Victoria Woodhull: Lecture on Constitutional Equality

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Any analysis of Victoria 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 instead 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.

With her Lecture on Constitutional Equality, Woodhull announced and expanded upon the address she had presented to Congress in January 1871 on the subject of woman suffrage. She had been given the privilege of a congressional audience mostly because she had gained a celebrity status shunned by other suffragettes. Woodhull was regularly featured in sensationalist newspaper stories relating to her roles as a newspaper publisher, as the first female owner of a stock brokerage, and as an announced presidential candidate. The scandal attached to her background made her more interesting to reporters than the staid personas of respectable middle-class suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In fact, a wide variety of suffragettes looked to Woodhull to make their case to the public and government. One advantage that Woodhull possessed as a spokeswoman for the woman suffrage movement was that, as an outsider, she had not taken part in the contentious split over the Fifteenth Amendment. The movement for woman suffrage had always been closely aligned with that for the abolition of slavery. When the Fifteenth Amendment, granting the right to vote to freed slaves, was being written, some more radical suffragettes, such as Anthony, campaigned for the same amendment to explicitly grant women the right to vote also, a position eventually advocated by the National Woman Suffrage Association. Meanwhile, conservatives such as Lucy Stone, a founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association, did not want to risk losing suffrage for former slaves by trying to then gain suffrage for all.

The argument that Woodhull delivered to Congress and later reprised for popular consumption in New York (even after her proposals had been rejected by a two-thirds vote of Congress's joint Judiciary Committee) was essentially based on traditional suffragist thought going back to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights. Woodhull begins the main part of her argument by adapting the language of the Declaration of Independence: “I come before you, to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This pattern of adaptation had been established by the Declaration of Sentiments produced at Seneca Falls. The essence of Woodhull's argument is that the right to personal freedom attaches to the condition of being human and that if the full exercise of freedom, including the right to vote, is denied women, it is a tyranny worse than that exercised by George III over the American colonies or by slave owners over slaves. In particular, Woodhull considers the legal position of women in America up until 1871 to be a “previous condition of servitude,” which, according to the newly passed Fifteenth Amendment, could not be used as a bar to voting rights.

Again following the Declaration of Sentiments, Woodhull moves on to a specific list of grievances against women's freedoms, also based insofar as possible on the Declaration of Independence. Women are subject to laws over whose making they have no control because they neither vote for nor serve as legislators. In particular, women must pay taxes that they have no role in levying, a point echoing the colonial American grievance against taxation without representation. Listing the taxes she must pay, she says, “Of what it is my fortune to acquire each year I must turn over a certain per cent.” This does not refer to the current income tax, begun in 1913, which is now the chief source of government revenue, but to the short-lived 3 percent income tax levied between 1861 and 1872 to help pay the cost of the Civil War.

Woodhull moves on to the main part of her argument, an analysis of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which after the Civil War established the newly freed slaves as citizens and specifically granted them the right to vote. She contends that if there was any doubt about the equality of women's citizenship before, the broadly inclusive language of the Fourteenth Amendment should settle it: “All persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” She does not, however, directly address the second clause of the amendment, which expressly prohibits states from denying suffrage to any male citizens only. Yet she insists that the inclusive language must be read in the broadest possible meaning, to comprehend everyone not specifically excluded. In such a reading, the specific mention of males indicates nothing about females. Woodhull might also have found in the amendment's second clause support for her argument about taxation being a basis for voting rights, since the amendment excludes “Indians” from voting for the specifically stated reason that they are not taxed.

It was the very brief and general language of the Fifteenth Amendment, however, that was the main support of suffragette hopes. Woodhull quotes the text in full: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” She regards this text as clearly supporting her cause: “Nothing could be more explicit than this language, and nothing more comprehensive.” She presents two arguments for the inclusion of women within the language of the amendment. Since gender is a larger and more inclusive category than any of those specifically mentioned in the amendment, she supposes that it must be inferred that gender also cannot be used to deny the right to vote. Her second, and more powerful, argument, is actually the opposite of the first. She quite rightly reads the amendment as not referring exclusively to the “black” race but as applying equally to all races and to people of all colors. Since, insofar as race is a legal category, all women belong to some race, the guarantee of rights to members of any race includes the female members of the races unless, as the amendment does not do, they are specifically excluded. As she reasons, “A race is composed of two sexes. If you speak of a race you include both sexes. If you speak of a part of a race, you must designate which part in order to make yourselves intelligible.”

Thus far, Woodhull has more or less followed the mainstream of suffragist thought on the relevance of the Reconstruction amendments to women's voting rights. None of these arguments is original to her, as they had long been developed by Anthony and other leaders of the movement. In fact, in the 1872 elections Anthony and hundreds of other suffragettes voted or attempted to vote, knowing that they would be arrested and could eventually present their arguments in court. (Woodhull herself was in jail on Election Day of 1872 on trumped-up charges of sending obscene material through the mail.) Irrespective of suffragettes' arguments and efforts, the 1874 Supreme Court decision in Minor v. Happersett settled the matter, ruling that no part of the Constitution, including the Reconstruction amendments, granted women the right to vote. Women would not gain suffrage until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

The remainder of Woodhull's address departs from the mainstream of the suffrage movement. Most suffragettes were middle-class women from conservative backgrounds, and while they thought it just that women be granted the vote and other legal rights of citizens, they distanced themselves from the more radical political ideologies embraced by Woodhull (such as Socialism), both because they did not find them appealing and because they did not want their movement to be perceived as a general threat to the existing social order. Woodhull had no such scruples, and her further proposals here are of a piece with her radical decision to run for the presidency. She states that if women are not granted full equality by Congress to elect and be elected in 1872, women will start a new American revolution and create a new constitution based on freedom rather than tyranny:

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 overthrow this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from the consent of the governed, but shall do so in reality.

This, of course, was a sensationalistic, if not fantastic, assertion that had no potential of being realized. Although it presents itself as an extension of the suffragettes' echoing of the Declaration of Independence, it rather belongs to the rhetoric of revolution found in Woodhull's Socialist politics. Later in 1871 her weekly would issue the first publication of the Communist Manifesto in the United States.