by Mary Gabriel
Victoria was loved and hated with equal vehemence. It was as if there were two women posing under the name Victoria C. Woodhull. One was a licentious, manipulative, thieving, deceitful tramp who corrupted men and women through unspeakable acts into doing her bidding and advancing her interests. The other was a brilliant, passionate, painfully honest working wife and mother who sacrificed herself for her ideals, inspiring thousands by the strength of her argument and the example of her courage. For the labor movement, the radical women reformers, and the spiritualists she was the latter. For the Beechers she was the former. The rest remained undecided.
NEW YORK CITY, EARLY NOVEMBER 1871
Shortly after Victoria’s visit to Hartford, on November 3, Victoria and Tennessee registered to vote. Victoria had been calling upon women to exercise their rights since January. Now that the polls were about to be opened for local elections in New York, she and Tennessee decided to set an example. Victoria was surprised by how little opposition they met; their names were eagerly recorded. Four days later, on election day, a group of women gathered at Victoria’s home before heading out en masse to put equality of citizenship to the test: “The line of battle was formed at the headquarters of woman’s rights in Thirty-eighth street,” the Herald reported, “where a solemn vow was registered, and each determined female unsheathed her parasol and swore to vote in spite of democratic denunciations and republican sneers. The elegant drawing room of Mrs. Woodhull at half-past two yesterday afternoon presented an animated appearance. A dozen intellectual ladies had there congregated, and to the accompaniment of rustling silks, flashed words of wisdom from fluent lips. Nervous but lily white hands impatiently turned the leaves of ponderous volumes, and in a flash of conscious pride the irresistible Tennie read the following fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. . .. The assembly thus satisfied themselves that the law was on their side, and confident in their right, sallied forth and swept down on the astonished inspectors.”
The World picked up the narrative: “Intense was the excitement caused yesterday at the little furniture store in Sixth avenue, which did duty as the polling-place for the Twenty-third District of the Twenty-first Ward, when a carriage and pair drove up opposite the door and from which alighted three ladies and a gentleman. No less noted personages were these than Mrs. Victoria C. Woodhull, Miss Tennie C. Claflin, Mrs. Daniels of Boston, and Judge Reymart. Both the former ladies had arrived there provided with their tickets fully prepared to test their right to vote as citizens of the United States. Since these ladies registered their names on Friday last, at which time not the slightest opposition was manifested towards them, much has been said relative to the issue of the project. Consequently there were a number of loiterers hanging about the polls yesterday anxious to catch a glimpse of the woman’s rights champion, but to their credit may it be said that they indulged in no unseemly language or behavior of any kinds and the women suffragists passed through the outer room into the smaller one beyond, where the whole paraphernalia of the ballot was in full working order under the guidance of two or three inspectors.
“‘Take your turn,’ shouted the police officer, as a rush was made to obtain a front place. Mrs. Woodhull, thinking this remark was intended for her, immediately stepped back, but American gallantry would not allow men voters to take precedence of the fair voter, the consequence was that Mrs. Woodhull found herself almost hustled into the front rank, so anxious were those present to see the issue.
“‘Holding the tiny bundle of tickets between her finger and thumb, Mrs. Woodhull, stretched forth her right hand towards the inspector, but that official deigned not to take any notice; not until Mrs. Woodhull had expressed her desire in words to record her vote.
“‘I can’t take it,’ said the inspector.
“‘You refuse to take my vote?’ rejoined Mrs. Woodhull.
“‘We can’t receive it,’ was the reply.
“‘By what right,’ continued Mrs. Woodhull, ‘do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?’
“‘By this,’ said the man, producing a copy of the first constitution of the State of New York, which reads ‘all males,’ &tc.
“‘But refer to the second article,’ replied Judge Reymart; ‘you will there find that “all citizens” are entitled to vote.’
“‘We haven’t a copy of the second constitution here,’ said the inspector, ‘and even if we had I could not take the vote.’
“‘Why?’ asked the judge.
“‘Because we were told to refuse.’
“‘I challenge you,’ continued the judge; ‘will you swear?’
“‘No.’
“‘Then I will send for a copy of the second constitution, which completely kills the first, and then see upon what authority you refuse to take the lady’s vote,’ threatened the judge.
“A messenger was thereupon dispatched to fetch the required book. Meanwhile Mrs. Woodhull crossed to the side, and the balloting went on briskly. When the constitution arrived, Judge Reymart found the place and, approaching the inspectors accompanied by Mrs. Woodhull, requested the officer to read the article which specified that no citizen shall be deprived of his privileges or immunities, &tc.
“‘I can’t look at it,’ replied the man.
“‘Can you give me a reason?’ asked the judge.
“‘I can give you no further information on the subject,’ was the response.
“‘Are you aware that you are liable to a penalty of $500?’ queried a bystander.
“‘I know nothing about it,’ responded the officer.
“Mrs. V. C. Woodhull then withdrew. Miss Tennie C. Claflin then tendered her vote, but the same answer was vouchsafed as in Mrs. Woodhull’s case. The party then retired.
“Mrs. Woodhull’s indignation was scarcely controllable.”
HER ATTEMPT TO vote did not close the suffrage chapter for Victoria, but it did put the issue in someone else’s hands: Judge Reymart had agreed to examine whether the election official who denied Victoria her right to vote had committed a crime. That left Victoria time to work with Andrews and Blood on one of her most controversial speeches to date. Steinway Hall, the largest hall of its kind in New York City, had been rented for the night of November 20 and leaflets announced that Mrs. Woodhull was to address “The Principles of Social Freedom,” which to a nineteenth-century audience, rightly or wrongly, meant she would deliver a speech on free love.
Winning the vote for women had never been Victoria’s primary goal; suffrage was only a way into the women’s movement. Victoria saw the matter of women’s equality as much more basic than the right to elect government officials, and while she had wholeheartedly embraced that cause, by November 1871 she was ready to begin promoting her own agenda. From the time she was a fifteen-year-old bride to her days as a medium when she listened to men and women seek help from beyond the grave for problems as real as hunger, abandonment, and abuse, Victoria had been building up to the point where she would broadcast her message that basic changes were needed in the very fabric of society. Victoria believed that nearly all social problems were rooted in bad marriages. Crime, poverty, intemperance, abortion, and disease were all the direct result of ill-advised coupling. For her, social freedom for women meant the right to end a bad marriage and begin again without being condemned by society.
Although divorce was possible in the second half of the nineteenth century, the social stigma attached to it was more oppressive than any law. A divorced woman was an outcast, tainted, and immediately suspected of being immoral. Even if the woman had sought a divorce on the grounds of physical cruelty, good society whispered that she must somehow have been to blame for the abuse. Her prospects for making a good second marriage were dim. But it was not just her good name or her future prospects that a woman lost in divorce; she was also forced to give up her children, who by law were the property of their father. A woman’s choices were simple: remain unhappily married and retain a home, financial security, and one’s chil
dren or get a divorce and lose the children, one’s place in society and whatever wealth one might possess. Not surprisingly, most women decided to stay married and to abide by society’s unwritten code of conduct concerning bad marriages: the union should appear to remain intact, the man should be free to indulge his passions elsewhere, and the wife should remain in the home to raise her children and accept her fate.
Victoria viewed these circumstances as cancerous and took it upon herself to change them. But to deliver such a speech in New York City, where audiences were much less accepting than her spiritualist friends in Ohio and New Jersey and where Victoria was sure to be ridiculed in the press for her radical stance, required insurance. She saw that insurance in the person of Henry Ward Beecher. If Victoria could persuade Beecher to introduce her on the platform, no one would dare criticize her as immoral, because she would have the backing of the most powerful preacher in the country. Even though Victoria engaged in violent antagonisms with his sisters, she recognized the undeniable advantage in forming an alliance with Beecher himself.
Victoria said that following her acquaintance with Tilton she met frequently with Beecher to “discuss the social problem freely in all its varied bearings.” She said she found that he agreed with nearly all her views and had even declared marriage to be the “grave of love.” He told Victoria that he “never married a couple that he did not feel condemned.” With that in mind, she decided to ask him to present her on the platform: “I was then contemplating my Steinway Hall speech on Social Freedom,” she said later, “and prepared it in the hope of being able to persuade Mr. Beecher to preside for me, and thus make a way for himself into a consistent life on the radical platform. I made my speech as soft as I conscientiously could. I toned it down in order that it might not frighten him. When it was in type, I went to his study and gave him a copy and asked him to read it carefully and give me his candid opinion concerning it.
“Meantime, I had told Mr. Tilton and Mr. Moulton [who had been negotiating a truce between Beecher and Tilton for more than a year] that I was going to ask Mr. Beecher to preside, and they agreed to press the matter with him. I explained to them that the only safety he had was in coming out as soon as possible [as] an advocate of social freedom, and thus palliate, if he could not completely justify, his practices by founding them at least on principle.
“A few days before the lecture, I sent a note to Mr. Beecher asking him to preside for me.”
The note read: “For reasons in which you are deeply interested as well as myself and the cause of truth, I desire to have an interview with you, without fail, at some hour tomorrow. Two of your sisters have gone out of their way to assail my character and purposes, both by the means of the public press and by numerous private letters written to various persons with whom they seek to injure me and thus to defeat the political ends at which I aim.
“You doubtless know that it is in my power to strike back, and in ways more disastrous than anything that can come to me; but I do not desire to do this. I simply desire justice from those from whom I have a right to expect it; and a reasonable course on your part will assist me to it. I speak guardedly, but I think you will understand me. I repeat that I must have an interview tomorrow, since I am to speak tomorrow evening at Steinway Hall and what I shall or shall not say will depend largely on the result of the interview.”
For all Beecher’s blustering bravado when he was preaching to his congregation with a choir of thirty young men and women arranged behind him, he was a coward concerning his personal life. He once wrote of his boyhood, “I had not the courage to confess, and tell the truth. First, shame hindered me; second, fear . . . and when I got to going wrong, I went on going wrong. . .. I was afraid of being found out.”
At the age of fifty-eight he was still afraid. Two years earlier, his involvement in a notorious free love scandal called the McFarland Case, in which he performed a marriage between a divorced woman and her dying lover, nearly cost Beecher his church, and now he was being asked to risk it again by associating with the Woodhull. But Tilton and Moulton warned him that to do otherwise, to decide not to appear with her, might be even more costly.
Victoria said Beecher was alarmed by her proposal: “Matters remained undecided until the day of the lecture, when I went over again to press Mr. Beecher to a decision. He said he agreed perfectly with what I was to say, but that he could not stand on the platform at Steinway Hall and introduce me. He said, ‘I should sink through the floor. I am a moral coward on the subject, and I know it, and I am not fit to stand by you, who go there to speak what you know to be the truth; I should stand there a living lie!’”
Victoria said, “He got up on the sofa on his knees beside me, and taking my face between his hands while the tears streamed down his cheeks, begged me to let him off. Becoming thoroughly disgusted with what seemed to me his pusillanimity, I left the room under the control of a feeling of contempt for the man, and reported to my friends what he had said.
“They then took me again with them and endeavoured to persuade him. Mr. Tilton said to him, ‘Mr. Beecher, some day you have got to fall.’
“‘Do you think,’ said Beecher, ‘that this thing will come out to the world?’
“Mr. Tilton replied, ‘Nothing is more certain in Earth or heaven, Mr. Beecher, and this may be your last chance to save yourself from complete ruin.’
“Mr. Beecher replied, ‘I can never endure such a terror. Oh! If it must come, let me know of it twenty four hours in advance, that I may take my own life.’
“Thoroughly out of all patience, I turned on my heel and said, ‘Mr. Beecher, if I am compelled to go upon that platform alone, I shall begin by telling the audience why I am alone, and why you are not with me.’ Again I left the room. I afterward learned that Mr. Beecher, frightened at what I had said, promised before parting with Mr. Tilton, that he would preside if he could bring his courage up to the terrible ordeal.”
He also agreed to pay for the rental of the hall, a sum of nearly two hundred dollars.
NEW YORK CITY, LATE NOVEMBER 1871
Placards announcing Victoria’s speech were mounted around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
In Its Last Analysis:
The Social Relations.
If it is good in the Religious and Political sphere who shall dare deny that it is good in
The Social Sphere?
For the express purpose of silencing the voices and stopping the pens of those who, either ignorantly or willfully, persistently misrepresent, slander, abuse and vilify her on account of her outspoken advocacy of, and supreme faith in, God’s first, last and best law,
Victoria C. Woodhull
Will Speak At
Steinway Hall,
Monday, November 20,
at Eight P.M., on
“The Principles of Social Freedom,”
Involving the Question of
Free Love, Marriage, Divorce and Prostitution.
She wishes it to be distinctly understood that freedom does not mean anarchy in the social relations any more than it does in religion and politics; also that the advocacy of its principles requires neither abandoned action nor immodest speech.
Horace Greeley, Governor Hawley, of Connecticut,
and the Boston Exclusives
are specially invited to seats on the platform.
All her lesser defamers should secure front seats.
A New York Herald reporter said that the night of November 20 was so wet and disagreeable that the city’s streets were virtually empty, but when he arrived at Steinway Hall it was as if the entire city populace had turned out. The New York Times said the crowd was one of the largest ever, with estimates of up to three thousand people massed outside the hall in the pouring rain to hear the terrible Victoria Woodhull make good on her threat to discuss free love. The Herald reported: “Immense placards covering the bulletin boards and announcing the lecture of Mrs. Woodhull, printed on yellow sheets of
paper, greeted the eye on every side. The entrance and vestibule of Steinway Hall were already crowded with people of both sexes, among whom were several children of a tender age. The stairs leading up to the entrance were thickly swarming with people, the strongest and most masculine being nearest the door, as is always the case. As it was half an hour before the doors were open there was considerable sky-larking and rough by-play among those who were compelled to wait, and as most of the ugly old women in attendance objected to this sort of jocularity, the fun became quite uproarious for a few minutes until the door opened.
“Our reporter found his way into the hall, which was but dimly lighted at the moment. Several young ladies of very bold behavior passed him at the gate door, evidently professional and unfortunate in character. Then came a stream of very respectable-looking people—men and women—some few of the latter having cultured faces. A red headed girl bounced in, saying as she threw off her shawl, ‘I hope, by gosh! I haven’t come here for nothing in all this rain,’ and then she bounced down into a seat and held her place.
“While waiting for the hall to fill, which occurred very rapidly, our reporter paid a visit behind the scenes to call upon Mrs. Victoria Woodhull. Going through a side door, he found that lady in a little room off in a narrow passage, standing talking to her sister, Tennie C. Claflin, with a roll of manuscript in her hands. The Woodhull had an inspired look, and it was very evident that the spirit of Demosthenes, a familiar of hers, was upon the lady.”
For the occasion of her scandalous lecture Victoria was dressed conservatively in black, a watch-chain pendant her only jewelry and a tea rose at her throat her only decoration. She was visibly agitated. Possibly the case of nerves was brought on by the boisterous and growing crowd outside, the knowledge of the outrage her subject was sure to provoke, or perhaps by Beecher’s absence. With just minutes to go before she was to walk onstage, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher had not appeared. He had left Victoria alone to preach the doctrine in which they both believed but which he would not defend in public.