The Husband Hunters

by Anne de Courcy

  At the end of 1869 two financiers, old enemies of the Commodore, tried to corner the New York Gold Exchange’s gold market and the collapse of the economy seemed imminent, creating a panic that became known as Black Friday. The Commodore rushed back from his honeymoon and the takeover was foiled by the federal government. All through the crisis Victoria sat in her carriage, coolly playing the market, and at the end cried out: ‘I came out a winner!’, later declaring that they now had capital of $700,000.

  Busy as the Commodore was, he kept the Claflin sisters under his wing. Recovery from Black Friday was slow, except for Vanderbilt and his protegées, whom he advised to buy as he bought: more holdings in his own railroads or in the ones that would soon be his at the current depressed prices. Soon the girls were rich.

  Sometime in 1869 the sisters had spoken to the Commodore about opening a brokerage house. He must have been astonished at first – no woman had ever thought of such a thing before – but agreed to give them advice, aid and a certain amount of financial backing. They began by visiting Wall Street as speculators and, when their appearance was noted by the press, invited a reporter from the New York Herald to visit them. In a long article about them, he described this first office as ‘a small comfortable room fronting on the avenue, profusely decorated with oil paintings and statuary, furnished with sofa, chairs, a piano and the various other articles, useful and ornamental, which go into the makeup of a ladies’ drawing room’.

  The Claflin sisters were now well known, and when in 1870 they opened an office on Wall Street, becoming the world’s first women stockbrokers, 100 policemen were needed to keep the crowd in order. When the two good-looking sisters arrived to enter their new office, the crowd of male onlookers was not disappointed. Their skirts were short by the standards of the day – just down to the tops of their gleaming boots – and it was clear they had left off corsets and bustles. Their deep-blue jackets, out of which Tennie’s magnificent bosom threatened to burst, were embellished with velvet. For the final, businesslike touch, each wore a gold pen behind her ear. All day men peered into the office, outside which hung a notice: ‘Gentlemen will state their business and then retire at once.’

  From the start they were feminists, believing that women could be equally as successful in business as men. ‘Why cannot women be judged for their merits as men are?’ asked Victoria. Tennie, whose ease of manner was invaluable with would-be investors, was always smartly dressed, usually in her favourite blue – sometimes a blue suit trimmed with black astrakhan, and an astrakhan muff, her hat black velvet trimmed with black feathers.

  US newspapers such as the Sun, the Evening Express and the New York Herald hailed Woodhull and Claflin as ‘the Bewitching Brokers’ and ‘the Queens of Finance’ – in the first six weeks they had made $750,000. The New York Evening Telegraph of February 1870 depicted them in a chariot drawn by two bulls and two bears with the heads of the largest financiers of the time. Tennie is holding the reins and Victoria is whipping right and left, crushing other financiers under the wheels of the chariot. The New York Sunday News commented that in time they would ‘have a standing equal to some of the oldest firms in the “street”’.

  Not only were they a good-looking pair but it was clear that both exuded considerable sex appeal; all through their careers they had no trouble in attracting men to their sides to help them, often in the face of contemporary opinion. This was possibly also why many contemporary men’s journals (e.g. The Days’ Doings) published sexualised images of the pair running their firm, linking the notion of publicly minded, unchaperoned women with the concepts of sexual immorality and prostitution.

  Once the sisters had proved that women could make money in a man’s field, as firm believers in women’s rights they cast about for the next step. They found it in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Articles of Amendment, which declared that electoral rights belonged to every citizen without reference to sex.

  ‘We will now prove that women can manage as well as men the interests of the country and, above all, that they have a right to do it,’ declared Victoria in 1870. ‘To do the good we wish to do, to be heard, we need a prominent position.’ Accordingly, in a breathtaking opening gambit, she put herself forward as a candidate for election to the presidency of the United States in 1872, announcing this in a letter to the New York Herald. Tennie said that she would run for Congress. Both hoped that this move would boost the fight for female suffrage. As no woman had ever thought of such a thing before, at first most people thought this idea too preposterous even to notice.

  Their first step was to start a paper to support their election. The first issue of the Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly appeared on 14 May 1870, and was soon selling around 50,000 copies every week. They campaigned vigorously, a crusade that included entertaining at the grand house they had bought with the money they had made. This stood at 15 East 38th Street and was lavishly decorated with large gilded mirrors, crystal chandeliers and painted ceilings.

  Victoria’s real object was of course not the presidency but the recognition of women as the equal of men, both in their enfranchisement and in their private lives. She hated the hypocrisy of the double standard – why should a woman who had ‘fallen’ once be condemned for ever, while a man was quickly forgiven – and she believed (though she had not yet said so publicly) that everyone should be free to love as they chose.

  The first two national suffrage organisations had been established only the previous year, and a few women had tried to vote but had been turned away. Victoria, acting on her own, put their case before the House Judiciary Committee at the Senate in Washington, on 12 January 1871. The hall was crowded, largely by members of the suffrage organisation who had originally fought shy of her because of her notoriety: news of her belief in free love had got about and the sisterhood were prepared for the appearance of a scarlet woman. Instead, they saw a dignified, ladylike figure in discreet dark clothing, visibly nervous. At first Victoria put her case forward barely audibly, in formal language, before launching into an impassioned, heartfelt plea.

  ‘By what ethics does any free government impose taxes on woman without giving her a voice on how and by whom these taxes shall be used and applied?’ she asked in her clear, sweet voice. ‘Women constitute a majority of the people of this country and are entrusted with the most vital responsibilities of society. They bear, rear and educate men, train and mould their characters, inspire the noblest impulses in men, and often hold the accumulated fortunes of a man’s life for the safety of the family – yet they are debarred from uttering any opinion by public vote.’ Scandal was forgotten; applause swept the hall as she finished.

  The decision to grant the vote or not hinged on the meaning of the word ‘citizen’, which had heretofore been taken not to apply to women (the suffrage associations were attempting to get the vote for black males on this basis). However, the second article of the Fourteenth Amendment stated: ‘All persons [author’s italics] born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States … No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of any citizens,’ words which would appear to allow Victoria just as much right as any man to stand for President. But before the hearing she was firmly told by one of the Judiciary Committee: ‘Madam, you are no citizen.’ When she asked him what she was, he replied ‘You are a woman!’

  Victoria was a compelling and persuasive orator, gaining such influential personalities as General Grant to her point of view; eventually, although she lost, the Judiciary Committee issued a minority report in her favour. As for Tennie, her looks were widely admired. ‘Oh, the irresistible Tennie!’ wrote one enthralled reporter.

  After the Judiciary Committee case there was a ferocious reaction from those who did not believe women should have the franchise, let alone stand for the highest office in the land. The sisters were turned out of the hotel where they were living and their baggage put on the street (they
had to sleep on the floor of their office that night), they were insulted and the usual treatment of females as second-class citizens continued. One evening they went to Delmonico’s, where they had often dined with their parents, arriving a few minutes after seven. They gave their order, and waited … and waited. Eventually, crossly, Tennie called the waiter. ‘Miss Claflin,’ he said apologetically, ‘the rules are, not to serve ladies after seven in the evening unless accompanied by a gentleman.’ ‘Fetch Mr Delmonico,’ said Tennie furiously. When Delmonico arrived he said that it was the rule, as ‘we might be having women coming in from the street if I did’.

  ‘You know very well that not half a dozen women outside in Fifth Avenue could pay your prices for a dinner,’ retorted Tennie, adding that his rule ‘would be obeyed’. Telling her sister to wait, she went outside, brought in her coachman, and loudly ordered: ‘SOUP FOR THREE.’ It came.

  It was, however, the beginning of their decline. They were not behaving as women of the class they had risen to were expected to behave. There were battles when they presented their nominations at the polls and they were sued for illegally attempting to vote. But this was as nothing to the storm raised when, in the lectures they continued giving, they advocated giving a child sexual knowledge, albeit in the most decorous form imaginable (‘Mamma carried you under her heart days, weeks and weary months … when people understand this mighty problem of proper generation, all the mock modesty will die’).

  Victoria went on to press for legalised prostitution (‘a woman of the town can lift no hand or voice for defence’). Common prostitutes, she said, were at the mercy of policemen, and ‘are compelled to pay them both in personal favours and money for the privilege of escaping arrest. In this way, large sums of money are drawn from them by men whose sworn duty it is to protect society.

  ‘What we ask and demand,’ she said, ‘is equality everywhere.’ She went on to a much more controversial theme: the double standard operating generally in society. ‘If loss of virginity is a disgrace to unmarried women, then the same should be held of men. If the mother of a child out of legal wedlock is ostracised, then the father should share the same fate; if it is wrong to mother such a child, it is equally wrong to father it. If a life of female prostitution is wrong, a life of male prostitution is equally wrong. If Contagious Diseases Acts are passed, they should operate equally on both sexes.’

  She went on to state particular cases, although without naming names, but made it clear that, as the campaign progressed, she would not hesitate to do so. ‘We propose to tear off the hypocritical mask and expose their moral deformity to the gaze of all eyes. We know who they are and shall not hesitate to write and publish their history so definitely that all men shall know them.’

  This was too much. The Claflin sisters must be stopped. Suits were brought against them and they were imprisoned a number of times on charges of ‘offence against the United States’, only being released on payment of large sums for bail. Their offices were closed and the Weekly had to cease publication. When their case eventually came to court, the judge – after saying that their business had been ruined and that they had been ‘subjected to many indignities’ – declared that no case had been proved against them. The jury was instructed to render a verdict of not guilty, which they did immediately, without even leaving their seats.

  The judge went on to say: ‘For the wrong which has been done to these women, they have no redress. The injury is irremediable.’ He was right. The Senate refused all compensation.

  Courageous as they had been at the time, they were so run-down and broken by their ordeal that they could not resume work until 1874. When they did, one of America’s leading suffragettes said: ‘Mrs Woodhull and Miss Tennessee Claflin have, with their prostrate bodies, bridged a chasm over which womanhood shall walk to freedom.’

  Continuing with their work had become extraordinarily difficult as lecture halls and meeting places had been banned to them and police waited outside any venue where their appearance had been advertised in order to arrest them. On one occasion they got the better of the law, when a lady went onto the platform to announce that neither of them could come that night as there was an order of arrest for them. On hearing this, an old, shaky Quaker lady got up and walked to the platform with an unsteady step, to everyone’s amusement, then disappeared behind a pillar.

  The previous speaker then announced that, though Victoria could not be there in person, her lecture would be read to them. The next moment the ‘old’ Quaker lady, coalscuttle bonnet and simple grey dress shed, dashed out – and there stood Victoria. Her lecture set everyone alight; even the police forgot their duty until the thunderous applause rolled out. Only then was Victoria arrested and taken out to join Tennie, who was also under arrest and waiting in a carriage outside.

  But the continued persecution, arrests and prison, coupled with an ostracism so severe that it was almost impossible for them to find anywhere to live – even Victoria’s daughter had to be sent to school under an assumed name – made them realise their only hope was to leave America.

  On 4 January 1877 their original benefactor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, died. As he had left almost his entire fortune to his eldest son William, his other nine younger children contested his will fiercely in a continuing battle, putting forward as one of their arguments the premise that Cornelius was senile when he signed this will, and bringing into court anyone who would testify to this. Among them were two men prepared to say that Cornelius had reneged on a promise to marry Tennie. In the event this testimony was irrelevant, but the rumour spread that William had paid the sisters, who had been out of his father’s life for several years, $100,000 not to testify at the trial that November. Whether or not he had done so was never clear; in any event, they had already left for England three months earlier.

  They continued their work in England, but on a much more moderate scale, so that lectures in St James’s Hall on the Human Body the Temple of God, for instance, aroused astonishment rather than hostility. In a new country it was important to arrive without trailing scandal, so to sanitise their image they denied that they had ever advocated free love, instead saying what they wished for was the ‘teaching and elevation of their sex’.

  It was a much safer subject – especially now they were meeting rich and influential Englishmen. Men who, in other words, would make suitable and substantial husbands.

  Victoria was the first to meet such a man. John Biddulph Martin was a quiet, scholarly banker who was spellbound by her, to the horror of his family, so that rewriting her past became of paramount importance. She went back and forth to America to try and quell her detractors, she threatened libel suits, she wrote articles that denied some of the more outré of the statements she had made in the past.

  Eventually, around 1880, Martin either ignored his family or they, perhaps, lost their hostility to Victoria, and the couple were married. Victoria now lived in a handsome town house or at Martin’s country estate at Bredon’s Norton in Worcestershire. Although shunned by most of his friends, she and Tennie remained close and Victoria, as the wife of a rich and devoted husband, seemed to have left her past behind her.

  Sometime in 1884 Tennie, too, met the man she would marry. She was now thirty-five and, though prettier than ever, wanted to settle down. Francis Cook, recently widowed, considered one of the three richest men in Britain, was sixty-three, a tall, handsome, bearded man whose wealth came from the family textile business that traded finished wool, cotton, linen and silk. He was a philanthropic, cultured man with a passion for collecting art. He owned the magnificent Doughty House, on the Thames in Richmond, which was filled with statuary and many great paintings (on which he was advised by Sir John Charles Robinson, the former V&A curator); and the large estate of Monserrate, near Lisbon in Portugal, where he had built a Moorish-style palace and become Visconde de Monserrate.

  More importantly, as a believer in the afterlife he had been trying to get in touch with his late wife, Emily Martha Lu
cas, who had died that August. When he heard that Tennessee was a clairvoyant he asked her to help him. It was a time when not only fervent religiosity but belief in supernatural forces and energies, ghosts, automatic writing, the new Ouija board and other spooky phenomena was swirling through the country, so that a country gentleman consulting a clairvoyant was not as odd as it sounds.

  After a few sessions Tennie told Cook with conviction that she had a spirit message from his dead wife: marry Miss Claflin. The lonely widower, whose grown-up children were married and settled, found no difficulty in believing what this pretty, gay, good-natured young woman said. They were married in October 1885, reports of it reaching the New York papers. She was given away by her rascally father, dressed to the nines for the occasion, who died three weeks later of a stroke.

  After Cook married Tennie, he allowed her mother Roxanna to come and live with them at Doughty House; she remained there until her death in 1890, aged eighty-five. He also added the Long Gallery to Doughty House to accommodate his growing collection, making this gallery open to scholars and, in a practical gesture towards the art he so loved, used some of his fortune to endow an artists’ home in London, Alexandra House.

  Its grand opening in 1887 was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales and a host of grandees. Here Tennie, gay and animated as always and beautifully dressed in a blue suit trimmed with grey sable, made a great impression. ‘The little American beauty’, noted one visitor, ‘was the nicest dressed and prettiest woman in the hall.’

  Soon afterwards Cook was made a baronet and, now Sir Francis, took Tennie to visit Monserrate. As their carriage drove through the village below the hill on which the castle stood, the villagers sang and danced and pelted Tennie with flowers – Sir Francis had always been a very benevolent proprietor.

  Tennie loved the pink and white castle, with its towers, cupolas, rose-marble pillars, its views of the surrounding countryside, the brilliant flowers in its gardens – Sir Francis had built the first irrigation system in Portugal. Here Lord Byron had been inspired to write Childe Harold; and Tennie’s letters expressed her delight in this lovely place. ‘I am out all day and happy as a bird,’ she wrote to Victoria. ‘Our cook is perfection and we have two big fires going all the time.’ She added, as she often did: ‘I have every thing that the heart could wish & perfectly happy & contented with my precious husband.’