The Scarlet Sisters (2 page)

The sisters not only preached free love—which was also referred to by the more demure name of “social freedom”—but also practiced it, discarding husbands and lovers as they liked. Tennie was the strongest in decrying a sexual double standard, and she defended prostitutes, calling
them victims in a hypocritical society where rich men patronized them but continued to be honored as respectable citizens.

In the Victorian age, men made the social as well as legal rules. If a wife conducted a circumspect affair, it was often tolerated, but to break the rules openly with a public lover and to divorce meant punishment, shunning, and ruin for her. In speaking out, the sisters broke a cardinal system by exposing what society wanted hidden.

In nine tumultuous years—1868 to 1877—they went from rags to riches to rags again. They were reviled and loved. They were called tramps, prostitutes, harlots, and, conversely, Joans of Arc: brave, courageous, and misunderstood.

They were survivors, sometimes barely, in a Manhattan that in 1868 was reinventing itself as a center of finance with the emergence of nouveau riche and bohemian cadres, and where, according to contemporary police reports, prostitution and crime were unequaled. It was a time when Ulysses S. Grant’s administration was famed for being totally corruptible and when Boss Tweed still ruled Albany, Manhattan’s City Hall, and all points in between. All this was conducted under a public code of Victorian prudery and a double standard that subjugated women as wifely slaves or mere ornaments.

But the sisters lost any claim to respectability, and a place in the suffrage movement, when they charged in their
Weekly
newspaper and on the lecture stage that the most famous preacher in America, Henry Ward Beecher, had conducted adulterous affairs with his parishioners. One presumed cuckolded husband was Theodore Tilton, handsome Adonis of freethinkers, abolitionist, fighter for women’s rights, free love advocate, and on-and-off friend of Abraham Lincoln’s. He was also thought to be one of Victoria’s lovers.

It was not Beecher’s adultery that drove the sisters to expose him, they insisted, but the hypocrisy of a man who preached faithfulness and did not practice it. In the same issue of their newspaper, Tennie penned an article charging a Wall Street financier with raping a virgin, and as a result, both sisters were thrown in jail on the charge of sending obscene material through the mail.

Then, when all seemed lost, the sisters shocked enemies, friends, and probably themselves with a grand final act of hobnobbing with British royalty and enjoying stupendous wealth that lasted for decades.

As for discovering who the sisters really were, while trying to assess the variety of opinions, facts, and falsehoods that exist, I was reminded of a reprobate editor who early on in my journalism career admonished, “Never let the facts stand in the way of a good feature story.” I have discovered that this problematic guidance also tempts historians and biographers. After generations of mythmaking, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate fact from fiction regarding the sisters. Everything written about them is a snarled knot of conjecture, hearsay, fabrication, perceptions of the times, and, yes, some facts.

Historical research is always an investigative attempt to define who people really were, but the Scarlet Sisters—which I have dubbed them for their ability to thoroughly shock Victorians and garner infamy—remain maddening enigmas. The first biography of Woodhull,
The Terrible Siren
, with peripheral attention paid to Tennie, did not appear until decades after the sisters’ march on Manhattan and just after their deaths (Tennie’s in 1923 and Victoria’s in 1927). In the book, novelist Emanie Sachs sought sensationalism over facts, paying anarchist Benjamin Tucker, a friend turned enemy of the sisters, $3,500 to produce his account of losing his virginity at nineteen to thirty-four-year-old Victoria, and to describe Tennie’s sexual advances. Tucker was an old man when he told his tale to Sachs, who used his material lavishly and did not divulge to readers the hefty price she had paid for it. Victoria died shortly before the book was published—much to the relief of Sachs, who triumphantly wrote to a friend that families of the dead cannot sue for libel, even if the dear departed were called “prostitutes.”

If Tucker’s tale is true, it dramatized a freewheeling arrangement that fit the love-for-love’s-sake definition of free love, with Victoria’s husband looking the other way and sister Tennie ready to substitute for Victoria if Tucker was so inclined. If he exaggerated, there was no one left to complain.
Victoria’s mortified daughter, Zula Maud, then in her sixties and living in England, considered suing but decided to devote her life to writing a biography of her mother, an unsuccessful effort.

Sachs’s machinations in pursuit of scandal remain paramount factors in the cloudy history of the sisters. She repeated gossip as fact and treated much of Victoria’s dubious accounts as gospel. For much of the twentieth century, Sachs’s book—which contains no attributions, notes, or index—was followed as fact or used in fictionalized books masquerading as biographies, with made-up scenes and dialogue, but after the 1970s rebirth of feminism, sympathetic portrayals of the sisters emerged by women authors. Historical battles among authors continue. Two recent biographies of the sisters’ friend Commodore Vanderbilt tangle over whether he had syphilis or “merely” gonorrhea or neither of these diseases that plagued rich and poor bounders alike in the Victorian era of brothel hopping.

Newspapers in the sisters’ heyday showed biases that deflect from balanced accounts. Yet these printed perceptions are vital from a historical perspective, illuminating contemporary attitudes toward crucial events involving the sisters. Sporting magazines, the forerunners to contemporary tabloids, broadcast the sisters’ every move, with illustrations that depicted them as hard-featured Jezebels. Forget the idea that celebrity journalism and paparazzi blitzes are relatively modern. A glance at the cartoons, daguerreotypes, blazing headlines, and gossip about the sisters proves that celebrity-chasing was virulent in the Victorian age. The publicity-savvy sisters in turn used the press as much as the press used them. Famous authors Henry James and Harriet Beecher Stowe even immortalized them as shady characters in their novels.

But just as suspect were the sisters’ own accounts of their lives. Over the years, they revamped, embellished, or reinvented themselves when it suited their purpose—nothing new in an era where a thief one day could make a fortune the next and needed a pedigree to go with his millionaire trappings.

A crucial example is the “as told to” biographical sketch of Woodhull written by Theodore Tilton, the alleged cuckold in the Beecher scandal. It
is lively and lurid, self-aggrandizing, draped in purple prose, and soaked in sentimentality. Victoria orchestrated the tale with several agendas in mind. Paramount was a vendetta against her parents for airing dirty family linen in a court scandal that was wrecking the sisters’ fame and future. Victoria also needed to woo the popular Spiritualist movement with declarations of sensational supernatural ghostly powers. She alleged that she was in a trance when, in 1871, at the age of thirty-two, she related the account to her current husband, Colonel Blood, who took notes. Handsome Theodore Tilton, who needed to curry favor with Woodhull, polished this melodramatic extravaganza for his magazine. All too often it has been cited as complete fact.

In this book, for the first time, Tennie is given the attention she deserves, and has been resurrected from a footnote in her sister’s life. She played a far larger role than biographers intent solely on Woodhull have portrayed. Contemporary papers gave her more coverage than Victoria before her older sister’s drive for the presidency and fame during the Beecher scandal. I have uncovered her fascinating life after Manhattan, previously ignored, including accounts of her married role as doyenne of a London estate and of her castle in Portugal, intimate letters between her and her sister, and accounts of her globe-trotting crusade for women’s rights.

The sisters were intriguing characters. They sought riches while pursuing Communist goals, arguing that they had to possess wealth in order to do good. They crawled out of a hustler’s childhood of fleecing females as well as males to champion an unheard-of concept in Victorian times: equal pay for women. They fought for female sexual independence when at the same time they may have sold themselves to rich men to earn money for their cause.

They were among the very few Victorian women who knew how to play the male game. As cunning as they were stunning, they crusaded for women’s freedom from men yet were nonetheless tough, and sometimes unscrupulous, pragmatists who adopted male rules. They courted and used powerful men in an era when women had no power themselves. With charm and beauty, they turned the tables on males, taking credit while using men to
help them in their careers. Yet they were capable of stirring, heroic bravery by espousing unpopular radical humanitarian causes—even as they were recklessly outrageous, extravagant liars, and at times, extremely unprincipled. Initially pushed and prodded by their con artist father, they learned how to survive as fabulists. They moved through life (with men) by their wits, indigenous street smarts, and intelligence, while fighting with feminist fervency for radical causes more than a hundred years ahead of their time.

Theirs was a wild ride through America during and following the Civil War. Along the way, their lives intersected with those of a cast of characters who are real but who, dare I say, read like fiction. Most were famous or infamous during this riveting time in history, and many remain so today (see Cast of Characters).

No American women in history surpass their raging, life-devouring, and life-enhancing journey from pre–Civil War days, through their Victorian battles, down to their final years as two Roaring Twenties
grande dames
having secured their place in history.

Opening Scene: Arriving

On a crisp February morning in 1870, the most dazzling and flamboyant sisters in American history made their debut. Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin had plotted, cajoled, and advertised and had been written up with besotted fervor in major New York newspapers by male reporters stunned by their beauty and daring.

As their open carriage turned the corner at Wall Street and Broad, the sisters could see the mob moving toward their brand-new Woodhull, Claflin and Co. brokerage firm. Estimates of the crowd reached two thousand and up. One hundred policemen were called out to keep order. Here they were! The first lady stockbrokers in the world! Wall Street had never seen anything like it. Nor would it again for nearly a hundred years.

The buzz on the Street, abetted by the sisters, was that the coarse, ruthless, and immensely rich—in fact, the richest man in America—Cornelius Vanderbilt had bankrolled the young beauties.

Males eagerly grabbed the reins of the high-stepping horses and, as the sisters descended lightly from the carriage, shouts, cheers, jeers, and catcalls shattered the air. The sisters pushed their way through the boisterous crowd held back by policemen, opened the door, and went to work. All day, men peered in the windows and doors of Woodhull and Claflin and whooped with surprise and pleasure if they caught a glimpse of one of
the sisters. A doorkeeper guarded the entrance. Nailed on the door was a sign:
GENTLEMEN WILL STATE THEIR BUSINESS AND THEN RETIRE AT ONCE
.

The mysterious sisters, who seemed to have stepped out from nowhere, had made the splash they wanted. Everything had been staged “to secure the most general and at the same time prominent introduction to the world that was possible,” Victoria later admitted.

They had carefully picked their outfits, gambling correctly that a large crowd would scrutinize them on the most crucial day of their lives. Everything matched, as if they were twins, although Victoria, at thirty-one, was seven years older than Tennie. Their skirts were shockingly short, touching the tops of their shiny boots, unlike fashionable dresses that trailed through the muck and manure of Manhattan’s streets. Their suit jackets were deep blue wool nipped at the waist but mannishly wide at the shoulders. Rich velvet embroidered the jackets, adding a feminine touch. But gone were the tightly laced corsets that warped a woman’s insides and made breathing difficult. Absent, too, were bustles, those steel half-cages filled with horsehair that were strapped to petticoats and draped with heavy brocade and silk that could weigh a woman down by twenty pounds. One cartoon likened the woman who wore one to a snail, with the bustle forming the curlicue shell dragged behind. Instead of ruffles or jewelry, the sisters wore silk bow ties. Their light brown hair had been cut boyishly short; Tennie derided the fashionable nest of curls and chignons as “vile bunches of hair, tortured into all conceivable unnatural shapes.” They’d added a rakish final touch: each had tucked a solid gold pen behind an ear, to flash in the noonday sun or catch the gaslight’s glow.

The sisters were showstoppingly beautiful, and their unique costumes only added to their allure. Victoria was willowy and gazed at the world through luminous, intensely blue eyes. High cheekbones gave her broad face character, and her proud, chiseled profile could have graced an ivory cameo. Tennie, at twenty-four, was the epitome of the term “pleasingly plump,” with a bosom that threatened to burst from her jacket and a sensuous, full mouth that curved into flirtatious smiles. There was mischief in her blue eyes, and she had the exuberance of an untamed colt.

Reporters gushed endlessly about the “Bewitching Brokers” and the “Queens of Finance.” They mentioned “their exquisite figures.” Reporters seemed astounded that women could be articulate: “They display remarkable conversational powers, Mrs. Claflin [Tennie] in particular talking with a rapidity and fluency that are really astonishing.” The gold pens behind their ears were the talk of the “gouty old war horses on the street.” The two women were praised, albeit as though they were a P. T. Barnum oddity: with one paper remarking that, at the end of their opening day, the ladies drove away “without any signs of headaches.”