Notorious Victoria

by Mary Gabriel

  Groups of her regular supporters visited her backstage before her lecture to wish her “God speed.” Finally Tilton and Moulton arrived, but they had not brought Beecher. Tilton said he found Victoria in an anteroom crying. She told him, he said, that “she did not believe there was a courageous man on the face of the earth.”

  Victoria later said, “Mr. Tilton then insisted on going on the platform with me and presiding, to which I finally agreed, and that I should not at that time mention Mr. Beecher.”

  They emerged together: “Mrs. Woodhull, followed by Tennie Claflin and the body of reporters and preceded by the god-like Tilton, marched onto the stage,” the Herald reported. “As Tilton got on the stage his friend Moulton cried to him” ‘Are you going to introduce Mrs. Woodhull to the audience Tilton?’

  “‘Yes, by heaven,’ said the flowery Tilton, ‘since no one else has the pluck to do it.’

  “As Mrs. Woodhull walked on the stage timorously, everywhere a great shout of applause went up for her from the audience, which had literally packed every seat on the ground floor, in the two galleries and which occupied every foot of standing room in the aisles. A hundred ravenous male bipeds leaned over the platform, standing up in front of the audience, and not less than three thousand persons were present, nearly half of whom belonged to the gentler sex of the Free Love persuasion. The immediate friends both male and female of Mrs. Woodhull crowded the boxes on either side of the stage. . ..

  “Mr. Theodore Tilton led Mrs. Woodhull upon the platform and, in introducing her, said:

  “‘Ladies and gentlemen: Happening to have an unoccupied night, which is an unusual thing for me in the lecture season, I came to this meeting, actuated by curiosity to know what my friend would have to say in regard to the great question which has occupied her so many years of life. I was met at the door by a member of the committee who informed me that several gentlemen had been applied to, particularly within the circuit of these two or three neighboring cities; to know whether they would occupy the platform and preside on this occasion. Every one had declined one after the other, for various reasons, the chief among them being—first, objections to the lady’s character and second, objections to the lady’s views.

  “‘I was told she was coming upon this stand unattended and alone. Now, as to her character, I know it, and believe in it, vouch for it. [Applause and a few hisses.] As to her views she will give them to you herself in a few moments, and you may judge for yourself. It may be that she is a fanatic, it may be that I am a fool; but, before high heaven, I would rather be both fanatic and fool in one than to be such a coward as would deny to a woman the sacred right of free speech. [Applause.]

  “‘I desire to say that five minutes ago I did not expect to appear here. Allow me the privilege of saying that with as much pride as ever prompted me to a performance of any act in fifteen or twenty years, I have the honor of introducing to you Victoria C. Woodhull, who will address you upon the subject of social freedom.’ [Applause.]”

  Victoria had been standing to the side listening to Tilton. She said later, “I shall never forget the brave words he uttered in introducing me. They had a magic influence on the audience, and drew the sting of those who intended to harm me. . .. I shall always admire the moral courage that enabled him to stand with me on that platform and face that, in part, defiant audience.”

  Victoria moved to the center of the stage and began quietly to speak: “My brothers and sisters, I come before the public at this time, upon this particular subject, notwithstanding that malicious and designing persons have sought to malign and undervalue my private life and personal motives, in a manner that shall complicate the righteous sentiment of these all-important issues. You are all aware that my private life has been pictured to the public by the press of the country with the intent to make people believe me to be a very bad woman.”

  Victoria then went on to describe the oppressive conditions under which the law dictated man’s rule over woman, how the law cannot regulate love, and how marital relations without love are adulterous. She continued: “I would not be understood to say that there are no good conditions in the present marriage state. By no means do I say this; on the contrary, a very large proportion of present social relations are commendable—are as good as the present status of society makes possible. But what I do assert, and that most positively, is, that all which is good and commendable, now existing, would continue to exist if all marriage laws were repealed tomorrow. Do you not perceive that the law has nothing to do in continuing the relations which are based on continuous love?”

  Nearly half of the huge audience rose to their feet and hissed, while the other half cheered. The hall erupted into chaos. The noise was deafening. Tilton tried to make himself heard from the platform, shouting “Ladies and gentlemen,” but his efforts at controlling the crowd were met only by more hisses.

  Stamping her foot Victoria shouted, “Let the gentleman or lady who is capable of hissing or interrupting me come forward on this platform and define their principles fairly.”

  From a front box, Victoria’s challenge was unexpectedly met by her volatile younger sister Utica Brooker. Utica had not been part of Victoria’s business or political schemes; she had been passed over by her older sister in favor of Tennessee. And though Utica had benefited from the success of Woodhull, Claflin & Co., she had grown to resent its senior partner. Utica believed she had talent—she had once tried acting and was also more beautiful than Victoria—but she could not emerge from either of her sisters’ shadows; she may have seen Steinway Hall as a way finally to step out into the light. She stood up and shouted back, though not entirely to the point, “How would you like to come into this world without knowing who your father or mother was?”

  “There are thousands of noble men and women in the world today,” Victoria responded, “who never knew who their fathers were, and God knows I do not know how many illegitimate men or women are in this hall to-night.”

  The confusion in response to this comment became so great that nothing more could be heard from the stage. Utica would not sit down as the audience cheered her. The cacophony continued unabated for ten minutes, during which time Tilton tried to calm the hall. A policeman was ordered to remove Utica, but when he tried the audience cried, “Shame!”

  Tilton once again sought to quiet the crowd by explaining that he would be happy to let Utica speak, but the event had been called for Victoria’s address and he would like the speaker to proceed. Eventually Utica was persuaded to sit down, Tilton returned to his seat, and Victoria resumed her speech with more stridency: “How can people who enter upon marriage in utter ignorance of that which is to render the union happy or miserable be able to say that they will always ‘love and live together.’ They may take these vows upon them in perfect good faith and repent of them in sackcloth and ashes within a twelve-month [period]. . ..

  “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.’ I know of no higher, holier love than that described . . .”

  Another shout came from the audience, this time not from Utica’s box. “Are you a free lover?”

  Victoria flared in reply, “Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love everyday if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. . ..

  “I have a better right to speak, as one having authority in this matter, than most of you have, since it has been my province to study it in all its various lights and shades. When I practiced clairvoyance, hundreds, aye, thousands of desolate, heart broken men as well as women, came to me for advice. And they were from all walks of life, from the humblest daily laborer to the haughtiest dame of wealth. The tales of horror, of wrongs inflicted and endured, which were poured into my ears,
first awakened me to a realization of the hollowness and rottenness of society, and compelled me to consider whether the laws which were prolific of so much crime and misery as I found to exist should be continued. . ..

  “What can be more terrible than for a delicate, sensitively organized woman to be compelled to endure the presence of a beast in the shape of a man, who knows nothing beyond the blind passion with which he is filled, and to which is often added the delirium of intoxication? You do not need to be informed that there are many persons who, during the acquaintance preceding marriage, preserve that delicacy, tenderness and regard for womanly sensitiveness and modest refinement which are characteristic of true women, thus winning and drawing out their lovenature to the extreme, but who, when the decree has been pronounced which makes them indissolubly theirs, cast all these aside and reveal themselves in their true character. . ..

  “I know I speak the truth . . . when I say that thousands of the most noble, loving natured women by whom the world has ever blessed, prepared for, and desirous of pouring their whole life into the bond of union . . . have all had these generous and warm impulses thrust back upon them by the rude monster into which the previous gentleman developed. To these natures thus frosted and stultified in their fresh youth and vigor, life becomes a burden almost too terrible to be borne, and thousands of pallid cheeks, sunken eyes, distorted imaginations and diseased functions testify too directly and truly to leave a shade of doubt as to their real cause.

  “I am fully persuaded that the very highest sexual unions are monogamic, and that these are perfect in proportion as they are lasting. Now if to this be added the fact that the highest kind of love is that which is utterly freed from and devoid of selfishness, and whose highest gratification comes from rendering its object the greatest amount of happiness depend upon whatever it may, then you have my ideal of the highest order of love and the most perfect degree of order to which humanity can attain. . .. Love is that which exists to do good, not merely to get good. . ..

  “Were the relations of the sexes thus regulated, misery, crime and vice would be banished, and the pale wan face of female humanity replaced by one glowing with radiant delight and healthful bloom. . .. Contemplate this, and then denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.”

  Victoria’s address lasted two hours. The Herald called it the “most astonishing doctrine ever listened to by an audience of Americans,” and added, “For an audience of three thousand people to applaud, and even to listen patiently, to the sentiments expressed last night is a deplorable state of affairs.”

  Victoria had violated Victorian decorum in the extreme. In their quest for gentility, the middle class and the newly rich in America had confined to whispers all words having to do with parts of the body normally covered by clothing. They had purged all words related to the sex act, from pregnancy to rape to abortion. Victoria had not only uttered the unutterable, but she had spoken as one who had intimate knowledge of the subject. Immoral was among the mildest epithets she earned by her performance.

  Henry Bowen, Beecher’s protector at The Independent, published a brief but scathing commentary on the speech: “Demosthenes used to speak with a pebble in his mouth on the shore of the many-sounding sea; but, if we may believe all we hear, he is practicing now with a mouthful of dirt. The seance at Steinway Hall, on Monday evening last, at which the distinguished Greek, ‘hiding under a woman’s gown,’ held forth to a rabble more boisterous than the waves, on the subject of Free Love, was certainly one of the dirtiest meetings that has ever been held in New York.”

  As for Tilton, what little stature he had retained following the publication of his biography of Victoria was gone. His lecture dates were canceled, invitations were withdrawn. He became a pariah for championing the woman who dared deliver such a speech. Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun declared of the pair, “Theodore Woodhull for President and Victoria Tilton for vice.”

  Victoria, frustrated, later tried to explain in notes what she had meant in her speech: “Free love is not what I asked for nor what I pleaded for. What I asked for was educated love that one’s daughter be taught to love rightly that she could under no circumstances love unworthily.”

  But as is often the case, the public chose to hear what it wanted to hear—a scandal—and the demand for Victoria on the lecture circuit only increased. Within forty-eight hours of her speech she received thirteen invitations to repeat it elsewhere. Audiences wanted to hear for themselves just how bad Victoria Woodhull was.

  NEW YORK CITY, DECEMBER 1871

  In December 1871, the American sections of the International Workingmen’s Association were busy planning a funeral procession in New York City for three communards recently put to death in Paris by the French government. The execution of the twenty-seven-year-old general Louis Nathaniel Rossel and two of his men aroused indignation even among those Americans who had little sympathy for the revolutionaries. The Paris Commune had been squelched just two short months earlier in 1871, and killing its leaders a half year later seemed not only unnecessary but a breach of etiquette in the rules of war.

  The funeral march was scheduled for Sunday, December 10. It was to form at the Cooper Institute, move up Fifth Avenue, and then head down to the Lincoln monument at Union Square, where a wreath would be laid. But the day before, the police published a terse statement in the Herald that forbade the march. It said that the procession would not be allowed because it was scheduled for a Sunday; it also said that the police reserved the right to “take the necessary measures to prevent the parade” if its organizers proceeded with their plans.

  On Sunday, disgusted by the arbitrary police order and determined to defy it, a group of marchers gathered as scheduled at the Cooper Institute. It was generally agreed, in the press and on the street, that the police had called off the march because they were afraid the Internationalists would disturb church services along their route. Also, as The Sun reported, “It would never do to suffer the Fifth avenue folks to be driven from their accustomed Sunday afternoon promenade by the International funeral processions.”

  The police were steadfast in their determination to stop the march. New York Police Captain Thomas Byrnes described the day: “At 1:50 P.M. about seventy persons, belonging to an organization known as the International Working-men’s Association, assembled near the Cooper Institute, with a flag in the hand of one of the members, who placed himself at the head of the crowd and in an excited and boisterous manner started and marched up Third avenue to Tenth street, through said street to Fourth avenue, down the avenue to Seventh street. At this point the mob had increased to about one hundred and fifty men and boys. Captain Byrnes here ordered the men of his command to request them to disperse, which they refused to do, and upon their so refusing, he, the captain, ordered the arrest of the leaders.”

  Six Internationalists were carted off to jail and the march was shut down. But while the police had won that particular battle, they had also gone a long way toward losing the war. The police had given the American communists their own martyrs and did more to arouse sympathy for the movement than any number of marches or speeches or strikes could ever do.

  Victoria had been in Washington during the march, making herself a nuisance at the convention of the American Woman’s Suffrage Association. It was the first AWSA meeting in Washington and it came less than a year after Victoria had conquered the town with her memorial before the House committee. She was not prepared to relinquish her dominance to the dreaded Bostonian branch, so she arrived ahead of them to, as one reporter noted, act as a “wet blanket” on their meeting.

  Victoria was not allowed into the convention, but she made sure copies of her memorial and Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly were distributed in the hall; she stationed young boys at the entrance to hand out the Weekly free of charge. When the leaders of the convention discovered the devilish tract among them, they hired more youths to round them up and remove them from the
auditorium. But in the chaos of the evening, many copies were missed and the leadership was constantly reminded of Victoria when they looked out over the audience and saw the overheated women in attendance fanning their faces with Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.

  By the time Victoria returned to New York, her section and Section 9 of the International Workingmen’s Association were engaged in planning a second march in honor of General Rossel and his comrades for the following Sunday, December 17. The parade was to take place along exactly the same route as the canceled procession and at exactly the same time, without regard for the Fifth Avenue promenade or the churches whose worshipers might be inconvenienced by the funeral cortege. The first march had been expected to attract a few hundred participants; the second one, thanks to the New York police crackdown, was expected to draw thousands.

  Long before the scheduled 1:00 P.M. start of the parade, crowds began gathering at the Cooper Institute. Astor Place was filled, and Third Avenue, the Bowery, and the side streets were lined with people. From every window a half dozen or more faces peered down on the gathering, and the trees in the triangular park in front of the institute sagged under the weight of street urchins who’d climbed up to get a better view of the spectacle. News vendors and apple sellers were hustling to keep up with the surge of customers.

  The gray December day was dotted with red. Everywhere were red ribbons, sashes, banners, and scarves. But the atmosphere was far from festive. Despite the mad rushing about, there was a funereal solemnity hanging over the crowd—except for the rogues on hand to pick pockets and generally cause a disturbance.

  Victoria and Tennessee were among about two dozen women who were to march near the head of the parade. The arrival of the two sisters was the occasion of much delight among a gang of youths who had heard of but never seen the daring pair. The sisters were cornered in an alcove at the Seventh Street end of the Cooper Institute and surrounded by a crowd fifty deep that shouted “Speech! Speech!” But neither Victoria nor Tennessee was prepared to deliver an address, no matter how insistent the audience, and the throng grew restless and irritated. A Sun reporter nearby said the youths began badgering the sisters. “Which is Tennie?” “Lor’ ain’t she homely?” “Let me through, I’m a free lover.” The taunts continued for more than an hour, with each new jeer greeted by laughter. The reporter noted the sisters bore up bravely, with only Colonel Blood and Stephen Pearl Andrews to shield them from the mob.