Victoria Woodhull: “‘And the Truth Shall Make You Free’”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Any analysis of Woodhull’s writings is complicated by the many uncertainties that exist about her work. Even scholars who have studied her documents closely cannot decide whether she wrote them or whether they were written by male intellectuals in the radical political circles she associated with, for her to deliver as speeches or publish under her more famous name. Many examples of the manuscripts that she read for her lectures exist, and they certainly are not in her handwriting, but she may yet have dictated them. While she had little formal education that would have prepared her to compose the elegant speeches she delivered, she would have heard hundreds of public speeches—especially sermons—throughout her youth and could well have picked up a working knowledge of rhetoric in that way. In any case, Woodhull’s experience as a patent medicine saleswoman, which involved moving from town to town, holding the attention of crowds on the street, and persuading people to buy essentially worthless medicines purely through her engaging power as a speaker, would have given her ample opportunity to polish her rhetorical skills. Little clarification is to be gleaned from the numerous drafts of her autobiography. She seems to have obsessively rewritten her life story every few years, preparing for her daughter to publish a final version (never realized) after her death. The changes between the various versions are so marked that these documents can be judged only as highly fictionalized.

In her address “‘And the Truth Shall Make You Free,’” (subtitled “A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom”), delivered to a packed house at Steinway Hall in New York City on November 20, 1871, Woodhull addresses the subject of free love, presenting an argument that is more nearly her own than were those for woman suffrage that she accepted. She advances her argument for free love much as she advanced that for suffrage, perceptively invoking the context of the general growth of freedom in Western society since the Renaissance, as culminated politically in the American Revolution. She positions free love as an inevitable extension of this process. In her view, the battle for religious freedom of the Reformation gave rise to the idea of freedom of conscience that found its expression in both the French Revolution and, more perfectly, the American Revolution. In this way society gained religious and political freedoms; Woodhull considers that another revolution is necessary for the gain of what she calls social freedom.

Woodhull believed that the coming of social freedom is a teleological process, meaning that the entire history of Western civilization has been moving toward and will inevitably reach the goal of social freedom. She declares that “the spirit of the age… will not admit all civilization to be a failure” but must in the end produce the fullest measures of freedom. This kind of thinking was intimately connected to Woodhull's practice of spiritualism, including communication with the dead; the spiritualist movement held that the combination of new technologies, the appearance of spiritualism itself as a new religion, and the inevitable progress of history would soon bring about a great transformation of civilization as the culmination of history. Woodhull envisioned this change as entailing the establishment of true social freedom.

In explaining what she means by social freedom, Woodhull turns, as she did in the case of woman suffrage, to the Declaration of Independence. She claims that social freedom will exist only when “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are granted to all. When an individual exercises his or her freedom by exerting control over another person, without government restraint, then that other person's freedom is taken away, and the usurper becomes a tyrant. The tyrant cannot live in freedom but must live the life of an oppressor. The tyrannical institution that Woodhull is alluding to is legal marriage as it existed in 1871, which gave the husband control over the wife's property, custody of their children, and many other rights denied the woman.

Woodhull then shifts her allusions from the Declaration of Independence to another document that many of her contemporaries would have considered foundational to American civilization, the Christian Bible. She quotes the Tenth Commandment from Exodus 20, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.” She argues that Jesus interpreted the meaning of the commandment by spiritualizing the terms neighbor and adultery. Woodhull takes this as a warrant to read the term wife in the same way, such that marriage is transformed from a legal contract to a spiritual love that she calls free love. The recognition of this new relationship of free love is seen as a natural consequence of social justice. Woodhull asserts,

Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have aninalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to loveas longor asshorta period as I can; tochange that loveevery dayif I please, and withthatright neitheryounor anylawyou can frame haveanyright to interfere.

She then digresses somewhat into a long aside in which she defends her doctrine of free love against its detractors: “The press have stigmatized me to the world as an advocate, theoretically and practically, of the doctrine of Free Love, upon which they have placed their stamp of moral deformity; the vulgar and inconsequent definition which they hold makes the theory an abomination.” She never spells out the false and distorted versions of free love attacked by her critics, but those versions related the term to promiscuity and prostitution.

For Woodhull, free love is, rather, the antidote to the “insidious form of slavery” of legal marriage, which transfers women's freedom to the control of their husbands. Without the control of such laws, Woodhull believes, men and women could approach each other as equal partners. To be in a position to express their love freely, women must be as economically independent as men, otherwise they would inevitably be devalued in exchanging love for financial support, which Woodhull considers to be as disgraceful inside marriage as out. Woodhull hated prostitution but nevertheless wanted to see it legalized to protect women whose poverty forced them to pursue such work from exploitation. This analysis of marriage, with its conclusion that women must become financially independent, is the most radical part of Woodhull's construct of social freedom; she goes far beyond the calls of the suffragettes and anticipates the linchpin of the entire feminist program of the second half of the twentieth century. Hers is a call to utterly revolutionize society. The creation of social equality through free love is what Woodhull considered to be the certain fulfillment of history. In fact, Woodhull's embrace of Socialism was directly connected to her desire for the economic empowerment of women.

Woodhull's final theme concerns women's reproductive rights under her doctrine of free love. Under legal marriage, women had no right to refuse to procreate either through abstinence or birth control; those decisions rested with the husband. Woodhull found this an unacceptable condition, indeed, a form of slavery: “It is a fearful responsibility with which women are intrusted by nature, and the very last thing that they should be compelled to do is to perform the office of that responsibility against their will, under improper conditions or by disgusting means.” This was a practical issue that Woodhull frequently addressed, especially in her newspaper and even in her later life, when she abandoned much of her radicalism. She opposed abortion because she considered it murder, but she also had in mind the dangers of the procedure to the mother's life under the primitive medical conditions of the day, especially when performed illegally by nonphysicians. She advocated birth control, probably principally meaning what today would be called the rhythm method. In any case, she insisted that women alone should decide whether and when to have children.

While Woodhull cites the broader circumstance that reproductive decisions all lay with the husband under the laws and social customs of the 1870s, it is not hard to see her own life experience reflected in her views. Married at the age of fourteen to a man who turned out to be a physically abusive alcoholic, Woodhull had two children by him in quick succession. The second of these children was intellectually impaired, a condition that Woodhull believed (quite wrongly) came about because her husband was drunk at the time of conception. Her husband did nothing to support her or the children but was nonetheless able, whenever he wished, to take any money that she herself earned to support the family. What compelled Woodhull to tolerate these conditions was the marriage law. Even when she was finally driven to obtain a divorce, she risked losing custody of her children and suffered a social stigma that prevented her from ever being considered a “respectable” woman in the dominant culture of nineteenth-century America. She might never have remarried if not for the fact that her second and third husbands were likewise political radicals who disregarded ordinary social norms. Woodhull wanted to separate love and reproduction from legal compulsion and social judgment. Her idea of free love seems to have aptly arisen as the answer to the misfortunes of her own life, and she naturally then saw free love as the answer to the problems of civilization as well.