The Scarlet Sisters (47 page)

The ruinous rift among suffragists began post–Civil War and continued for decades, until 1890. Both sides were stiff-necked, and Stone refused reconciliatory overtures from Anthony. More damaging than the sisters were these two groups duplicating time, money, and effort trying to woo the same segment of women—a minority at that, as most women remained anti-suffrage. The leaders of the movement, including Stanton, mentioned Woodhull’s memorial or petition to the congressional Judiciary Committee, but otherwise ignored her in their massive
History of Woman Suffrage
, begun by Stanton, Anthony, and several others in 1881. But
Woodhull got her reward posthumously, when she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame at Seneca Falls, New York, in 2001. Current feminist websites have discovered both sisters, lauding them as heroes.

It is tempting to ponder what might have happened had other suffragists joined Stanton and the sisters to decry the sexual, political, corporate, medical, and clerical subjugation women endured. Even after the sisters left the scene, the movement’s timidity on any women’s issue except the vote held women back for generations.

Stanton was one of the few contemporaries who refused to blame Woodhull for wrecking the women’s movement. In 1876 she predicted that Woodhull “will be as famous as she had been infamous, made so by benighted or cowardly men and women.” She would eventually have a “high place” in the “annals of emancipation.” Catharine Beecher and her anti-vote battalion in the 1870s had its rebirth a hundred years later, in the anti-ERA movement led by Phyllis Schlafly. She succeeded in making a large segment of housewives think they would lose their financial rights as wives if the ERA passed, and predicted there would be unisex bathrooms, which made one wonder if she had ever ridden on an airplane. The mostly male legislatures defeated the Equal Rights Amendment.

Today the desire to upend
Roe v. Wade
, ban same-sex marriages, and curb the availability of contraception is once again coming from the religious right, just as religious curtailment of social freedoms held sway in the sisters’ era. Victoria and Tennessee said that one’s private life was none of anyone’s business, especially the clergy and lawmakers. Activists say the same today, but the fight goes on. However, in spite of these roadblocks, many of the sexual freedoms the sisters called for in their younger days have finally become widely accepted cultural norms. By 2012 a new record low in marriages was reported; barely half of the adult population over age eighteen was married, with cohabitation, single parenthood, and same-sex relationships all growing more prevalent.

It is, at last, time to take a look at what the sisters were accused of—keeping in mind the far different standard held for Victorian males. On
blackmailing and extortion, the record of wrongdoing remains slim. There was a threatening article, which did not run, written on the possible adultery of women in the movement as payback against those who had denigrated Victoria and Tennie as tramps and prostitutes; a threatening letter to Henry Ward Beecher and a possible one to Challis, both of whom the sisters saw as sexual hypocrites; and comments from Tennie and Victoria threatening William Vanderbilt about their relations with his father, the Commodore, unless he gave them money they said was owed them. While I am not defending these actions, they were a far cry from the brazen thievery, corruption, bribery, and shady deals made by men on Wall Street and in politics at the time. The sisters fabricated and they lied, trying to advance themselves with fake personas in the rigid Victorian class structure. They were viewed as unscrupulously ambitious—as if male leaders were free from this trait. However, how many men of wealth worked as tirelessly as the sisters did for the working class and poor during their Yankee International days, or how many women fought for the advancement of women in every arena, from sex to politics?

Such onslaughts as repeated incarceration for minor offenses before being acquitted, and ridicule and hatred from every direction, eventually broke the sisters’ will and resolve. Their turncoat lies about free love showed how flawed their avowals of truth were, but even friends such as Stanton and Hooker—who deserted them while in prison—came to understand their motives and visited them in England. And Tennie’s long and stalwart march for women’s suffrage and women’s rights during this final period showed true conviction. By the time the two were elderly, their views on marriage seemed truly to have mellowed, a not unusual pattern as young radicals in all fields sometimes turn more conservative.

Of course, no discussion of the sisters or politicians, then and now, would be complete without a look at sex and scandal. More men than women have asked what seems to them to be the crucial question: were they prostitutes? As Tennie always said, look at the double standard. “You never hear a man called a prostitute… even the President of the United States,
a governor of a state and a pastor of the most popular church, president of the most reliable bank, or of the grandest railroad corporation, may constantly practice all the debaucheries known to sensualism [
sic
]… and he, by virtue of his sex, stands protected and respected.” When a woman is involved in a sexual situation “newspapers make it their special business to herald her shame… utterly forgetting that there was a man in the scrape.”

Illicit sex has been one of the least lofty but enduring cornerstones of American politics, from Thomas Jefferson on. Victoria knew what she was talking about when she shocked audiences by charging that lobbyists distributed money to brothel madams in order to secure influence with their customers in the house and senate; “I say it boldly, that it is the best men of the country who support the houses of prostitution!”

One could fault her phrase, “the best men of the country.” Her observation of rampant sex among politicians, coupled by Tennie’s anger at a double standard are as familiar now as they were in Victorian times. Political sex scandals fill newspapers, websites, and talk shows.

A recent spate of tawdriness kept the public spellbound once again in 2013, and this time some constituents didn’t give a damn. At least that is the message surrounding former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. He famously used taxpayers’ money in 2009 to walk out of his office and trek off to see his Argentine mistress, while he was decidedly married. Undeterred, even by such misuse of his office, “family values” Republicans in this red state elected the “fiscal hawk” Sanford over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch for Congress in 2013. Demonstrating that women continue to have an uphill battle in politics,
Slate
magazine surmised that two Democratic women actually helped elect Sanford: Republicans in South Carolina don’t like Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, and “they couldn’t stomach sending her an ally in Colbert Busch.”

However, voters were not so forgiving of two sex-tainted New York pols: former congressman peter tweeter Anthony Weiner, as the comedians named him for once again sexting explicit photos of himself, and former Luv Gov Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as New York governor after being caught patronizing prostitutes. Tennie’s ancient fight to change the
double standard echoed in the actions of federal prosecutors who never charged Spitzer. They “traditionally didn’t prosecute prostitutes’ clients.” Spitzer lost the 2013 race for the minor post of city comptroller and Weiner was trounced in his run for mayor. Meanwhile Bob Filner, mayor of San Diego, was forced to resign after nineteen women claimed sexual harassment.

Back to the question of whether the sisters were prostitutes. After reading everything available, I am inclined to think they may have been occasionally for sale when they were under their father’s devious rule and possibly when they came out of prison destitute and tried to keep the
Weekly
and their various causes afloat. Still, it is conjecture, and authors who make it otherwise are using hearsay to create a sensational “fact.” Better to look at the obstacles they faced and the names they were called, the humiliation they endured and their courage in trying to accomplish radical change. Sexism was rampant, but what was more chilling, I found during research, was the deep misogynist strain of contempt for women in all realms of Victorian life. Furthermore, men who supported women’s suffrage, let alone free love, were commonly mocked as unmanly.

As for women in business, the glass ceiling has only cracked and is far from broken. Some 145 years ago Tennie said of the rough treatment she received on Wall Street from the male clique, “the real objection to me was that I was attempting to stand upon an equality with them, to transact business, while these other women [cleaning women who were allowed in their offices] were their slaves, to wipe up their vile tobacco puddles.” When she attacked Wall Street colleagues, their response was to tar her with sexual slurs. Corporate women today still complain of being shunned, derided, and passed up for promotion by male colleagues.

In politics, women are still more likely than men to be asked why they are running for office. And their egos are often viewed as excessive, while no one questions a man’s personal ambition. Woodhull was thought insane for running for president, even though her reason was symbolic: to stress parity for women. Both sisters were regarded as viciously ambitious,
and therefore abnormal, tough, mannish, “strong-minded,” unsexed—but, conversely, viewed as prostitutes. Nearly 140 years later, Hillary Clinton faced an incredible barrage of degrading and dismissive name-calling in her serious 2008 quest for the presidency and again, in 2013, was viciously targeted by the Tea Party while still an undeclared candidate.

In the end, we come full circle, back to 1870 when the sisters argued that the vote alone was not enough; women need to be elected and in positions of power. Only then can women change not only attitudes but the laws that matter. As of now, there are more elected women than ever before, but they are far from a critical mass, and real change happens only when there is a critical mass. Women make up half the United States, but there are only twenty in a Senate of one hundred. As Pat Schroeder says, “20 percent is
not
a critical mass.” Let’s support and nurture more young women who are “seldom well behaved” and who are following in the line of uppity others, from Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull onward. They will make the history that matters.

Victoria Woodhull

Tennessee Claflin (Courtesy of New York Public Library)

Annie Claflin (John Miles Thompson, Jr. Papers)