Victoria Woodhull: Lecture on Constitutional Equality

About the Author

Victoria Woodhull (née Claflin) was born on September 23, 1838, on an Ohio farm. She was married to the physician Canning Woodhull at the age of fourteen, acquiring the name she would use professionally throughout her life. Her husband, an alcoholic, never provided for her or their two children. By the time of the Civil War, Woodhull's parents were in the business of promoting her younger sister, Tennessee (or Tennie C.) Claflin, as a “magnetic healer,” claiming that she could cure disease through mesmerism, or hypnosis. The family dispersed after the indictment of Claflin for manslaughter following the death of Rebecca Howe, whom she was treating for breast cancer. Woodhull and Claflin struck out for a time on their own, establishing practices in various cities, including Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago. Claflin continued her magnetic healing, to which service Woodhull added consultations as a spirit medium, claiming that she could talk to the spirits of her clients' dead relatives. The sisters were periodically run out of town either by the authorities or by popular hostility. During these intervals they would travel around frontier towns selling patent medicine—drugs that had little or no actual medical effect. In 1866 Woodhull married Colonel James Harvey Blood in Dayton, Ohio. In 1868 Woodhull settled in New York City together with her husband, her sister, and the rest of her family.

In 1870 the shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt consulted the sisters, probably in the hope of contacting his dead son. Vanderbilt came to establish the two as heads of a brokerage firm he capitalized, making them the first female stockbrokers in America. Using their new income, the sisters started their own newspaper (with Blood acting as editor) to promote their radical political beliefs, which included suffrage for women. Woodhull became the first woman to address a congressional committee, arguing that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—which granted citizenship and voting rights to freed slaves following the Civil War—by their terms also gave women the right to vote. Woodhull began to promote her own idea of free love, a far more radical conception of gender equality than mere universal suffrage. In 1870 she announced her candidacy for the presidency of the United States in the 1872 election. She would be formally nominated by the Equal Rights Party in 1872, with the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate. In 1871 she was elected president of the American Association of Spiritualists, the main professional organization for spirit mediums.

By 1872 it had become clear that Woodhull had become too radical for her own good; she was damaging the public image of her causes and as such was forfeiting the support of Vanderbilt and of other suffragettes, such as Susan B. Anthony. Woodhull responded to her declining stature, on instructions from the spirit world, so she claimed, by attacking various prominent public figures with charges of immorality, including the nationally prominent Protestant preacher Henry Ward Beecher (a notable critic of free love). Woodhull published evidence of Beecher's adultery in her newspaper. A number of legal and ecclesiastical trials followed, constituting perhaps the greatest scandal in nineteenth-century America. Woodhull spent many weeks in prison and saw her personal finances ruined by prosecution brought about by the postal censor Anthony Comstock over the publication of the Beecher story, though the case against her was thrown out on a technicality. After these proceedings, Woodhull was viewed as a martyr and was able to begin a national lecture tour that largely restored her fortunes. In 1876, Woodhull divorced Blood. The next year she moved to England, where she married the wealthy banker John Biddulph Martin. She continued to promote changing the circumstances of family life, though in a far less radical vein, until about 1905, when she retired to a country estate. She died on June 9, 1927.