities on the subject but he would not.

At one of her speeches she veered into the taboo territory of free love and someone in the audience called out, “Are you a free lover?” to which she replied “Yes! I am a free lover!” and then the wheels began to come off her otherwise promising campaign for women’s rights. Her ugly family roots came out, with her mother, definitely off the rails now, denouncing her and some of her sisters and in-laws coming forward to spread falsehoods about her and her intentions. Stanton and Anthony pulled away, fearing for the degradation of the movement they had worked so diligently for.

Politics was pretty much a shambles at this point. Running for re-election, Ulysses S. Grant was on shaky ground, and his opponent, Horace Greeley, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Stanton and Anthony reluctantly backed Grant, and both were arrested for voting and Susan spent a night in jail—but Victoria and Tennie had a much harder time of it in the court system, for unrelated reasons.

The Claflin-Woodhull weekly was declared to be obscene and the sisters were jailed for their part in passing its distribution through the U.S. mail.  Victoria, Tennie, and Col. Blood were in jail in November, and couldn’t have voted if they tried. Despondent in a jail cell, Victoria wrote to Stanton, calling on her to speak what she knew to be true about Beecher, but Stanton didn’t respond.

It took some behind the scenes work by a number of people to get Victoria and Tennie back but six months later their conviction was overturned by a technicality. They were marginalized by society now and Victoria’s bid to become the first woman president was soon all but forgotten.

In 1876, in hopes of cleansing her reputation, she divorced Col. Blood. “The grandest woman in the world went back on me,” he was reported as having said at the time.

A surprise was in store for her and her sister at the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt. After the reading of the will, it was clear there were going to be disputes among his heirs, and his son William Henry called on Victoria to inquire if she had certain letters in her possession that might create problems for the family. She played her last card pretty well, ending up with a thousand dollars (about $24,000 in today’s currency) for her and Tennie, enough to get them started on a life in a new place. They set sail for Southampton and both finished their lives in England.

According to Wikipedia, “She made her first public appearance as a lecturer at St. James Hall in London on December 4, 1877. Her lecture was called "The Human Body, the Temple of God," a lecture which she had previously presented in the United States. Present at one of her lectures was the banker John Biddulph Martin. They began to see each other and married on October 31, 1883. His family disapproved of the union.”

Her sister Tennie married Francis Cook, chairman of Cook and Son drapers, and also Viscount of Monserrate in Sintra on the Portuguese Riviera. Claflin was correctly known "Lady Cook", and in Portugal was also Viscountess of Monserrate. She lived a long and happy life from then on.

Victoria never gained the presidency, but by her unique gifts and tenacity she overcame incredible odds to rise from a childhood of impossible anguish to heights a lesser person might not even imagine.

Much of this information comes from the book OTHER POWERS, by Barbara Goldsmith; and from THE SCARLET SISTERS, by Myra MacPherson.

Working Women

The Road to Equal Rights Required Strength

  

Reform was in the air in the mid-1800s. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony responded, both espousing support for abolishing slavery, and Elizabeth also for the rights of women. Elizabeth had befriended the Quaker progressive Lucretia Mott, and went to hear her speak in public, a privilege heretofore afforded only to men.

  "When I first her from her lips that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, I felt a new born sense of dignity and freedom," Mrs. Stanton said of Mrs. Mott. Conversations between them bolstered her confidence and set her on her path toward leadership of other women. The idea of a big Women's Rights Convention was hatched in 1840 but it was not until 1848 that it came to fruition. in a meeting that brought together women and men in the cause. Elizabeth and a committee of like-minded women drafted a document they called the "Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances, and Resolutions," which contained a section advocating for the right to vote, a radical idea that even her husband objected to. He made sure to leave the area when the convention happened, and her father, a judge in the Upstate New York town of Jonestown came down to Seneca Falls to see if she had lost her mind.

The convention was attended by 300 men and women and 68 women ad 32 men signed the Declaration, including the formidable Frederick Douglass, a free man of color who fought for women's rights as well as for the abolition of slavery. Douglass had befriended Elizabeth and her husband Henry in the cause of abolition, and he also became a supporter of women's rights, including that of suffrage.

A few years later Elizabeth Cady Stanton was to meet her lifelong compatriot and partner in battle, Susan B. Anthony. Susan came from Rochester, NY, where she was active in the temperance movement as well as the anti-slave movement. There was always a close connection between the cause of women's rights and the cause of civil rights for the black race--the more the women gathered at abolition meetings, the more they came to realize that symbolically at least they were slaves too. They did not have the right to own property (and if a woman inherited money or land, it was automatically transferred to her husband's name), to attend universities, or to participate in the political process, including the right to vote. Stanton and Anthony were a powerful duo, both as speakers and organizers. They wrote newsletters and traveled across the country giving lectures when lectures were a popular form of diversion and education. They worked together for years, forming a close friendship, even though there were many periods of time when they disagreed on a crucial topic and didn't communicate with each other for years.

In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting and was put in jail, which was what she wanted--as a way of publicizing the cause. She never married but put all her energy into the women's rights movement, while Stanton stayed married and was the mother of seven. Stanton had the charm, the writing talent, and both shared the wholehearted commitment to the movement. They both were adept at public speaking, but basically Susan did the organizing, and often came up with ideas she asked Elizabeth to write about. Throughout their work together they both often felt on the verge of seeing suffrage for women made into law, through a Constitutional amendment. They threw themselves into lobbying for the 14th amendment, about to pass, include a woman's right to vote as well as that of black freed slaves. This was not to be in their lifetimes, but they carved a niche for it, all the while thinking a victory was at hand.

Uptight and Victorian as the 19th century was, it did spawn generations of offbeat characters, and Elizabeth and Susan encountered any number of them in their journey to liberate women. One was an almost-forgotten flamboyant young man named George Francis Train, who had a ton of money and liked to wear outrageous clothes. Train traveled with them and appeared on the lecture circuit, espousing the liberation of women but spewing racist comments at the same time. He funded a feminist newsletter, Revolution, which Elizabeth edited. She and Susan found his anti-abolition rhetoric harmless as long as he backed their principle cause, and he amused them until he didn't. He was rich and charming, but basically a charlatan and their friends thought him insane. Another con artist who beguiled multitudes and won Elizabeth and Susan's admiration for a time was the fascinating Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who deserves a special place in the history of women's rights. She had a checkered career, at last forming her own political party and running for president of the United States in 1872. I'll post about her in my next entry. 

If you're interested in reading more about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, I recommend In Her Own Right, by Elizabeth Griffith and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony by Penny Colman. Victoria Woodhull is the subject of many books too, but the best of them is Other Powers, by Barbara Goldsmith.

Wonder Woman

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1904

Ideas are like people, they come and they go, and sometimes an extraordinary idea takes an extraordinary person to embrace, embody, and articulate it. Such was the case for the idea of equality of the sexes, and such was the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

She was one of eleven children (eight surviving) in the days of large families--in Jonestown, New York. Her mother, statuesque and queenly, was an enigma to young Elizabeth, a bright child who apparently was born wanting to break boundaries. Her father was a judge in Upstate New York at the beginning of an era of revolution and reform. He spotted considerable intellect in his daughter and educated her himself, telling her he wished, with her remarkable brain, that she had been born a boy. She graduated from Jonestown Academy in the days before women were allowed admittance to universities. She had a neighbor who taught her Greek, a brother-in-law who taught her the equestrian arts, and law students of her father's to teach her to debate. After graduating from Emma Willard's Seminary for Women in Troy,  she continued to read omniverously and take classes. She read her father's law books and questioned him relentlessly about why the law favored the male sex exclusively. He had, of course, no answer, but he saw the rightness of her arguments and probably saw a wave of rebellion in her eyes.

After a brief foray into the Great Troy [religious] Revival in her teen years, Elizabeth settled into a rational view of religion. She combined the fervor of revivalist Charles Grandison Finney with the reformist mood of the times and questioned the hold religion had on society and the role it afforded women in particular. She spent a good deal of her time thinking about religious matters and decided that “…all religions on the face of the earth degrade her [women], and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible," Elizabeth later wrote in her book The Women's Bible.  She came to believe the natural course of studying theology would result in rejecting religion altogether, as she felt religion itself simply a delusion. But she continued to ponder and write about it until her last years.

Elizabeth was pretty and petite when she was young, and always brilliant and brimming with ideas and personality.  As she reached what was considered the marriageable age, she apparently fell in love with her sister's husband, who was a mentor to her and a guide in her self-propelled studies. The two knew their relationship was unwise at best--and, both smitten, they thought better of it and he and his wife removed themselves from the scene and moved to another city. She decided to marry Henry Stanton, an attractive man with a bright future in the law and in politics. Elizabeth asked that the minister remove the phrase "promise to obey" from the wedding vows, whom she had met through her work on the Abolitionist Movement . Henry was ambitious and shared many of her political passions, however, he never supported the cause of women's suffrage. His focus was on abolition and a place for himself in politics. He was impressed with Elizabeth and felt she could be steered away from the life as a belle she was entering. He sought to influence her to be his partner in the cause of the emancipation of slaves, but he did not comprehend or embrace the cause of women's rights. Elizabeth was in love with the handsome, eloquent, and serious fellow, and she looked forward to marriage as a shared adventure for two independent adults. He was ten years older, and she was just 23. She would find a life with him different from what she anticipated.

Shortly after the marriage, both she and Henry were elected as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery convention in London. When couples gathered in London, Elizabeth met, among other American women in the delegation, the formidable Lucretia Mott, a Quaker abolitionist who would join her in the fight for women's suffrage in future years. The most exciting controversy at this convention was that of the eligibility of women to be seated in the hall. They were not considered to be serious delegates and it was said that seating them would be--ahem--promiscuous and inappropriate. Henry made a stirring speech in support of seating the women, but it is generally thought he voted against it when the time came. The convention did little to promote anything to do with abolition of slavery, but it was important because it brought Elizabeth Cady Stanton in touch with Lucretia Mott, and launched her into the burgeoning women's rights movement.

Mrs. Mott was 22 years older than Elizabeth, a practiced speaker in the days when women were not thought to be proper public speakers. She got her experience in the Quaker church, which was ahead of the world in all areas of human rights, and she was in the vanguard of the movement toward woman's suffrage. She was a Quaker minister, an abolitionist, and a feminist. She always dressed and spoke in the modest Quaker mode, but in her heart she came to rebel against the orthodoxy of the sect. Elizabeth found her "a peerless woman," and stated, "...my soul finds great delight in her society." Together in London they not only attended the convention sessions, but also went shopping together, inspected schools and prisons and found time for sightseeing. In a letter, Elizabeth later wrote, "Wherever our party went, I took possession of Lucretia, much to Henry's vexation."

Elizabeth's gifts were many, but perhaps her superpower was her stamina. She was to live a long and rich life, and to get into and out of many scrapes and remain optimistic in spite of many setbacks and outright blunders on her part. I'll deal with some of those in the next entry, but so far I hope I've piqued your interest in one of the fascinating and charming American women in the history of this or any other country. Hold onto your hat.