The Scarlet Sisters (18 page)

Tennie, noting that “a long practice in female complaints entitles me to speak authoritatively,” excoriated “that class of so-called public servant who affix M.D. to their names—first, for their persistent silence upon this subject; and… secondly their ignorance” regarding “the class of diseases resulting from sexual abuses… never a word do they let drop… that there is such a thing as unfortunate results, which… flow to women from our present marriage system, and to men, from its attendant fact of prostitution.” The health system was also skewed for profit. She presciently noted,
“It is the direct interest of the physician that sickness shall prevail, since the people pay the doctors for treatment, not for health.” If patients had a “contract by the year for treatment,” it would be in the “direct interest of the physician to preserve them in the best possible health,” as a healthy patient would be alive to continue paying the annual fee. Instead, there is no “inducement” to battle sexual diseases.

Like Tennie, Victoria was years ahead of the doctors and legislators when she mocked a “Social Evils” bill being discussed in Congress in 1874 that would test prostitutes for sexual diseases. “Now if they really wish to stop diseases and make the business safe, why not register and examine every man who visits these houses before he is admitted? A house of prostitution, free from disease, cannot be contaminated, except through the diseased men. Examine the men, then, and deny admission to the diseased.” She added wryly, “How many Social Evil bills would be passed under such conditions?”

In her eugenics discussions, Victoria spoke of the horrors of diseased men creating damaged children well before doctors established this as fact. She hinted at the possibility when speaking of women marrying a man for his money: “It doesn’t matter if he is just from the hands of the physicians, cured of a loathsome disease, if he has the cash he is the man.” Victoria blamed her husband’s alcoholism for their retarded son, but it more likely could have been caused by gonorrhea or syphilis. She never addressed this, possibly because she would have had to face the horrible thought that she may have been contaminated.

The concept that “ ‘profligate’ men” could infect their wives and produce damaged children was not prominent until the latter part of the nineteenth century, at which time the idea that innocent babies could be diseased or damaged outraged sensibilities. Long before, in 1837, a French doctor, Philippe Ricord, was the first to establish that syphilis and gonorrhea were not the same disease. By 1876 it was found that severe cases of syphilis could spread to the spine, leading to paralysis and madness. Doctors understood finally that syphilis was much more dangerous than assumed. Yet long after the ravages of syphilis were recognized, doctors
continued to view gonorrhea as a milder disorder—and doctors even found a way to blame women for it. Because of the “asymptomatic nature of the disease in women,” doctors believed that “a woman frequently gives gonorrhea without having it.”

When gonorrhea was thought to be a trifling inconvenience, men saw it as a badge of honor. Actor Edwin Booth had countless lovers, including actress Laura Keene, who was onstage at Ford’s Theatre the night his brother, John Wilkes, assassinated President Lincoln. In the 1850s, when Edwin contracted gonorrhea, he termed it the “glorious clap.”

By 1879 a better understanding emerged, and gonorrhea, “previously considered a ‘trivial disease’ now joined syphilis as a serious venereal malady.” Studying the effects of gonorrhea on women, one doctor finally understood “why so many healthy, blooming young girls begin to suffer and fail as soon as they enter the bonds of marriage.” Virgins before, they were tortured for the rest of their lives by a mysterious malady, including high rates of sterility. An 1886 study gauged that 90 percent of sterile women were married to men who had had gonorrhea.

Not that men got off easily. One well-known physician, Frederick Hollick, wrote a treatise on gonorrhea in 1852, when it was thought to be relatively harmless but carried certain complications. One was that it produced a curvature of the penis, causing a painful erection. Hollick’s cure: He placed the penis with the “curve upward on a table and struck a violent blow with a book.” If the patient didn’t keel over, this would, supposedly, “flatten” his member.

By 1901, doctors recognized what had been hidden in the sex lives of men such as Edwin Booth all those years before. One 1901 study contended that an astounding eighty out of every one hundred men in New York had been infected at one time or another with gonorrhea, which was by then viewed as the most prevalent disease in the adult male population. An estimated 5 to 18 percent of all males had syphilitic infections.

To ease the pain of such diseases, drugs were widely available. In fact, Victorians of all social classes found drugs for various uses accessible everywhere. Large numbers of women of every category used them to
ease their lives. Prostitutes used them to dull their existence; housewives, to banish the doldrums of unhappy or boring marriages. Upper-class matrons were often addicted, as doctors liberally prescribed drugs to these pampered, fainting-prone patients. Opium-based laudanum was wildly popular, touted to cure everything from headaches to tuberculosis. Nannies spooned it to cranky infants, sometimes causing their deaths. Ads in newspapers touted opium imported from England. Cocaine was also legal, and everywhere. Cocaine toothache drops for children were popular, required no prescription, and were sold in all drugstores. The rise in cocaine use began in 1850 and quickly snowballed. It was famously found in the original Coca-Cola recipe, and by the turn of the century it was being snorted, which led to serious nasal conditions. Opium, mercury, and lead-based medicines were used everywhere. Implementation of the Pure Food and Drug Act in January 1907, requiring disclosure of a medicine’s contents, was the first attempt to control cocaine use.

Laudanum addiction, a fierce and ugly craving, was hard to stop, and wrecked constant users, as did morphine. It was not surprising, then, that at least two in the Claflin clan became addicts, Canning Woodhull and Victoria and Tennie’s beautiful sister Utica.

ACT THREE

CHAPTER TEN

Confessions of Sin and Battling the Beechers

In July 1870 the Tilton house in Brooklyn echoed with violent shouts between Theodore and his wife, Elizabeth. “In the heat of passion and in the presence of Miss Anthony, each confessed to the other of having broken the marriage vow.” Tilton became so belligerent that Anthony rushed into an upstairs bedroom. “She heard Mrs. Tilton come dashing upstairs, and Mr. Tilton following close after. She flung open her bedroom door, and Elizabeth rushed in. The door was then closed and bolted. Theodore pounded on the outside, and demanded admittance, but Miss Anthony refused to turn the key. So intense was his passion at that moment that she feared he might kill his wife if he gained access to the room. Several times he returned to the door and angrily demanded that it be opened.

“ ‘No woman shall stand between me and my wife,’ he bellowed.

“ ‘If you enter this room it will be over my dead body,’ Anthony shouted back. Tilton then withdrew.

“Mrs. Tilton remained with Susan throughout the night. In the excitement of the hour, amid sobs and tears, she told all to Miss Anthony. The whole story of her own faithlessness, of Mr. Beecher’s course, of her deception, and of her anguish, fell upon the ears of Susan B. Anthony, and were spoken by the lips of Mrs. Tilton.”

This gossipy morsel, relayed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton—that Theodore Tilton’s wife had had an affair with the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher—raced
through the women’s movement and was added to rumors that had surrounded Beecher for years involving women parishioners. At her angriest, Woodhull depicted Beecher as a serial seducer without conscience. “I am reliably assured that Henry Ward Beecher preaches to at least twenty of his mistresses every Sunday.”

Stanton did not tell Woodhull the adultery story until a full year after the incident, in May 1871—the very time Woodhull and Tennie were being pummeled by the Beechers following the Claflin family court brawl. By then, Woodhull’s anger at the Beechers had been building for six months, following Woodhull’s speech in January before the Judiciary Committee. Not content simply to warn Isabella Beecher against a friendship with Victoria, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe had spread gossip about Tennie and Victoria and their free love reputation.

Catharine had loathed Woodhull ever since Victoria’s first salvo at her in January 1871 when the
Weekly
criticized the seventy-year-old Beecher sister for her anti-suffrage stance: “Is it not possible to drive Miss Beecher for very shame out of her unholy position” that would “deprive woman of her legal right to vote?” Airing her consistent contempt for those who could afford to live in ease, albeit “remaining in bondage” to rich husbands or fathers, Woodhull said of Beecher and her ilk, “Let them remain under it by all means, and lick the dirt from the naked feet of their oppressors; but do not let them interfere with that grand and sublime majority of noble women who prefer freedom and the full rights of American citizenship.”

Isabella tried to convince Catharine, the family dowager queen, that if she only met Woodhull, she would love her. The two agreed to meet, and a more improbable duo could not be found riding in a carriage around Central Park on a brisk February day in 1871. Catharine was thirty-eight years older than Victoria. Grief-stricken decades earlier when her fiancé drowned at sea, she had turned from a carefree girl into a “domineering, querulous and eccentric” autocrat. Women’s highest and only calling was as mother and wife, vowed Catharine, who had no experience in either. A bitter, virginal spinster, she nonetheless became the nation’s wildly popular
authority on how to raise children and run a home through her best-selling
Treatise on Domestic Economy
.

Her rigorously religious childhood had held little joy, but Catharine grew up privileged and educated. She could not conceive of the life Victoria and Tennie had known and witnessed, nor share their hardened knowledge of what demeaning jobs poverty-stricken women faced, including prostitution.

The carriage ride through Central Park was a disaster, and at the end of it, war was declared. “I frankly stated my views upon the social question,” recalled Victoria, “all sexual commerce not founded on love is prostitution, whether in or out of marriage.” Catharine called her doctrines the “rankest of heresies,” and said that if a woman had to leave her husband for any reason she should “retire into solitude for life, and never think of another man.” Then Victoria told Catharine that she knew that her brother, the reverend, was among those living her theories of “social freedom” but not ready to become an advocate. Catharine exploded. She called her brother’s wife, Eunice, a “virago” and admitted that he was unhappy, but she swore he was “nevertheless a true husband.”

Victoria shot back, “If you were a proper person to judge, which I grant you are not, you would see that the facts you state are fatal to your theory of faithfulness to marriage.” Catharine “became very abusive, calling me many bad names.”

Catharine ordered the driver to stop the carriage, got out, and shouted after Victoria, “Remember, Victoria Woodhull, that I shall strike you dead!”

“Strike as much and as hard as you please, only don’t do it in the dark, so that I cannot know who is my enemy.”

“I will strike you in every way; I can and will kill you, if possible!”

At least, this is Victoria’s dramatic version.

Catharine’s only public acknowledgment of the meeting was to say that Victoria was “either insane or the hapless victim of malignant spirits.” Isabella saw her furious half sister on her return from the carriage ride and could not resist telling a friend, “Sister Catharine, attacking [Victoria] on
the marriage question, got such a black eye as filled her with horror and amazement. I had to laugh inwardly… and am now waiting for her to cool down!”

Victoria wrote that after their meeting, Catharine helped kill Victoria’s lecture in Hartford, Connecticut, writing letters to the Hartford papers that warned readers not to attend. Meanwhile, Harriett Beecher Stowe, who did not hesitate to brand Victoria “a snake [who] should be given a good clip with a shovel,” pounded Victoria and Tennie with a wicked satire serialized weekly in brother Henry’s
Christian Union
. When the mortifying Claflin family feud erupted, Stowe happily ripped plotlines from the newspapers: “There’s a terrible wash of dirty linen going on,” remarks one character in her roman à clef,
My Wife and I
. Her main character, Audacia (or ’Dacia) is called a “tramp,” and her newspaper “is not the kind of paper that any decent man ought to have in his house.” A demure anti-suffrage heroine sighs that Audacia “makes one ashamed of one’s sex,” to which another replies that there is no danger of ’Dacia’s being a real woman; “she’s an amphibious animal.”

Stowe’s poison dart novel aimed at Victoria often reads more like a distortion of the bolder Tennie; a book illustration also looks like her: “a jaunty, dashing young woman, with bold blue eyes.” ’Dacia accosts the book’s male hero, aggressively pressing him to buy her newspaper and aid her in her social freedom cause. When he looks amazed, Audacia mocks his naïveté: “You ain’t half out of the shell yet”; she tells him she “does just what a man would do” and rants about her right to drink, smoke, and come up to a man’s room and “have a good time.” He gives Audacia money to get rid of her. In real life, critics accused Tennie of this same sort of badgering to get ads for the
Weekly
. Victoria’s presidential quest also is derided by a character in Stowe’s book: “What sort of brazen tramp of a woman would it be that could stand it and come out of it without being killed?” The Beecher brigade against the sisters did not stop there. The religious
Independent
, published by Henry Bowen, founder of Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, slammed the
Weekly
as unfit reading.