Notorious Victoria (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Notorious Victoria Grace Farrell Notorious Victoria. By Mary Gabriel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1998. xi + 372 pp. $24.95. Victoria Woodhull, or Mrs. Satan as she was dubbed in the nineteenth century, was a spiritualist, financier, free-love advocate, publisher, and presidential candidate, as well as a con artist and probably a blackmailer and prostitute. After the Civil War, with carnivalesque road shows featuring the sale of sham medicine and communication with the dead, she and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, supported an extended family, which included parents, in-laws, and even an ex-husband. Later, Woodhull earned her family’s keep by going on lecture tours to preach woman suffrage and free love. Maintaining a level of notoriety kept the gate receipts high. Two recent biographies of Victoria Woodhull (and the reviews they have spawned) have disseminated an erroneous portrait of her as a leader of the nineteenth-century suffrage movement. Notorious Victoria, by Mary Gabriel, which is billed as the more scholarly of the two, describes Woodhull as the dominant voice of the woman suffrage movement during 1871–73. This statement is not accurate. Woodhull was able—for about a year—to insinuate herself into the movement by gaining a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on the same day, 11 January 1871, that the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) Convention was held in Washington. Gabriel implies that Woodhull slept with Massachusetts Congressman General Benjamin Butler in exchange for her invitation to address the committee. Only after arriving in Washington did Susan B. Anthony and the convention organizer, Isabella Beecher Hooker, learn of the Woodhull hearing. A meeting of leading suffragists was held to determine a response. As Lillie Devereux Blake, author of Fettered For Life (1874) and Woman’s Place To-day (1883) and leader of the New York delegation, wrote, Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, “up to this time . . . had never been connected in any way with the Woman Suffrage Movement”(Blake, Autobiography [ms. housed in the Missouri Historical Society] xxiv: 1). As Blake saw it, the suffrage leaders had but two choices: “either let Mrs. Woodhull appear as the sole representative of the reform, or go with her before the Committee and themselves plead for the cause with such grave and judicious arguments as they knew so well how to employ” (xxiv: 2). The suffragists appeared at the hearing. Although presented as a breakthrough in suffrage thought, Woodhull’s position—that a voting rights amendment was unnecessary because, under the wording of the Constitution, women already could vote—had earlier been voiced by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Subsequently, quid pro quo, Woodhull was invited to speak at the NWSA Convention. Gabriel writes that by May 1871, Woodhull “was already [the movement’s] acknowledged leader” (95). Nothing could be further from the facts. Anthony, always sympathetic to the unconventional, was initially charmed by Woodhull, but, when droves of women began boycotting NWSA meetings, vowing [End Page 265] to hold out until this “acknowledged leader” was no longer invited, Anthony began to pull back and try to distance Woodhull from the NWSA. Stanton, many of whose radical ideas Woodhull assumed, defended Woodhull’s right to speak. By January 1872, Woodhull had been effectively marginalized from the movement. Stanton and Anthony alone appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Woodhull was limited to a speech on spiritualism at the NWSA Convention. Gabriel, however, does not mention Woodhull’s omission from the hearing and, with rhetoric such as “under the guidance of Victoria Woodhull,” conveys the impression that Woodhull was the leader of the convention. Woodhull was indeed the center of much attention, with leaders of the movement called upon to explain her inclusion (however minimal) in the proceedings. Gabriel quotes extensively from Anthony’s justification speech but does so out of context, thus letting it stand as if it were fulsome praise for Woodhull. Gabriel also quotes Isabella Beecher Hooker’s lengthy instructions to Woodhull on dress and demeanor as evidence of Hooker’s unfailing support. She seems to be unaware that Hooker often conveyed, with enough fawning praise to mitigate insult, just such uninvited suggestions even to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who she also feared might...