Because she was female, presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull could not vote for herself in the 1872 election. Needless to say, by throwing a woman’s hat in that ring, she invited considerable ridicule. The Memphis Appeal, for example, wrote of “one of the most remarkable compounds of shrewdness and sublime folly, of . . . nonsense, of impudence,” then sprang their punch line: “We do not refer to Mrs. Victoria Woodhull.” Rather the paper was referring to George Francis Train, knowing readers would assume they meant Woodhull. After that era’s preeminent African American leader, Frederick Douglass, turned down the offer of being Victoria Woodhull’s running mate, a Portland, Oregon, newspaper quipped, “We suggest that she substitute in Mr. Douglass’ stead the name of Little Bear, Spotted Tail, George Francis Train, or some other noble savage.”1
The fact that many viewed Woodhull and Train as comparably nutty serves in its own right to sharpen the focus on the shape the nation was in at that time. Through the lens of Woodhull’s campaign, however, that focus become even more acute since, unlike Train’s fringe candidacy, Woodhull’s campaign resided on the cusp of fringe and third party insofar as it was, on the one hand, ridiculed by a great many Americans while, on the other hand, given serious attention by a great many other Americans, even if not given their votes.
Let’s begin with the ridicule—quips that back then were, for many, real knee-slappers. Here’s an item from the New Orleans Republican, published shortly after Woodhull declared her intention to run: “‘What is the difference between you and me?’ asked Victoria Woodhull of Judge Bingham in Washington the other day. ‘I cannot conceive, madam,’ responded the gallant opponent of woman suffrage.”2
Not hilarious now but, c’mon, still kind of cute. Others were less so. As for instance from the Idaho World: “Victoria Woodhull wants to know ‘why women of sound mind cannot vote.’ That is precisely the class of women that has not asked for the privilege of voting.”3
Apparently, however, many of that class did, which led jokesters to mock them. The resident wag at the New Orleans Republican wrote, “The English journals are amazed at the nomination of Victoria C. Woodhull for the Presidency, regarding it as a serious matter.” As Election Day approached, even the humor fell away as one newspaper declared, “Imagine Victoria Woodhull elected to the Presidency of the United States! True, it requires a very great exercise of various qualities of the mind to imagine a thing so absurd and ridiculous.”4
Even in those ostensibly more moral times, there were remarks that were the era’s equivalent of what was termed in the 2016 election “grabbing her pussy.” For example, one Oregon newspaper reported, “The editor of the Owyhee, Idaho, Avalanche favors Victoria Woodhull for President, and hoists her petticoat to the masthead of his paper.”5
Similarly crude but alluding to an additional issue that hampered Woodhull’s campaign was a Kentucky newspaper’s misogynistic metaphor: “Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Clafin [her business partner and sister] are going to give a series of oratorical can-cans in Europe.”6 The can-can is a hem-lifting dance associated at the time with licentious performers in Paris. The “oratorical can-cans” to which the statement referred were lectures by Woodhull advocating that century’s Free Love movement.
In addition many newspapers used epithets to ridicule Woodhull. Most frequently employed were phrases along the lines of “a petticoat president.”7 More explicit were those aimed at her views on marriage, such as “the Free Love Queen.”8 In fairness to the news media, it should be said they attacked her in the same way they attacked male candidates with whom they disagreed. Which is to say, often taking remarks out of context and imputing views to the candidate which that person did not advocate.
Here too let’s begin with the quips. “A trotting mare has been named after Victoria Woodhull. She is also very fast.”9 And: “The irrepressible Mrs. Victoria Woodhull . . . says that both the great political parties are positively without issue. Notwithstanding she has two or three husbands, and we don’t know how many affinities, so far as we are aware she is in the same condition.”10
As far as they were aware was, in fact, not very far, since virtually all of the details of Woodhull’s marital history had been previously reported nationwide.11 In point of fact Victoria Woodhull had one husband. Admittedly, though not unusually, he was her second husband. She divorced her first husband, whom her parents had forced her to marry at the age of fourteen. He turned out to be an alcoholic who buttressed his drunkenness with opium and further destabilized their marriage by, shall we say, buttressing other women. His sole means of support was Woodhull and her sister, when they formed an investment company through which they became the first women to acquire a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. In exchange for which her now ex-husband came to live with her and her second husband in order to take care of the son from that first marriage, who was severely disabled. So much for the issue of having no issue. Woodhull also, as was easily known, had a daughter by her first husband. Also previously and widely reported in the press, Woodhull and her husband eventually evicted her rarely sober ex-husband.12 Awareness, however, made little difference. One of the news articles conveying the bulk of these details was the one previously mentioned bearing the headline “The Free Love Queen.”
Likewise there was absence of awareness in news accounts of her “wholly lascivious lecture.” Despite its being delivered before a standing-room-only audience at New York’s Steinway Hall in November 1871, “wholly lascivious” was the entirety of the details provided in newspapers such as Ohio’s Painesville Journal.13 For which, in fairness, it apologized when explaining why it had not provided the facts: “An apology would the rather have been in place had we given an elaborate account of the voluptuousness of her sentiments and the audacious sophistry by which she endeavored to support it.” That must have been one spicy speech—hot enough for the newspaper to set fire to the First Amendment when it added, “Lectures such as these should be suppressed.”
The Painesville Journal was not alone. “These ideas are as indecent and shocking as any that could have been promulgated in the corrupt ages of Caligula and Louis XV,” another newspaper reported. “Woman’s ‘Rights’—Free Love and Prostitution Claimed as Rights of the Sex—Very Plain Talk from Mrs. Woodhull” headlined yet another.14
This is too good to miss. Let’s listen in to the spiciest moments from her talk, parts of which did appear in some newspapers and all of which soon appeared in published form: “Over the sexual relations, marriages have endeavored to preserve sway and hold the people in subjection to what has been considered a standard of moral purity. Whether this has been successful or not may be determined from the fact that there are scores of thousands of women who are denominated prostitutes, and who are supported by hundreds of thousands of men who should, for like reasons, also be denominated prostitutes.”15 Even proponents of marriage could not deny what she said, though they could suppress it.
But Woodhull was just warming up. “People may be married by law and all love be lacking,” she went on to say. “Law cannot change what nature has determined. . . . Law cannot compel two to love.” Which may sound like orgies over order—and the press was as quick then as now to run with such hot headlines—but Woodhull was not advocating the abolition of marriage. “Marriage laws that would be consistent with the theory of individual rights would be such as would regulate these relations, such as regulate all other associations of people,” she declared—apparently pornographically, in the view of numerous (male) editors. “They should only be obliged to file marriage articles, containing whatever provisions may be agreed upon as to their personal rights, rights of property, of children, or whatever else they may deem proper for them to agree upon.” The role of government in marriage would be the same, in this view, as in the enforcement of any other contract. And since contracts may be binding “for an hour, a day, a week, a year, a decade or a life,” Woodhull argued, “why should the social relations of the sexes be made subject to a different theory?”16
But there is another inconvenient fact, one Woodhull had to confront or suppress. The desire for the committed affection of another person is different from the desire for the commitment of a kitchen remodeler. Which, to her credit, Woodhull recognized and did not seek to evade.
How can a third class of cases be justified in which but one of the parties desire the separation, while the other clings to the unity? . . . Can any real good or happiness possibly result from an enforced contrivance of marriage upon the part of one party thereto? . . . Now let me ask, would it not rather be the Christian way, in such cases, to say to the disaffected party: “Since you no longer love me, go your way and be happy, and make those to whom you go happy also?”17
In terms of pornography, I’ve read better. In terms of marriage, Woodhull raised issues that, to this day, profoundly challenge the status quo. Many sought to dodge that challenge by accusing her of being, in the words of one newspaper, “a domestic monstrosity . . . rotten, festering, polluted, and abominable.”18 Of the many similar news reports, she said, “The press have stigmatized me . . . [and] the doctrine of Free Love, upon which they have placed their stamp of moral deformity. . . . This conclusion is no more legitimate and reasonable one than that which should call the Golden Rule a general license to all sorts of debauch.”19
Personally I would not want to debate this woman. But those who did so by ridiculing her presidential bid on the basis of her views on marriage not only overlooked her actual views on the subject but also overlooked the fact that she was not running on a Free Love platform. Her platform was equal rights. And, by the way, not just equal rights for women, as can be gleaned from the headline “‘Victoria’ on the Stump—She Says Christ Was a Communist.”20
Not all of those who ridiculed Woodhull’s candidacy did so on the basis of her sex or her marital views. Some did so on the basis of her spiritual views. When the Chicago Tribune headlined a report on Woodhull “The Queen of Quacks” and the Charleston Daily News ran a piece on her previously excerpted speech headed “Demosthenes at Steinway Hall,” they were alluding to the fact that Woodhull was an adherent to Spiritualism, the belief in communication with those whose earthly life had ended. As such, Woodhull believed herself to be periodically in contact with Demosthenes, a statesman in the days of Ancient Greece.21
“Demosthenes assures her that she will be the next President of the United States,” Washington DC’s Evening Star told readers. “Demosthenes declares it to be the correct thing for the American Victoria to live with two husbands.”22 Yeah, except, not.
“Religious freedom does, in a measure, exist in this country, but not yet perfectly,” Woodhull replied to such slurs on her beliefs. “That is to say, a person is not entirely independent of public opinion regarding matters of conscience.” As significant is when she said this: in her so-called Free Love speech at Steinway Hall.23 Indeed that speech is a fitting monument to her candidacy in that it was not, despite news reports, promoting sexual promiscuity and was not only about Free Love, and the news coverage of the speech did not include her views on religious freedom, women’s rights, and the distribution of wealth. At the risk of a bad pun, Woodhull’s quest for the presidency brings into focus the variety of ways in which women were tied up in nots.
On the other hand, here’s a fun fact: the principal opponent to President Grant’s reelection that year was Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the highly regarded New York Tribune. Greeley is most remembered today for popularizing the phrase Go west, young man, and least remembered (since the press kept it under wraps despite Greeley’s never trying to hide it) for being entranced with Spiritualism.24
Here’s a less fun fact: Woodhull was not running for president on behalf of Spiritualists. And while her platform did primarily advocate women’s rights, she was not running with the endorsement of the National Woman Suffrage Association, from which she and her supporters had broken away to conduct their own convention in 1872. As for the National Woman Suffrage Association, it was established in opposition to the American Woman Suffrage Association.
This organizational splintering among woman suffrage advocates reflected the shape the nation was in at that time. The mainstream candidates for president in that year’s election included not only Grant (Republican Party) and Greeley (Liberal Republican/Democratic Party splinter) but also Benjamin Gratz Brown (Liberal Republican/Democratic Party splinter), Thomas A. Hendricks (Democratic Party splinter), Charles J. Jenkins (Democratic Party splinter), David Davis (Liberal Republican Party), Charles O’Conor (Bourbon Democratic Party), and James Black (Prohibition Party).
The shattering of political parties in the aftershocks of the Civil War reveals why 1872 was the year the first woman ran for president. Reporting on Woodhull and her supporters breaking away from the National Woman Suffrage Association at its 1872 convention, Portland, Oregon’s New Northwest explained:
That this Presidential Campaign brings the nation to one of those crises . . . of general political disintegration, when many new combinations will be formed and several candidates run for the Presidency, they [the National Woman Suffrage Association] thought it a good time for further agitation, to share in some direct way in the general excitement and party re-organization . . . and demand recognition of each. . . . Mrs. Woodhull’s plan, however, differed widely from this, and her action defeated the whole purpose of the combination. She proposed . . . a new Constitution, a new party, a new platform . . . all to be crowned with herself for President.25
In this regard Woodhull’s candidacy reveals a fact from the past (and present) often overlooked: not all feminists are alike. It was also in this regard that Woodhull’s candidacy veered into the realm of fringe.
Viewed by many Americans as a fringe candidate, Woodhull’s campaign crashed in a way that it may have avoided had public opinion been tipped more toward perceiving her as a legitimate candidate. Three days before the election she and her sister were arrested and jailed, charged with sending obscene material through the U.S. Post Office. The pornography, as it turned out, was an exposé of an adulterous affair between a highly respected minister, Henry Ward Beecher, and the wife of Theodore Tilton, an upper-crust New York poet and journalist. Beecher was prominent for having been a leading abolitionist as well as the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Thus Woodhull & Clafin’s Weekly revealed that a supposedly highly righteous man was a marital hypocrite.
The timing of the arrest was not calculated by opponents of her campaign; rather Woodhull timed the exposé to provide a last-minute burst to her campaign. Previously she had declared, “The whole social state is honeycombed with social irregularities and outrages. . . . Everybody knows that everybody else knows it, and yet everybody pretends to conceal the fact that everybody knows it. Hypocrisy is settling like a mildew on every individual character.”26 Virtually verifying this accusation, no newspaper or public figure responded; they pretended not to hear it. Woodhull then forced them to hear by outing one of the nation’s preeminent religious leaders and offering him as Exhibit A in her claim of marital hypocrisy. Unable to ignore such evidence, the nation’s public figures were forced either to acknowledge that her attack on marriage had an element of truth or declare her attack so salacious as to be legally obscene.
We can see which they chose. What they did not count on, however, was that the arrest and pretrial confinement of Woodhull and her sister in the dank Ludlow Street Jail turned out to be hot stuff for selling newspapers—so much so that the authorities ended up dropping the charges.27
As for the election, what few votes Woodhull may have received have been lost in the category of “Other.”
After the dust settled, Woodhull resettled, moving to England, divorcing her second husband and marrying a third, this one a wealthy British banker. Over the ensuing years she and her daughter published the Humanitarian Magazine, and with money no longer an object, Woodhull became a benefactor of Sulgrave Manor, the home of George Washington’s ancestors. As women began to acquire rights, Woodhull spoke out in favor of sex education, in opposition to abortion, and in favor of eugenics. She was not, in other words, in agreement with most modern-day feminists regarding abortion or with virtually all Americans, post–Nazi Germany, regarding eugenics.
In 1892 Woodhull returned to the United States to a take another shot at that year’s presidential election. Her announcement was greeted by so many quips they were combined into a nationwide news article featuring the top nine, followed soon after by the top ten of a new slew.28 Recognizing reality, Woodhull ended her quest, resumed her activities in England, and passed away in 1927 at the age of eighty-eight.