There is a great PBS featured documentary on Victoria Woodhull; AMERICA'S VICTORIA, REMEMBERING VICTORIA WOODHULL . Kate Capshaw performs the role of Woodhull. Historians and feminis Gloria Steinem offer great commentary.
The First Woman to Run for President
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Mainstream suffragists like Anthony and Stanton, once delighted by this mystical upstart, supported New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley for the White House against President Ulysses Grant. And they watched in dismay as a scandal about sex put her in jail.
The scandal involved Henry Ward Beecher, a famed Brooklyn preacher and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Bothered by Beecher's condemnation of her "free love" attitudes—"I have an inalienable and natural right to love whom I may, to love for as long or as short a period as I can, and to change that love every day if I please," she said—Woodhull published reports in her newspaper that the moral prig himself had an affair that led to the breakup of a marriage.
In response, Beecher directed what might be called a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against Woodhull. Anthony Comstock, a prude, prodded federal prosecutors to charge Woodhull with obscenity for her published accounts of Beecher's affair.
With the charges, Woodhull fell as ferociously as she rose. She lost her home twice and once found herself living on the streets. Judges set bail at $16,000 for the sisters, an absurdly high amount for the day. Her former friends ignored her plight, underscoring the verity that the way you treat people on the way up affects how they treat you on the way down. Woodhull spent Election Day in cell 11 at the Ludlow Street Jail.
After the election--in which she received thousands of write-in votes—Woodhull prevailed in the obscenity case and resumed her lucrative speaking career, giving speeches titled "The Naked Truth" and "Moral Cowardice and Modern Hypocrisy."
And then in 1877, she left. With $100,000 Vanderbilt left Woodhull and her sister in his will, the sisters moved to England to begin a new life. Victoria lived until she was 90, beloved by all who knew her there. Toward the end, she denied that she had ever espoused the free-love ideas that caused such controversy in America. In her new life, she reinvented herself the way she once tried to reinvent American politics.
Victoria Woodhull and Hillary Clinton are completely different women from different times. But the way they stirred ideas and emotions tells us something important about American politics. Both were charismatic stars and the subjects of rampant gossip. Both were hated by their opponents and subjected to constant personal attacks. Both were ridiculed for their attitudes about monogamy—Woodhull for her "free love" notions and Clinton for "standing by her man." Both embraced a goofy spiritualism—remember Clinton's séances with Eleanor Roosevelt—and radical new theories about the family.
Both were driven politically by their husbands and were attacked for those relationships. They were both criticized for shady-looking stock deals. Both bewailed the hypocrites of their time who preached rigid values but could not uphold those values.
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