The Scarlet Sisters (9 page)

Wednesday: my brownstone palace began;

Thursday: I drove out a spanking new span;

Friday: I gave a magnificent ball:

Saturday: smashed—with just nothing at all.

The Williams and Grey firm—which included a forger, bank robber, swindler, and murderer, a rather concrete example of outlaw days on the Street—had hastily vacated the sisters’ offices, leaving behind furnishings that the sisters bought at a foreclosure price. The office was “magnificently fitted up” with heavy walnut desks with gold trim, oak chairs upholstered in fine green silk, and carpets. “The best Marvin safes are conspicuous,” said one news account; “… nothing seems wanting to supplement the boldness, spirit, grandeur and enterprise of the new idea.”

Some thirty feet from the entrance, in a smaller office partitioned off with etched glass and elaborate woodwork, the smiling sisters served strawberries and champagne. It was said that they had instituted after-hours sessions of champagne and frivolity on the Street, but their neighbor on Broad Street, jolly Jim Fisk, had preceded them.

Yet no others on the Street entertained as well as they, moving their after-hours open house to a suite in the Astor House hotel, where they served up roast beef, champagne, and bonhomie. Some of the famously wealthy were regulars, and even Clews, who despised the sisters’ boldness, couldn’t keep away. Among their guests were Arthur Brisbane, the wealthy Utopian; William Hillyer, President Grant’s former chief of staff; a reverend or two; and the president of the Stock Exchange board. Capitalist
“presidents” abounded—of Western Union, the Home Insurance Fire Company, the Continental Bank—plus the vice president of the Union Pacific Railroad. And of course, members of the fourth estate. “We like newspapermen,” said Tennie. “They are the salt of the earth—and keep everything from spoiling!”

The sisters also cleverly created something amazingly progressive: a private entrance leading to a female-only back room for women stock traders. The sisters’ upfront role in the financial world was beyond belief; the ladies’ back room sported an unprecedented mix of elderly, sedate spinsters and young “blondes, fair and fresh as pippins,” who came to mock but who left thinking that “there were other things to live for besides cosmetics, the toilet, fashion and vanity.” Housewives who had managed to save money, madams seeking to grow their portfolios, and feminists also joined the group.

Susan B. Anthony, the prototypical grim-faced Quaker spinster, set out to survey the sisters. Her longtime suffrage partner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, looked the innocent rotund matron, with silver curls and the heft of having borne seven children. But looks deceived. In addition to being defiantly courageous, both were sharply witty—and both were interested in the swirling gossip within the women’s movement.

Anthony was ecstatic when she visited the firm, a few weeks after its opening. She commented on Tennie’s striking looks—“a handsome blonde.” Tennie had no problem being the stylish businesswoman, despite her tirades about fancy-dressed women. She wore a blue suit trimmed with black astrakhan fur, held her hands in a matching astrakhan muff, and topped her hair with a black velvet hat trimmed with black feathers. Anthony wore black and parted her hair straight down the middle and pulled into a severe bun that did nothing to soften her thin-lipped face or mitigate her slightly crossed eyes squinting behind rimless glasses. She could have disliked Tennie on sight, having no love for idle women of fashion, but these physical opposites hit it off. Anthony was entranced by the younger woman’s candor.

“Instead of making shirts at fifty cents each (one per day) for a living,
these two ladies (for they are ladies) determined to use their brains, their energy, and their knowledge of business to earn them a livelihood,” wrote Anthony in the
Revolution
, the women’s rights newspaper she and Stanton published. “Their presence on Wall Street marks a new era.” The day she visited the firm, Anthony had picked her way through a crowd of men, and commented with distaste, “Wall Street has been so exclusively monopolized by men that it has not yet got over a bad habit of staring at a passing woman.”

Tennie enthusiastically greeted Anthony at the women’s entrance, guided her into the inner sanctum, and casually flipped off her hat. Anthony sat on a green silk lounge and got to the point: “What first suggested to you the idea of coming into the rush and tumble of Wall Street?”

“The necessity for earning a livelihood… a knowledge of financial matters, and unfitness for the slow, dreary methods by which women usually earn a living,” replied Tennie. “Look at this office! Is it not better than sewing drawers at ten cents a pair?” Tennie’s brash comment was refreshing candor to Anthony. “Or teaching music at ten dollars a quarter?”

Tennie bubbled with praise for the “men of influence” who had received them “with the greatest possible kindness.” She then mentioned one of Anthony’s core topics in the women’s struggle: male contempt. “There are a few of the ‘small potatoes’ sort of men, who never mention the name of any woman, not even their own mother with respect; who sneer, and try to get off their poor jokes on us, but it doesn’t hurt us… We shall soon be part of the regular machinery.”

Anthony remarked with some surprise that the press “had nothing very dreadful to say against you.” The older woman knew full well what newspapers could do. She had endured years of humiliation, described as “an ungainly hermaphrodite… with an ugly face and shrill voice.” Eggs were thrown at her when she tried to speak, and she was hung in effigy three times. Recently she had been called a leader “of the delirium of unreason known as the Woman’s Cause.”

Tennie told her, “No, the worst was that I had been a clairvoyant physician. I did not mind that, it was quite true.” Then, she lied, “I never
received any money on false pretenses.” On a roll, she slipped into slang: “They cannot say that we ever were, or are, bad women, that we ever got tight, or visited disreputable places.” She wondered why women could not be judged “for their merits as men are? But if I say I want equality with men, they think I mean, at once, the privilege of getting drunk and being licentious. My opinion is that business, work… and something for it when it is done is the only thing that will put a stop on the social evils.”

Anthony warmed to her every word. “You are right,” she cried. “Men have everything, most women nothing but what men give them. When women want anything, be it bread or a kind word, they must pay the price that men exact for it, and it is nearly always a ‘pound of flesh.’ ”

“Yes indeed,” exclaimed Tennie. “Within the past eleven days we have made five hundred dollars by commissions on sale alone. This is called very good for the beginning.”

Anthony agreed, and asked the sisters to join the suffrage ranks.

“Just wait until we get ourselves firmly established in our business and we will show you what we will do for the rights of our sex,” replied Tennie.

As she left, Anthony felt a “great throb of pleasure” to see “a waiter from the restaurant, with a tray of hot luncheon on his head,” serving Tennie just as if she had been one of the established male brokers. She felt an “augury of better times to come for women—times when they shall vote the right to put food in their mouths, and money in their pockets, without asking men’s leave.”

After her article on Tennie, Anthony wrote an editorial in the
Revolution
stating that the sisters were stimulating “the whole future of woman”: “They are full of pluck, energy, and enterprise, and are withal most prepossessing in personal appearance, in manners, and lady-like deportment; moreover they ‘know what they are all about,’ and are calculated to inspire confidence by the sound sense, judgment and clear-sighted-ness they show in financial matters.” Little did the sisters know that in just a few years, Anthony would become their mortal enemy.

CHAPTER FIVE

Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly

Despite prejudices, so many capitalists and speculators were willing to try the female firm that Victoria and Tennie were swamped in their early days. They had impressed many with their coolness under fire.

Wall Street, however, was but a stepping-stone for the sisters’ next venture. Victoria and Tennie had what they wanted: fame and enough money to move on, infuriating Wall Street regulars who saw them as dilettantes. Victoria soon left the daily brokerage duties to Colonel Blood, and sprang a surprise that she had promised in January to reveal “soon.”

A week after the opening of the firm, Woodhull had spoken bitterly to a reporter about other women, stating “our own has universally thrown dirt at us.” The sisters did not buy the notion that women were “despoiled of most of their rights by the domineering will of man.” On the contrary, said Victoria, as soon as women were “prepared to perform” outside their sphere, “the right to do so cannot be withheld.” The public was hearing for the first time her ringing cry for freedom: “We propose revolution whenever the chains of conservatism drop too slowly and leave us chafing under their restraint too long.”

Six weeks later, on April 2, 1870, Woodhull announced what no woman had ever dared. She was putting her name up for nomination for the presidency of the United States, giving herself a two-year head start to form a political following and organization. She knew she would be
ridiculed, but claimed that otherworldly spirits had told her to do so. Her method of disseminating this information, however, was purely of this world: she announced it through the
New York Herald
. The
Herald
called her “The Coming Woman” and cheered, “Now for victory in 1872.”

In her letter to the paper, Victoria boldly combined what she saw as her credentials with the plight of women—“As I happen to be the most prominent representative of the most unrepresented class in the Republic…” She stingingly dismissed longtime activists: “while others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of woman with man, I proved it by engaging in business.” While other women merely fought for the right to be treated as equals, Victoria scoffed, “I boldly entered the arena of politics [although she had not yet made any noticeable effort] and business and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised [
sic
] woman of the country.” Woodhull hoped that her candidacy would spur on the fight for women’s suffrage and argued that it was overdue, contrasting the inequity for women with that of African Americans: “The blacks were cattle in 1860 and a Negro now sits in Jeff Davis’s seat” in the U.S. Senate. She built her campaign on Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s novel act. In 1869, Stanton had nominated herself for Congress from New York’s Eighth District, arguing that the Constitution said nothing about women not being able to run for office, even if they could not vote. Woodhull’s full-bore wooing of the friendly
Herald
led to its publication of lofty position papers, ghostwritten by Stephen Pearl Andrews, an eccentric genius who would soon play a prominent role in the sisters’ education.

Following Woodhull’s announcement, the sisters immediately made two strategic moves to boost Woodhull’s name and their fame. A week later, they leased a four-story mansion in posh Murray Hill, ready to entertain those who could help Woodhull’s candidacy. A few weeks later, in May, their
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
hit the newsstands.
UPWARD AND ONWARD
, blazed its masthead, but the sixteen-page newspaper cloaked its
radical text in a circumspect format. Victoria for president was a central theme, but far-reaching topics filled its pages. Anthony and Stanton would sell their struggling
Revolution
that spring, after only two years, so the field for a radical paper concerning women’s issues was wide open. The
Revolution
had touched on other women’s rights issues besides voting, such as liberalized divorce laws, but the sisters expanded this by mentioning the unmentionable: sexual equality for women and participation in politics and finance. Such explosive ideas outraged the male hierarchy of clergy, journalists, financiers, and businessmen. The sisters inflamed them with their frank language on everything from prostitution, sex (in or out of marriage), corruption on Wall Street, defense of the eight-hour workday, coed sex education, vegetarianism, and Spiritualism. Into this mix they added poetry and fiction, including the “immoral” writing of George Sand. There were no salacious cartoons, no blazing headlines. Ads from prominent bankers and brokers were strategically placed on page one, while ads for mediums and clairvoyants and, yes, ever-fraudulent cancer cures, ran inside.

There was no way that the uneducated, unlettered sisters could have penned or, in some cases, even understood the intellectual broadsides to which they signed their names. Once again they used men—Blood to run the brokerage firm and Andrews to craft their words.

Andrews was a visionary abolitionist, an anarchist who argued for individual freedoms such as free love, had taught himself thirty-two languages, and introduced Pitman shorthand to Americans. He also won and lost a fortune as a lawyer. In 1843, while reading Isaac Pitman’s phonographic manuals, Andrews saw the possibilities of shorthand as a major learning tool “to teach the illiterate Negro.” Because the phonic system taught listeners to record the spoken word accurately—using symbols, not spelling, for the sound of the word—a person unable to read could understand the meaning. Andrews then fought to make shorthand an acceptable course in American schools.

Not content with existing languages, Andrews started his own, Alwato, long before Esperanto was known. His serious work aside, Andrews’s fame came through his advocacy of free love, a belief he
quickly sold to the sisters, who were already versed in the concept through Colonel Blood. They were eager sponges, absorbing Andrews’s knowledge and his introductions to Victorian-era radical thinkers. In 1852 Andrews had engaged in a debate in the
Herald Tribune
with Henry James Sr. and Horace Greeley, on free love, marriage, and divorce. In the debate, Greeley embraced the concept of a conservative straight-laced marriage that could not be dissolved. James argued, vaguely, for a “foggy betweenity.” Andrews slammed James for weakness and dismissed Greeley as a bigot.