The Scarlet Sisters (55 page)

7.
the ongoing repression of women:
Timothy Messer-Kruse,
Yankee International, Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876
. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 110.

8.
subtle echo of sameness:
Stern,
The Pantarch
, p. 105.

9.
vigorous police raid:
Ibid., p. 89.

10.
“addicted to disorder.”:
Brooklyn Eagle
, May 5, 1875.

11.
dined with Vanderbilt:
(NY) World
, Sept. 24, 1870, p. 5.

12.
ideas of “radical progress.”:
Brooklyn Eagle
, May 5, 1875.

13.
I hope to see tomorrow:
VW to Reid, Jan. 26, 1870; TC to Reid, Feb. 6, 1870. Some biographers feel Tennie’s letter said she hoped to see him in the “a.m.”; the abbreviation is difficult to read and could be “p.m.,” which adds a sexual overtone. Whitelaw Reid Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

14.
penmanship of Colonel Blood:
Underhill,
The Woman Who Ran for President
, p. 73. Underhill postulates that Blood may have been a procurer for Tennie, but there is no evidence except his writing this letter.

15.
figured in American history:
Robert S. Holzman,
Stormy Ben Butler
. (New York: Macmillan, 1954).

16.
the Civil War Yankee general:
New Orleanians do not forget. Information from their Louisiana State Museum, the Cabildo, states that the nickname “Beast” reflects local sentiments even today.

17.
which end of them looks best:
Holzman,
Stormy Ben Butler
, pp. 84–88.

18.
As Edith Wharton said:
Edith Wharton,
The Age of Innocence
(New York; Toronto; New York: Collier Books; Maxwell Macmillan Canada; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992), p. 100.

19.
descended from Jews:
Kaplan,
When the Astors Owned New York
, pp. 29–31 and 53.

20.
“indescribably pretentious” trappings:
Ibid., p. 30.

21.
the Selfridge Merrys:
Wharton,
The Age of Innocence
, p. 215.

22.
one can’t make over society:
Ibid., p. 111.

Chapter Six: “Madam, you are not a citizen, you are a woman!”

1.
support the houses of prostitution!:
VW in
Tried as by Fire or, the True and the False, Socially
(essay and speech) (New York: Woodhull and Claflin, 1874).

2.
championed the vote for women:
Holzman,
Stormy Ben Butler
, pp. 4 and 171.

3.
I hope to snuggle you closer:
Baker,
Sisters
, p. 75.

4.
her naked person:
The Butler “naked” anecdote is repeated as fact in twentieth-century biographies. However, biographer Sachs’s “source,” Benjamin Tucker, actually told her he was repeating rumor. Sachs used the naked comment as truth, not printing Tucker, who’d said flatly, “About Ben Butler’s relations with Victoria I knew nothing. I believe this to be a total lie.” Tucker-Sachs.

5.
“I went at night”:
SIU.

6.
open the [judiciary] committee:
Ibid.

7.
dip into my husband’s pockets:
IBH to JM, at SIU.

8.
“on her own.”:
Ibid.

9.
Mrs. Woodhull’s talent and personality:
Ibid.

10.
very ably debated:
Ibid.

11.
servitude of the hardest kind:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Johnson Sage, and Ida Husted Harper,
History of Woman Suffrage, 1861–1876
, vol. 2, part 2, 1881 Reprint (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2013), p. 456.

12.
women as citizens should be included:
Woodhull’s memorial available in many books and on numerous websites including
An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera
, Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections division; and Cari M. Carpenter,
Selected Writings of Virginia Woodhull
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

13.
the question to be argued:
(Washington, DC) Daily Morning Chronicle
, Jan. 11, 1871, p. 2.

14.
“You are a woman!”:
Underhill,
The Woman Who Ran for President
, p. 99, and several other accounts.

15.
makes her logic irresistible:
Evening Star
, Jan. 11, 1871, p. 1.

16.
Hooker became a fervent follower:
IBH to JM, at SIU.

17.
picture of the advanced ideas:
Daily Patriot
, Jan. 11, 1871.

18.
found to contain ice:
Philadelphia Press
, Jan. 22, 1871.

19.
Hooker thought she would fall:
IBH to JM, at SIU.

20.
the fourteenth amendment is good enough:
Daily Morning Chronicle
, Jan. 14, 1871, p. 4.

21.
made news when they tried to vote:
When the sisters and several women friends burst into the polling place, a Democratic inspector told them that Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall had given him orders not to receive the votes of women. Woodhull’s eyes flashed. “Is it a crime to be a woman?” she asked. The inspectors ignored her question. Curious onlookers crushed into the polling place to see how this “new thing was going to work.” Tennie addressed the crowd before the inspector pushed her hand away as she tried to vote. The women vowed to bring a suit against the inspectors, noting that Wyoming Territory and Michigan had both accorded women the right to vote.
New York Herald
, Nov. 8, 1871, p. 4.

22.
ramifications of an amendment:
Daily Morning Chronicle
, Jan. 14, 1871, p. 4.

23.
the irresistible Tennie!:
Philadelphia Press
, Jan. 14, 1870, p. 1.

24.
“masculine coat-tails”:
Gabriel,
Notorious Victoria
, p. 75.

25.
the woman we are after:
Sherr,
Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words
. 1st paperback ed. (New York: Times Books, 1996), p. 222.

26.
“in which I have no voice.”:
WCW
reprinted speech, March 4, 1871, p. 8.

27.
a government of righteousness:
Ibid.

28.
fluttering of white handkerchiefs:
Gabriel,
Notorious Victoria
, p. 87.

29.
“A masterly argument,”:
Underhill,
The Woman Who Ran for President
, p. 112.

30.
help strike the chains:
Stanton letter to Woodhull, in
WCW
, SIU.

Chapter Seven: Free Love, Suffrage, and Abolition

1.
women should grovel in the mire:
Anthony to Laura Deforce Gordon, Feb. 9, 1871, Stanton and Anthony Papers; Goldsmith,
Other Powers
, p. 255.

2.
the woman must be sacrificed:
Stanton to Stone, Nov. 24, 1856; William O’Neill,
Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 2.

3.
the adult traits Stone shared:
Andrea Moore Kerr,
Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992; paperback, 1995), pp. 15 and 251n.

4.
deepen this disappointment:
Ibid., p. 11.

5.
a healthy woman has as much passion:
Mabel Collins Donnelly,
The American Victorian Woman: The Myth and the Reality
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 47n13.

6.
wives could refuse sex:
Baker,
Sisters
, p. 109n34.

7.
man master, woman slave:
O’Neill,
Everyone Was Brave
, p. 21.

8.
in a word Free Love:
1871 letter, Stanton to Anthony; Baker,
Sisters
.

9.
a crack-brained harlequin:
Elisabeth Griffith,
In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 130.

10.
I should have said Amen!:
Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed.,
One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Women’s Suffrage Movement
(Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995), p. 68.

11.
men and women were slaughtered:
Lori D. Ginzberg,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), p. 125.

12.
get out of the terrible pit:
Eric Foner,
Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 33.

13.
ignorant negroes and foreigners:
Ibid., p. 90.

14.
an order for a mule:
Ginzberg,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
, p. 141.

15.
Patrick and Yung Fung:
Griffith,
In Her Own Right
, p. 152.

16.
fearful outrages on womanhood:
Foner,
Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights
, p. 33.

17.
‘Sambo… and the bootblack.’:
Ibid., p. 87.

18.
an urgency to obtain the ballot:
Ibid., p. 33.

19.
it is true of the black woman:
Ibid., p. 87.

20.
“Battle-him of the Republic.”:
Brooklyn Eagle
, Jan. 10, 1870.

21.
five thousand anti-suffragists:
Anglo-American
, Feb. 11, 1871.

22.
unsuited to their physical organization:
Gabriel,
Notorious Victoria
, p. 83.

23.
let men drive the nails:
Gabriel,
Notorious Victoria
, p. 92; Quoting Stanton to Mott, April 1, 1871.

24.
work for her own enfranchisement:
Letter to Milo A. Townsend, April 5, 1871, letter no. 41 in Peggy Jean Townsend and Charles Walker Townsend III, eds.,
Milo Adams Townsend and Social Movements of the 19th Century
, 1994, at http://www.bchistory.org/beavercounty/booklengthdocuments/AMilobook/23Woodhull.html.

25.
assume to be better than I:
VW to IBH, quoted in Gilbert,
Notorious Victoria
, p. 90; no original attribution.

26.
every gossip of every revolutionist:
Letter from SBA to IBH, in Lynn Sherr,
Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words
, 1st paperback ed. (New York: Times Books, 1996), p. 220.

27.
all the scandals afloat:
Ibid., p. 221.

28.
A lady in every sense:
Gabriel,
Notorious Victoria
, p. 98; and letter from Isabella Hooker to VW: SIU.

29.
at the expense of any ambition:
New-York Daily Tribune
, May 12, 1871, p. 2.

30.
such rivers of blood:
Gabriel,
Notorioius Victoria
, p. 94.

31.
rhetoric on privacy rights:
New-York Daily Tribune
, May 12, 1871, p. 5. More than a hundred years later a Florida senator, Jack D. Gordon, managed to pass a Florida state constitutional amendment assuring the right to privacy, thus protecting individual rights such as sexual relationships from government interference. Florida was one of a few states to pass such an amendment. In a Republican Florida Senate, Gordon’s privacy amendment—“right to privacy” would have been called “free love” in the sisters’ era—was stripped of much of its power by a subsequent conservative amendment.

32.
what terrible rough seas:
Goldsmith,
Other Powers
, p. 275.

33.
The paper then excoriated:
Brooklyn Eagle
, May 19, 1871, p. 2.

Chapter Eight: All in the Family: “Never a wholly sane mother”

1.
[U]pon affidavits of Annie Claflin:
New York Herald
, May 16, 1871, p. 3.

2.
“disprove the charges against me.”:
Brooklyn Eagle
, May 8, 1871, p. 10.

3.
Byron’s Dadu electrified:
Ibid.