| Woodhull, Victoria Claflin |
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Unorthodox feminist, radical (1838-1927) |  |
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Born into a poor Midwestern family, sisters Victoria and Tennessee Claflin spent part of their childhood working in the family's travelling medicine show. After a failed early marriage, Victoria Claflin Woodhull joined her sister for further travels. Energetic, curious and decidedly nonconformist, she became immersed in spiritualism, utopian socialism, women's rights and an array of radical causes. Eventually settling in New York City in 1868, Woodhull became a prominent figure on the national political landscape for a brief, stormy period. |
 | | Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927), social refo | | © 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin |
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Soon after their arrival in New York, the sisters broke into the male preserve of Wall Street by forming their own successful brokerage firm. In 1870, they founded Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, a political journal described by one historian as "strident, eccentric, and outraging. Short skirts, free love, legalized prostitution; tax, housing, and dietary reform; world government and thinly veiled blackmail competed in its columns for attention. Sordid tales of Wall Street fraud made the Weekly an early pioneer in muckraking." Already surrounded by controversy, Woodhull declared herself the first woman candidate for President of the United States in 1870. Leaders of the women's suffrage movement courted Woodhull's participation but soon balked at her radical rhetoric and outrageous public behavior. Her uncompromising, flamboyant style led to mounting troubles. The year 1872 saw Woodhull beset by personal scandals; abandoned by feminists, socialists and Wall Street patrons alike; jailed on obscenity charges for publishing details of a political opponent's extramarital affair in the Weekly; and, not surprisingly, losing the presidential election by a wide margin. In the decades that followed, Woodhull continued her writing and activism, though with tempered views and a more decorous public profile.
SOURCE: Notable American Women. |
