Free Woman (14 page)

Warming up now, her voice began to rise. Her cheeks seemed on fire, so rich was the color of her skin. She continued to attack marriage. Calling it "slavery," she declared that it is better to break up a bad marriage than continue in misery. "All that is good and commendable now existing would continue to exist if all marriage laws were repealed tomorrow!"

A gasp began in the back of Steinway Hall and slowly spread to the front. Amid the hisses was a scattering of applause.

"Any lady or gentleman in the audience who is hissing may come up on the platform with me," she challenged.

Off to the left, a woman stood up in a box. It was Vicky's sister Utica.

"How would you like to come into this world without knowing who your mother or father was?" Utica shouted.

The audience cheered and whooped. Men tossed their hats in the air. "Answer that!" yelled a woman in the balcony, waving her handkerchief.

"There are thousands of noble men and women in the world today who never knew who their fathers were," Vicky fired right back.

Pausing for a moment to wipe her forehead, she began talking about the need for a sexual revolution. Never discussing sex is false modesty, she said. Sex that is not based on love is wrong. One day in the future, "free love" would be accepted as normal and natural.

"Are you a free lover?" she heard someone shout. Finally the dangerous question had been asked in public. Three thousand people looked at her. She saw a sea of upturned faces gazing at her in silence, barely breathing, waiting to hear her answer.

"Yes!" she said in her grandest voice. "Yes. I am a free lover!"

The crowd broke into cheers and hoots. Vicky's voice rang out. "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."

Her written speech forgotten, Vicky pleaded with the audience. "I dearly prize the good opinion of my fellow beings," she said plaintively. "I want so much to have you think well of me. It is because I love you all that I tell you my vision of the future."

Stretching out her arms, she explained what she believed in her innermost heart.

"The love that I cannot command is not mine," she said in a hushed voice. "Let me not disturb myself about it, nor attempt to filch it from its rightful owners. Rather let me leave my doors and windows open, intent only on living so nobly that the best cannot fail to be drawn to me by irresistible attraction."

Dropping her hands to her sides, she turned and sailed off the stage.

9

Campaigning

Hark! the herald angels sing,
 

Glory to the newborn King.

Vicky pressed her forehead against the frosty windowpane and sat motionless as she looked down at the carolers on Twenty-third Street. Tonight was Christmas Eve, but no holiday spirit warmed her heart this year. She was living in a rented room in a boardinghouse on East Twenty-third Street.

Only days after that dreadful calamity at Steinway Hall, the owner of her Murray Hill mansion had requested her to leave. He could not have her kind of woman as a tenant, he had informed her.

Theodore had warned her to expect unpleasant consequences. "It was not your prepared speech which did the damage," he told her. "It was the remarks you made in response to the audience. You said violent things, Vicky. Violent."

Wall Street agreed. For a long time there had been gossip about Mrs. Woodhull. Her customers could—and did— ignore the whispers and innuendoes. They continued to patronize her company because she happened to be an excellent investment counselor. But now that she had publicly proclaimed her shocking beliefs, many felt they could no longer associate with her. They began taking their business elsewhere.

Vicky felt herself on a treadmill to disaster. Her bank account kept dwindling as money poured out to pay bills, especially for the
Weekly.
Little came in, except her lecture fees.

The loss of her splendid house had affected her deeply. Nearly all the fine furnishings had already been sold. But the shell remained—the glittering chandeliers, the gilt cornices, and the silk brocade walls in the dining room. Mourning, she had packed up boxes and valises.

James and Tennie searched for new quarters, a place where the family could live cheaply. The result was this boardinghouse on Twenty-third Street. It was clean, Vicky had to admit, and guests were served plenty of meat and potatoes each night in the dining room. But her days of living like a queen seemed over.

Tonight she couldn't help remembering other Christmases in the house on Thirty-eighth Street. On Christmas Eve her cook would prepare an elaborate feast. The dining room would be garlanded with pine branches, holly, and roses. The table itself was decorated down its great white length with fruit and flowers and tall red tapers.

Vicky's family and friends would sit down to a dinner of many courses: scalloped oysters and Tennessee ham and roast duck with currant sauce, wild rice and beaten biscuits, cantaloupe pickle and spiced cranberries. For dessert, there would be blancmange with brandied apricots, ice cream, nuts, marzipan fruits, and coffee. Iced Roman punch, a heady mixture of rum, champagne and lemon sherbet, flowed freely all evening.

Achingly, she recalled the sounds and smells of Christmas morning, the ooh's and shrieks of the children gathered around the ceiling-high fir tree. Even Byron would be caught up in the excitement. After the gifts had been opened, they would all sit down to a merry, noisy breakfast. Cook would bring out platters loaded with Spanish mackerel, steak, bacon, and fried apples, and buckwheat cakes.

Now it all seemed so long ago. Turning from the window, she said her prayers and went to bed.

The election year of 1872 was to prove a turbulent one for American politics and for the country's only female candidate. The new year, which Vicky had looked forward to with so little hope, began on an unexpectedly bright note. Once again the feminists were holding their January convention in Washington, the same event at which Vicky had won their admiration a year ago. Despite Vicky's recent troubles, the spirit of sisterhood triumphed after all. Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony, remembering how much they owed Vicky, invited her to address the convention.

When some of the delegates complained, Susan squelched the criticism. Instead, at the convention she went out of her way to pay tribute to Vicky, who sat on the platform in a midnight-blue suit. Susan told the feminists that, on her lecture tours, people repeatedly questioned her about Mrs. Woodhull. Why, they had asked, do you make her your leader?

"I told them," Susan recounted, "that we don't make leaders. They make themselves. If any can accomplish a more brilliant effort than Victoria Woodhull, let him or her go ahead and they will be leaders, too."

Full of affection for the women's movement, Vicky left Washington with an inspired new plan in her mind. Last May, she had boldly challenged the feminists to secede from the union if they were not granted their rights. Since then, of course, no such rights had been granted because no one took the feminists seriously.

"Let them secede," men had chuckled. "They can go to the North Pole and set up a hen state. Good riddance!"

Now Vicky thought of a way to follow up on her secession threat and at the same time promote her campaign for the Presidency. Why didn't the feminists form a political party and nominate their own candidates for office? Naturally she hoped that she would be their candidate for President. When she told this to Elizabeth Stanton, Isabella Hooker, and a new friend, Laura Cuppy Smith, the women reacted enthusiastically. They wrote to Susan Anthony, away on a speaking tour, but she didn't think much of the idea.

"Mrs. Woodhull means to run our ship into her port and none other," she wrote back testily.

Recalling how Susan had defended The Woodhull not a month ago, Elizabeth and the others paid little attention to her reservations. Plans were soon underway for the organization of the People's party. Announcements were sent to the press, and a party nominating convention was scheduled. It was to be held jointly with the New York convention of the National Woman's Suffrage Association in May.

That winter, Vicky concentrated on tooting her own political horn. The
Weekly
provided readers with a running account of her campaign activities, but her chief means of publicizing herself was lecturing. Traveling across the country and back, she shivered in drafty railroad stations, slept in seedy hotels where the bedbugs frolicked at night, and ate uncountable greasy meals.

In Harper's
Weekly,
Thomas Nast, famous for his savage political cartoons, drew a portrait of Vicky with horns and bat wings. It was captioned
Get thee behind me, Mrs. Satan.
Since Nast did nasty caricatures of all politicians, Vicky wasn't too disturbed.

Meanwhile, election fever had gripped the nation's political parties. Right after the Civil War, the Democratic party had fallen apart. It had been the party of the South, although throughout the war there were still Democrats in the North. By 1872, most of the white men in the South and also working-class men in the North voted Democrat. Nevertheless, the Democrats hadn't won a national election since 1856 and would remain out of the White House until 1884. The condition of their party could only be described as a mess.

The powerful Republican party also had its problems. Ulysses S. Grant had been a great general. As President, he had made a lot of mistakes. During his first term in office, there were charges of corruption and graft. Many of his friends made money in ways that were not quite honest, although Americans felt that Grant himself was an honest man.

Unhappy liberals in the Republican party decided to revolt against Grant and form a third party, the Liberal Republicans. A national nominating convention was called to meet in Cincinnati on May 1. The politicians who assembled there hadn't the slightest idea who they wanted as a candidate for President. Finally, on the sixth ballot, they nominated sixty-one-year-old Horace Greeley, editor of the New York
Tribune.
The man who put his name before the convention was none other than Vicky's ex-lover, Theodore Tilton.

The Liberal Republicans almost immediately regretted their action, but there was nothing to be done then. In July, when the Democrats met in Baltimore for their convention, they also endorsed Greeley as their candidate. They figured that if any party was to beat Grant, it must avoid splitting the opposition vote. They were stuck with Greeley, but they didn't like him. They remembered that he had once remarked, "All Democrats may not be rascals, but all rascals are Democrats."

In June the Republicans would convene in Philadelphia and unanimously vote to run President Grant for another term. Thanks to pressure exerted by Susan Anthony and other feminists, the Republicans would write a women's rights plank into their party platform:

"The Republican Party is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause of freedom; their admission to wider fields of usefulness is received with satisfaction; and the honest demands of any class of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration."

This token acknowledgment to "the ladies" meant nothing, of course. In the ninety-six years since the birth of the nation, national elections had come and gone every four years. But they had been exclusively for men. Never had women involved themselves in the electoral process. The year 1872 would be different.

On the morning of May 9, the National Woman's Suffrage Association convened at Steinway Hall. Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton were barely speaking. In fact, they had spent the last few days quarreling, something they had never done before in their long friendship. Susan had said she would have nothing to do with Vicky or the People's party.

"She is trying to turn the NWSA into a political party for her own ends," cried Susan. "We shall lose everything we have ever fought for." Susan then called Elizabeth "foolish," and Elizabeth called Susan "narrow."

The convention had just gotten underway when Vicky stepped forward and asked the chair for recognition. She wanted to make an announcement concerning the People's party.

Susan, her face pinched, rejected her request. "I have rented this hall to hold a women's rights convention," she declared stonily, "and not for any other purpose. If there is any woman in the audience who is not a member of the National Woman's Suffrage Association, she will please leave."

Vicky, who was not a member, turned and walked out of the hall. Half of the audience, members and nonmembers, got up and left with her.

In the evening, Vicky returned. Entering Steinway Hall by a side door, she ran up on the stage before anyone could stop her and announced that she had hired Apollo Hall. The convention of the People's party would be held there tomorrow.

When a cheer went up from the delegates, Vicky automatically responded. Speaking in a rapid, even tone, she started to tell them that the time for political action had come. If women acted now, they could change the world.

Susan Anthony, her face distorted with rage, rapped her gavel for order. Then she pounded it. And then she shouted to announce the convention was adjourned. Vicky tried to ignore her.

Hurrying from the stage, Susan found the building's janitor and commanded him to turn off the gaslights in the hall. This desperate tactic worked. Aghast at Susan's hostility, Vicky stood silent in the darkness.

The next morning, six hundred people jammed Apollo Hall. The majority were feminists, but others also turned out: Vicky's radical friends, readers of the
Weekly,
Spiritualists, communists and those who simply came out of curiosity. Their mood was enthusiastic, and their gaiety reflected their sense that this was an historic occasion. Today, May 10, 1872, was the day they would nominate a woman to run for President.