Victoria Claflin Woodhull

Background

Woodhull was born on 23 September 1838 in Homer, Ohio. She was the seventh of ten children born to Reuben Buckman Claflin and Roxanna Hummel Claflin. Her mother was a fervently religious woman who enjoyed taking the family to evangelical revival meetings, while her father was a jack-of-all-trades who would try anything if it seemed to hold the potential for financial reward.

Education

By age 11, Woodhull had only three years of formal education, but her teachers found her to be extremely intelligent.

Career

Woodhull and her sister traveled to New York City in 1868, where they met wealthy industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt. Though Tennessee refused his hand in marriage, the sisters did accept his valuable financial advice and funds when they opened their own stock brokerage house, Woodhull, Claflin and Co. Soon they were enjoying wealth and a lively social life. With their good looks, spirited personalities and unusual talents, the sisters attracted publicity and many admirers and supporters. They entertained radical intellectuals in their salon and founded a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, in 1870. Through the paper they and their friends championed free love, equal rights for women, birth control, and socialism; one issue reprinted Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. The Weekly also engaged in muckraking, exposing injustices and hypocrisies. Woodhull also enjoyed fame as a popular lecturer, demonstrator and public speaker. She contributed enthusiastically to the women’s suffrage movement, but many of the movement’s other supporters were uncomfortable with the support of such a controversial woman.

Caught-up in the fervor of her political activity, Woodhull announced her bid for the United States Presidency in a letter to the New York Herald. She was thirty-two, and her running mate was Frederick Douglass. She began writing a series of articles describing her political philosophies in the New York Herald, and a year later in a book. She had the support of Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, but the New York Times made dismissive comments about her radical politics, her sexual lifestyle, and lack of intelligence. Woodhull was defeated, but her speeches in favor of women’s suffrage before the House Judiciary Committee in 1871 helped sway many adversaries to her cause.

Hounded by gossip and rumors, Woodhull resorted to personal attacks. She accused the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher of adultery within the pages of Woodhull & Claflin Weekly. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had told Woodhull in confidence of Beecher’s affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the married mother of four children. Woodhull was outraged by Beecher’s sanctimonious and hypocritical public stand against adultery and free love. Biographers have suggested she may have also been angry with novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opposition (Stowe was Beecher’s sister) and encouraged by Elizabeth’s husband. Theodore Tilton, once a lover of Woodhull’s. This tangled web found its way into court, with Beecher accused of adultery and Woodhull accused of libel. Woodhull was acquitted in 1873. She had framed the stories within a larger problem of men who ruin young women but retain their social respectability, but she still lost the support of many friends and suffered financial instability. Her paper folded in 1876.

In 1877 the sisters sailed for England, where Woodhull married the wealthy and respectable John Biddulph Martin. As the future Mrs. Martin, Woodhull worked hard to sanitize her reputation, changing her views on free love to “the free love of God” and declaring belief in the Bible and the sacredness of motherhood. Her next two bids for the American presidency met with little interest, much less support. She continued writing and lecturing, and started a magazine, the Humanitarian, co-edited by her daughter, Zulu Maud. The magazine was used mostly as an organ to redeem Woodhull’s reputation, and reprinted many of her less controversial writings. Called a “nine-year-old stillborn child” by biographer M. M. Marberry, the paper never achieved anywhere near the fame and notoriety that Woodhull’s previous paper enjoyed. During this time her writings include Stirpiculture, or the Scientific Propagation of the Human Race; The Human Body the Temple of God; and Humanitarian Money.

Achievements

• Victoria Woodhull was one of the most controversial figures of her time. Together with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, she was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street, making a second, and more reputable fortune. They were also among the first women to found a newspaper in the United States, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which began publication in 1870. In 2001, Victoria Woodhull was inducted posthumously into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Garden Of Eden

    (This pamphlet is a version of a lecture which Victoria Cl...)

    1875
  • Victoria Woodhull Reader

    (Notorious as a free-love advocate, a stock broker, a news...)

    1974
  • Feminist Spirituality

    (The aim of this anthology is to offer a variety of litera...)

    2015
  • Ideas Ahead of Her Time

    (A collection of speeches and writings by one of the forem...)

    2016
  • The origin, tendencies and principles of government 1871
  • Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull 2010
  • Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull 2005
  • The Human Body the Temple of God: Or, the Philosophy of Sociology 1888

Politics

In her presidency campaigne Woodhull spoke publicly against the government being composed only of men; she proposed developing a new constitution and a new government a year thence. She also argued that women already had the right to vote - all they had to do was use it - since the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteed the protection of that right for all citizens.

Views

Woodhull's support of free love likely started after she discovered the infidelity of her first husband, Canning. Victoria concluded that women should have the choice to leave unbearable marriages. She believed in monogamous relationships, although she also said she had the right to change her mind. The choice to have sex or not was, in every case, the woman's choice, since this would place her in an equal status to the man, who had the capacity to rape and physically overcome a woman, whereas a woman did not have that capacity with respect to a man. Woodhull railed against the hypocrisy of society's tolerating married men who had mistresses and engaged in other sexual dalliances. She spoke out in person against prostitution and considered marriage for material gain a form of it. But in her journal, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, Woodhull expressed support for the legalization of sex work.

Quotations: All this talk about women's rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them. That's what we're doing.

Personality

Victoria Woodhull practiced free love for most of her life.

Connections

Victoria, before she turned sixteen, married Dr. Canning Woodhull, partly at her father's urging. He was a kind but alcoholic doctor. They had two children and divorced in 1866. Victoria lived with him a few years after the divorce and supported him financially throughout her life. Though she married Colonel James Harvey Blood in 1868, she had little use for sexual fidelity and practiced free love, married or not. Later Woodhull married John B. Martin in 1882.

Father:

Reuben Buckman Claflin

Mother:

Roxanna Hummel Claflin

Spouse:

John B. Martin

Daughter:

Zula Maude Woodhull

Son:

Byron Woodhull

ex-spouse:

Canning Woodhull

ex-spouse:

James Harvey Blood

References

• Victoria Woodhull: Fearless Feminist
• A Woman for President: The Story of Victoria Woodhull
• The Woman Who Ran For President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull
• Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull