Woodhull, Victoria (Claflin)

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WOODHULL, Victoria (Claflin)

Born 23 September 1838, Homer, Ohio; died 10 June 1927, Bredon's Norton, Worcestershire, England

Daughter of Reuben B. and Roxanna Hummel Claflin; married Canning Woodhull, 1853; James Blood, 1866; John B. Martin, 1883

Victoria Woodhull was the seventh child of an itinerant worker who married a tavernkeeper's daughter in Pennsylvania and moved with her to Ohio. Woodhull and Tennessee Celeste, a younger sister, both demonstrated psychic powers in early childhood. These were exploited as the family, leaving Ohio hurriedly after a suspicious fire in Claflin's grist mill, set up a traveling medicine show promising psychic cures for a variety of physical ailments. Although Woodhull had little schooling, she was clearly an ambitious, intelligent child with extraordinary physical beauty and a strong sense of destiny. Her first marriage was a failure, although she had two children.

In 1868 obeying Woodhull's vision that fame and fortune awaited her in a city crowded with ships, she and Tennessee moved to New York City. For almost a decade, Woodhull was a notorious figure in New York, famous for her brilliance as an orator; her vigorous espousal of free love, spiritualism, woman suffrage, and the rights of workers; her establishment of a brokerage business in male-dominated Wall Street; and her publishing venture, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. Cornelius Vanderbilt provided help in her financial venture, but it was Woodhull's intensity, courage, and beauty that won not only public support for her causes but also the interest of public men such as the editor Theodore Tilton, the philosopher Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Congressman Benjamin F. Butler, an advocate of woman suffrage.

Woodhull earned the enmity of Henry Ward Beecher when she accused him of secretly practicing the free love doctrines she openly espoused. After publishing details of an alleged liaison between Beecher and Tilton's wife in her weekly magazine, Woodhull was attacked by the moralist Anthony Comstock and imprisoned for sending obscene matter through the mails. The suit was dismissed, but Woodhull, who at the height of her fame had been named the Equal Rights Party's candidate for president (black leader Frederick Douglass was nominated for vice president), had lost money, prestige, and health in the struggle. Shortly after Vanderbilt's death, Woodhull and Tennessee left for England amid rumors that money for the trip had been provided by Vanderbilt's son and heir, who did not wish the sisters to testify in a lawsuit contesting his father's will.

In England, Woodhull gave lectures such as "The Human Body, the Temple of God" and attracted the interest of her third husband, a banker. The prosperous comfort of her last years in England was a surprising end to her sensational career as lecturer, propagandist, and free thinker. Yet she continued to write and to publicize herself, attempting to refute through the press and by legal action those whom she accused of persecuting her. Woodhull's new causes—eugenics, a single moral standard, and educational reform—were pursued as vociferously as her earlier ones.

Although Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly—which was the first U.S. magazine to publish Marx's Communist Manifesto— reflected Woodhull's ideas, as did her lectures, there is a question as to how much of what was published under her name she actually wrote. Colonel Blood, her second husband, was an experienced writer and propagandist, and the commonly held notion that he wrote much of what she signed may be correct. On the other hand, Woodhull herself wrote extensively after their divorce.

Despite her lack of formal education, Woodhull had un-doubted originality and intelligence, and a driving force that helped her rise from a childhood of poverty and social ostracism to become an internationally known spokeswoman for human freedom.

Other Works:

Origins, Tendencies, and Principles of Government (1871). Speech on Labor and Capital before the Labor Reform League (1871). Speech on the Principles of Finance (1871). The Elixir of Life (1873). Tried by Fire (1874). Breaking the Seals (1875). A Fragmentary Record of Public Work (1887). Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race (1888). The Garden of Eden (1890). The Human Body, the Temple of God (1890). The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit (1891). Humanitarian Money (1892).

Bibliography:

Anker, C., and I. Rosenberg, Onward Victoria: A Musical (1979). Johnston, J., Mrs. Satan: The Incredible Saga of Victoria C. Woodhull (1967). Marberry, M., Vicky: A Biography of Victoria C. Woodhull (1967). Sachs, E., "The Terrible Siren": Victoria Woodhull, 1838-1927 (1928).