by Marion Meade
After hearing about a new method of education for very young children—the kindergarten system—she built a school on her estate, hired trained kindergarten teachers, and provided bus service so that children from the surrounding villages could attend.
Demosthenes had prophesied that she would lead her people; there, in Bredon's Norton, she tried. She established an annual flower show which, as years passed, became the largest agricultural fair in that section of England. She also brought culture to the village. Renovating an old barn on her property, she turned it into a hall where she arranged lectures, pageants, and Christmas parties with carols sung by the village choir.
On a foggy January afternoon in 1923, Vicky sat impatiently in the rear seat of her shiny white limousine. It seemed as if they had left London hours ago and still they were nowhere near Norton Park.
She fought an urge to yell at her chauffeur. His driving annoyed her. In good weather she had to remind him constantly to drive faster. She loved cars; in fact, she had been one of the first in England to own one. But she also enjoyed speeding.
That day there was no use insisting the chauffeur speed up. The fog grew worse than ever. Blurred shapes of trees and houses surged slowly by the window. Now and then she could see an electric light glowing dimly in the thick grayness. It was almost as dark as night.
From head to toe, Vicky was enveloped in fur. A dark fur hat covered her white hair; over the lap of her sable coat, a fur rug was thrown. All that showed were her fragile face, still as exquisite as a cameo, and her thin hands crisscrossed by blue veins. She turned to Zulu Maud with a sigh and asked the time.
Her daughter told her that it was almost four.
Then she fell silent again, trying hard to clear her mind of all thoughts. But the painful emotions kept hammering their way to the surface. "Why did Tennie have to go and die!" she cried to herself. Tennie dead! When the telegram had arrived the week before, she had refused to believe it. "She couldn't be dead," she'd moaned to Zulu. "She's only seventy-seven!" She had always imagined Tennie, seven years her junior, would outlive her.
Eighty-four! She hadn't felt her age, at least not until the past week. Now she suddenly realized that everyone but her had passed away—Roxanna and Buck and her sisters and brothers. All three of her husbands were dead: John, who succumbed to pneumonia in the eighteenth year of their marriage; James, who went to hunt gold in Africa and died there of a fever; Canning, released these many years from the grip of alcohol and morphine.
Even those whose paths she had crossed briefly were no longer living. The feminists came to mind—Susan Anthony, Elizabeth Stanton, Lucy Stone, Isabella and Pauline. For the first time in years, she thought of Henry Ward Beecher. After he died of a stroke in 1887, the mayor of Brooklyn declared a public holiday. Fifty thousand persons, mostly women, lined the streets to watch his funeral procession. Poor Lib Tilton survived him by another ten years. When she publicly confessed that Beecher had been her lover after all, the minister declared she was unbalanced and never spoke to her again. She went to live with one of her daughters and became a recluse. When Lib died, she was buried in the same cemetery as Beecher.
And Theodore Tilton. Vicky remembered that, after the trial, he traveled around the country lecturing. Finally he went to Paris where he wrote poetry and played chess until he died in 1907.
Driving up to London for Tennie's funeral had stirred a thousand memories in her. Since she'd given up her London home and retired to the country twenty years before, she and Tennie had been less close. Tennie never changed, though. Whenever she visited Vicky, she'd curl up in a chair reading trashy mystery novels. She wore ruffled frocks too youthful for her age and, in Vicky's opinion, too much makeup. During the war, she'd talked about organizing women into an amazon army, but nothing ever came of it.
The car came to a stop at a village crossroads. Staring out into the blackness, she could see shrouded figures come into view and then vanish. This fog will last until spring, she thought wearily. She had grown to hate the uncomfortable English winters with their smog and drizzle and snow. Suddenly she remembered to ask Zulu Maud about Tennie's obituaries. The Times, her daughter said, had called her Tennessee Claflin instead of Lady Cook. The obituary mentioned that Tennie had been a pioneer in the women's rights movement and that she had studied law, banking, and medicine.
Hearing the latter, Vicky must have smiled into her furs. What would the papers say about her when she died? Would they forget her tempestuous past, as they had Tennie's?
As the car left the Avon River and turned up the winding graveled road to her home, Vicky stirred restlessly under her furs. Still half lost in reverie, she passed her orchards, the park of evergreens, and then the manor house which had been built before Shakespeare's time. The smaller of two dwellings on her estate, it was a wonderful old place with hidden cupboards in the oak paneling and even a secret passage.
The car crossed a bridge over a foamy stream and drew up in front of Norton Park, the estate's main house. In summer its gables were overgrown with ivy and roses, but now the massive house loomed dark and ominous in the swirling fog. Vicky felt empty and depressed.
That summer she went to Brighton, the popular seaside resort, in the hope that the ocean air might restore her vitality. Low in spirits after Tennie's death, she also began to suffer from heart trouble.
Zulu Maud noticed that her mother was growing increasingly eccentric. Vicky demanded that all the windows in the house be heavily curtained. She allowed no doors to be closed in any room she happened to be occupying. She also avoided shaking hands with people because she feared contracting a disease. When visitors came to call, she insisted they come no closer than ten feet.
All her philanthropic activities with the villagers were abandoned. Each afternoon, she would order the car to be brought around. Lying in the rear seat, she would careen madly through the countryside, urging her chauffeur to greater and greater speed.
One autumn afternoon in September 1923, a reporter from an English newspaper came to interview her on her eighty-fifth birthday. They sat in the garden and sipped tea. To her relief, he seemed to know nothing about the colorful past she had tried so hard to live down. His questions dealt with women's rights; in fact, he called her "The United States Mother of Woman's Suffrage."
"What do you think of the current bill to give Englishwomen the vote at twenty-five?" he asked.
Vicky answered obliquely. "I want women to have the vote as soon as they are fit to use it, but I do not believe in forced maturity."
Then she explained that she had become a bride when hardly more than a child, and her youth had been unhappy as a result.
After he'd gone, she sat there for a long time. The sun, red as a ripe strawberry, was just beginning to descend. She gazed at the sky, its canopy streaked with lavender and gold and rose, and allowed waves of memory to wash over her. She thought of herself as a young girl in Ohio when she had eaten too many green apples in the orchard behind their shack. She saw herself on the stage at Steinway Hall when somebody asked if she were a "free lover." "Yes," she had answered proudly, "yes." Ah, how young and tough she had been then! Again she thought of the day, a half century ago, when she had been nominated for the Presidency, could picture that heady spring afternoon with its star-spangled banners and hear the tumultuous voices crying, "Aye, aye." What a monstrous trick life had played on her, tantalizing her with such a magnificent destiny and then holding it beyond her reach.
In the end, when she craved peace of mind, she found herself paralyzed by fear. Ever since Tennie's funeral, she could think of nothing but dying. The realization that her time was drawing closer terrified her. She could smell the scent of fear rising from her pores. And though she pinched her nostrils, the deadly perfume lingered.
She was not ready for death; she hadn't come to terms with life yet.
For the next three years, she refused to go to bed. If she lay down, death might snatch her unawares. Instead, she slept sitting u
p in a chair.
On June 9, 1927—at the age of eighty-eight—she died in her sleep.
Epilogue
At Victoria Woodhull's death in 1927, times had changed radically in some ways since her struggles in the 1870s; in other ways, they had not changed at all. By 1927, women could vote, work in an office, drink, smoke cigarettes, and shorten their hemlines above their knees. Although they no longer had to pretend they were pure and virginal, they still worried about being thought "fast." Feminism had gone beyond respectability and dullness—it was dead.
Despite the greater opportunities open to women, society's attitude toward them remained essentially the same. The life of the average woman in the 1920s was little different from that of a woman in Vicky's day. Woman's place was supposed to be the home. Her destiny was to marry and become a mother and homemaker. Little girls planned to raise children when they grew up; little boys said they wanted to be President. In fact, most jobs outside the home were still reserved "for men only."
Some historians have claimed that Vicky set feminism back a hundred years. In a sense, this is true. The questions she raised—the issues of sex, marriage, and female revolution— took much of the steam out of the women's movement in the nineteenth century. She caused feminists to retreat to safer ground where they concentrated on getting the vote. They became timid reformers instead of revolutionaries.
Vicky brought up questions so terrifying that generations of women would be afraid to touch them again. Not until the late 1960s would feminists once more begin to pick up where Vicky left off.
Can a woman be elected President? Victoria Woodhull's question still has not been answered. The American political system has yet to catch up with the ideas that scandalized her generation.
Unsuccessful as Vicky's crusade had been, others took up her dream. Twelve years after she ran for President, attorney Belva Ann Lockwood became the second woman in our history to declare herself a presidential candidate. A fervent feminist, she was, in contrast to Vicky, a restrained fighter for women's rights and a paragon of respectability. Discrimination was familiar to her. As a teacher in Royalton, New York, before the Civil War, she had protested loudly when paid half of what male teachers received.
Later, after graduating from law school, she found herself barred from practicing before the United States Supreme Court. "Women are not needed in the courts," said the judge who denied her petition. "Their place is in the home to wait upon their husbands, to bring up the children, to cook the meals, make beds, polish pans and dust furniture."
Unwilling to trade her law degree for a dustcloth, Belva drafted a bill permitting women to practice before the Supreme Court. It took her three years to get it passed by Congress, but finally, in 1879, she became the first woman to appear before the country's highest tribunal.
In the election year of 1884, feminists tried to persuade both the Democratic and Republican conventions to write a strong women's rights plank into their campaign platforms. Both parties ignored their requests. Insulted women around the country urged Belva, then fifty-four and twice widowed, to run for President.
She was formally nominated as the candidate of the National Equal Rights party. Marietta L. Stow of California was selected as her running mate. The nomination took place in a Maryland apple orchard just outside Washington, D.C. A makeshift platform under the trees was festooned with flags, banners, and pictures of the candidates. Campaign buttons, as well as homemade cakes and pies, were distributed to the delegates.
In many states, giggling young men organized Mother Hubbard Clubs and Broom Brigades. Parading through the streets dressed in women's clothing and carrying brooms and mops, they mockingly chanted, "Elect a lady to the White House." Belva said she found them amusing.
Although her campaign attracted nationwide attention, she held no hope of winning. She regarded her candidacy only as a means of publicizing the feminist cause. Writing to a group of supporters in California, she explained: "This campaign will become the entering wedge, the first practical movement in the history of woman suffrage. It will open a door to be shut no more forever."
Despite her impressive background as an attorney, the voters sent Grover Cleveland to the White House. Belva received only 4149 of the more than 10 million votes cast. Her supporters charged that many of her ballots had been thrown out.
Belva failed to be dismayed by her poor showing. She ran again in 1888. "My dear," she later told her daughter Lura, "the fact that a woman actually ran for President will give men something to think about for years to come."
Her prediction turned out to be dead wrong. Not only men, but women as well, promptly forgot that women had run for President in the nineteenth century. In 1964, when Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine announced her candidacy, it was mistakenly believed that she was the first female contestant. Senator Smith's campaign created little excitement among the members of either sex. Next to Belva's, it rated staid; compared to Vicky's, it seemed like a Sunday school picnic.
Women won the right to vote in 1920 but made little use of their hard-won franchise. They voted like their menfolk, and on the rare occasions when they ran for political office, it was for seats vacated by their dead husbands. For decades, women remained the gofers of politics. Working behind the scenes, they sealed envelopes, ran mimeograph machines, and made phone calls and coffee.
Not until the 1970s did significant numbers of women turn their attention to winning public office in no-holds-barred races. They didn't worry about being "ladies"; they campaigned to win. They also found that they could count on strong support from their own sex. The National Women's Political Caucus was formed to inspire women to run for political office. Another nonpartisan group, the Women's National Education Fund, began to conduct regional seminars encouraging women candidates and offering instruction on campaign tactics.
Despite these promising signs, women still faced enormous obstacles rooted in culture and tradition. In 1972 Shirley Chisholm, congresswoman from Brooklyn, made a fierce stab at the Democratic nomination for President. She was unsuccessful.
In 1974 more than fifteen hundred women—the largest number ever—battled their way through the primaries. When the election results were tallied, they showed that women had scored significant gains at all levels of government, and a few had even been elected to offices that women had never held before. For example, Ella Grasso of Connecticut became the first woman governor to be chosen in her own right instead of as a replacement for her husband. Janet Gray Hayes was elected mayor of San Jose, California, the first woman to govern a city of more than a half million population. And Susie Sharp of North Carolina became the first woman chief justice of a state supreme court.
The woman who started it all has never been awarded her rightful place in America’s political history. Victoria Woodhull’s candidacy has not been considered sufficiently important to include in school textbooks. No monuments nor commemorative stamps have memorialized her. In Homer, Ohio, no marker notes her birthplace. As recently as 1957, however, at least one person in Homer remembered her. A reporter from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer talked to Frank Yoakam, an eighty-nine-year-old retired storekeeper, who recalled meeting Vicky when he was a boy.
On one of Vicky’s trips back to America in the 1880s, she paid a last, brief visit to Homer. Yoakam said he talked to her for ten minutes, an event he apparently never forgot. His memory seemed to be excellent. He recalled that she arrived in a stylish carriage with a fringe. He also gave a detailed description of her outfit: a brown silk dress, a hat with ostrich feathers, and a diamond, heart-shaped locket that hung from a string of pearls around her neck.
“She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” he sighed. “I can see how she won all the men she did.”
What he failed to remember was that she had ever run for President.
Perhaps the most perceptive assessment of Vicky’s contribution to women's liberation was made before she was erased and forgotten by history. In 1875, El
izabeth Cady Stanton wrote:
Victoria Woodhull has done a work for women that none of us could have done. She has faced and dared men to call her the names that make women shudder. She has risked and realized the sort of ignominy that would have paralyzed any of us...Leaping into the brambles that were too high for us to see over them, she broke a path into their close and thorny interstices, with a steadfast faith that glorious principle would triumph at last over conspicuous ignominy, although her life might be sacrificed. And when with a meteor's dash, she sank into a dismal swamp, we could not lift her out of the mire nor buoy her through the deadly waters. She will be as famous as she has been infamous, made so by benighted or cowardly men and women. In the annals of emancipation, the name of Victoria Woodhull will have its own high place as a deliverer.
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