The Present Crisis: The Naked Truth, or, The Situation Reviewed!

November 7, 2022 11:07 PM

150 years ago, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president - "Letter to the New York Herald, April 2, 1871 - I claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised woman of the country and announce myself as a candidate for the presidency."[1,2,3] (previously)

My name is Amanda Frisken, and I wrote the book "Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution."[4] Woodhull came from an unusual family, the Claflins. She grew up in a small town in Ohio, but they moved a lot, kind of traveling salesman, catch-as-catch-can. And at the age of 14, Woodhull was married off by her parents to a man who proved to be an alcoholic. And she had a pretty hard life with him. She was traveling around when she said she had a revelation to go out there and declare her right to be a woman in public and to be a powerful woman. And so she packed up and came to New York.

The 19th Century Advocate For 'Free Love' and Women's Liberty (Victoria Woodhull and the Free Love Movement) - "The freedom to love who you want to love, without government interference, might seem like a relatively new thing, but the push for this ideal goes as far back as the 19th century -- with Victoria Woodhull and the Free Love Movement."

Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but as a community, to see I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing else.

Mrs. Woodhull Goes to Washington: The First Female Presidential Candidate Petitions For Women's Suffrage - "'No taxation without representation' is a right that was fundamentally established at the very birth of our country's independence; by what ethics does any free government impose taxes on women without giving them a voice upon the subject or a participation in the public declaration as to how and by whom these taxes shall be applied for common public use?"

When she went on to deliver her argument to the Judiciary Committee nine days later, on January 11, many around the country took notice, with newspapers ranging from the Washington Evening Star to the Owyhee Avalanche in Idaho printing small pieces on Woodhull’s petition. It was covered mostly as a curiosity, with the press tending to focus on the women’s outfits or their suffragette status rather than the actual substance of their speeches...

Who is Victoria Woodhull? - "Instead of debating Victoria on the issues, her opponents attacked her personally. They called her everything from a witch to a prostitute. They accused her of having affairs with married men."

At first, Victoria responded to the slanders by taking the high road and ignoring the abuse. She believed that the private matters of public figures were just that, "private." Still, the rumors didn't subside, and she found she had to justify her private behavior in public which led to her open advocacy of social freedom, also known as "free love." She equated freedom of the affections with freedom of religion:

Free love means nothing more and nothing less, in kind, than free worship, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, free trade, free thought, freedom of locomotion (without a passport system), free schools, free government, and the hundred other precious, special systems of social freedom, which the great heroes of thought have fought for, and partially secured for the world, during this last period of the world's growth and expansion. It is all one and the same thing, it is just freedom and nothing else.

--Victoria Woodhull in her speech "The Naked Truth."[5: 'Immediately after the speech, federal authorities arrested her on obscenity charges.']

The rumors eventually led Victoria and her family to be evicted from their home. They literally spent one night homeless on the streets of New York because landlords were afraid to rent to the "Wicked Woodhull." Victoria believed certain members of the Beecher family--Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe--were responsible for the insidious rumors. In desperation, Victoria and her second husband Col. Blood wrote to Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.[6] They asked him to help put an end to the persecution. Rev. Beecher turned a cold shoulder to them. Because Henry Ward Beecher refused to listen to her pleas, Victoria felt there was no choice but to fight back and reveal the hypocrisy of her attackers. She published the story of Rev. Beecher's affair with a married woman hoping that his family would stop the personal attacks. Instead, they enlisted the help of the United States marshals and Anthony Comstock of the YMCA.

The first female presidential candidate spent election day in jail. The U.S. government arrested her under the Comstock Act for sending "obscene" literature through the mail. (As late as 1996, part of this act was still in effect within the Internet Communications Decency Act in Title V of the Telecommunications Act.) The alleged obscenity wasn't pornography. The obscenity consisted of articles about stockbroker Luther Challis and about Rev. Beecher's affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of Beecher's best friend, Theodore Tilton. At first, people took the side of the government. They were glad to see the "Wicked Woodhull" in jail for smearing a celebrity preacher. As time went by, though, they realized that the principle of free speech was at stake. Victoria, her sister Tennie C., and her second husband Col. James H. Blood were in jail for publishing what they believed to be the truth. The government didn't care if it was the truth. They wanted to destroy Victoria Woodhull and her newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. Some members of the press joined in. A Chicago Tribune editor admitted to an intentional campaign to destroy her. He said, "Editors know that all she has said about Beecher is true, and we must either indorse her and make her the most popular woman in the world, or write her down and crush her out; and we have determined to do the latter."

First Woman to Run for President of the United States - "Victoria Woodhull (1838– June 9, 1927) was a leader of the women's suffrage movement. She was the first woman to own a brokerage firm on Wall Street, the first woman to start a weekly newspaper, and an activist for women's rights and labor reform... although she had received encouragement from Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists, Anthony withdrew her support because Woodhull was too outspoken and radical even for them."

In 1877, the now-bankrupt Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie left to start a new life in England. Woodhull made her first public appearance as a lecturer at St. James Hall in London on December 4, 1877. Her lecture was called “The Human Body, the Temple of God,”[7,8] a lecture which she had previously presented in the United States.

Present at one of Woodhull’s lectures was the wealthy banker John Biddulph Martin. They began to see each other and were married on October 31, 1883. (His family disapproved of the marriage.) From then on, she was known as Victoria Woodhull Martin. Under that name, she published the magazine The Humanitarian from 1892 to 1901, remained active in the British women’s suffrage movement and various causes, and worked to distance herself from her former radical ideas on sex and love

After her husband died in 1901, Woodhull Martin gave up publishing and retired to the country, establishing residence at Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, England.

"And the truth shall make you free" : a speech on the principles of social freedom, delivered in Steinway Hall, Nov. 20, 1871 - "This speech defends Woodhull's advocacy of free love or social freedom, which served to create divisions within the women's rights movement and led eventually to her ostracism by some women's rights associations." (LOC, pdf)

posted by kliuless (2 comments total)

Wonderful post!

Woodhull was a pioneer in every sense of the word, and her writing seems as fresh and revolutionary to me as if she had just hit 'send' and closed her laptop.

Which goes to show how little progress we’ve made in the last 150 years toward realizing her visions, I suppose.
posted by jamjam at 12:26 AM on November 8, 2022

She was also the subject of a Broadway musical!
posted by pxe2000 at 6:17 AM on November 8, 2022