Free Woman (15 page)

Eleven-year-old Zulu Maud stared around her in wonder. Even though the hall had been rented on short notice, flags were draped on the walls and people carried red, white, and blue banners and signs. The weather had turned warm for May; women had put on thin, summery cotton dresses. Some brought fans to assure a cool breeze if the hall grew too warm. When her mother took a seat on the platform, people clapped and whistled. Zulu Maud had never seen anything like it in her whole life.

The first business on the agenda was to change the name of the party. It was decided that the People's party did not sound descriptive enough. Instead, the convention agreed to adopt the name Equal Rights party. Finally, Vicky was asked to address the session. She rose from her chair and stepped to the center of the platform. The audience was hushed now.

"What is equality?" she asked in her most impassioned voice. "And what is justice? Shall we be slaves to escape revolution? Away with such weak stupidity."

She had to stop after almost every sentence because of the applause. "A revolution shall sweep over the whole country, to purge it of political trickery, despotic assumption, and all industrial injustice."

The crowd roared its approval; someone shouted, "Amen!"

"From this convention will go forth a tide of revolution," Vicky exclaimed. "Who will dare to attempt to unlock the luminous portals of the future with the rusty keys of the past?"

As she sat down, six hundred people stamped their feet and laughed and kissed one another. A judge from Cincinnati rose to nominate Vicky for President. "All those in favor of the nomination, say aye," he cried.

A thunderous chorus of ayes rang through the hall.

The uproar continued for an hour. People marched up and down the aisles, waving flags and shouting "Victoria for President!" Tennie scrambled up on the platform and led the convention in a campaign song she had written, sung to the tune of "Comin' Thru the Rye":

If you nominate a woman

In the month of May,

Dare you face what Mrs. Grundy

And her set will say?

How they'll jeer and frown and slander

Chattering night and day:

Oh, did you dream of Mrs. Grundy

In the month of May?

There were many verses, all ending with:

Yes, Victoria we've selected

 
For our chosen head.

People passing on the street and hearing the music came in to find out what was going on. They stayed to sing and march and hear Vicky's acceptance speech.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, she took a deep breath and looked out on the smiling, happy throng. She began by thanking everyone from the bottom of her heart.

"I feel it all the more deeply because I have stood by you so long, sometimes meriting your applause and sometimes encountering your rebuffs. But I have always been faithful to my principles. Without saying more, I again thank you for the great honor you have shown me."

For vice-president, the convention chose black reformer Frederick Douglass. The Equal Rights party ticket would include a representative of the oppressed sex and the oppressed race. Douglass, once a slave, was not present at the convention. He didn't even know of its existence. When he did hear about his nomination, he ignored it and never responded.

That night there was a big celebration. The convention was over. They had broken political tradition; they had done what had never been done before. The challenge had been thrown down to the male voters of America.

The New York
Times
, always critical of Vicky, dismissed the convention in a few words: "Mrs. Woodhull's periodical exhibitions of bitter language attract numbers of idle people."

Smaller papers throughout the country applauded her courage. The Belfast (Ohio)
Weekly Observer
said: "Mrs. Woodhull brings the woman question to the forefront as only an American woman should have the bravery or boldness to do. As long as we are willing to make a woman a queen, we cannot consistently deny her ability to be a president."

A few weeks later, Vicky learned that being a presidential candidate made no difference—if you were a revolutionary and a woman. The landlord of her boardinghouse, perhaps only now aware of her identity, asked her to move out at once. "I won't have no anarchists livin' here," he said.

Once more the search for housing began, only this time Vicky sensed something peculiar going on. At every boardinghouse they met the same answer: "No room." Or, "We're a family establishment."

Next they looked for a house to rent. Real estate agents wouldn't even show her a building. "I don't object to you myself," one agent told Vicky, "but there is just so much prejudice against you in this city that I really can't risk my reputation."

The size of Vicky's family had decreased. In April, after a month's illness, Canning had died of pneumonia. Buck and Roxanna went to live with Polly but that still left James, Tennie, Byron, and Zulu Maud.

"We will have to go to a hotel," Vicky told James gloomily. "I know it will be expensive but what other choice do we have?"

First they tried the Hoffman House in Wall Street where the sisters had first rented space for their brokerage office. The manager, once friendly, politely refused them. So did a dozen other hotels. Finally, they found a shabby place called the Gilsey Hotel where a room clerk accepted their application without a murmur. Unknown to Vicky, the hotel manager was away that day. When he returned and found out the identities of his new guests, he tried to put them out.

Vicky's eyes blazed with anger. "I am a candidate for President of the United States and I am also a citizen," she stated in her most imperious voice. "Unless you can prove I have committed a misdemeanor, I refuse to leave."

The manager slunk away. Next morning, Vicky and James set off for the brokerage office. Tennie went to the
Weekly.
When they returned that evening, Byron and Zulu Maud were seated on the sidewalk next to the luggage. The doors to their rooms had been locked and a guard posted. Undoubtedly Vicky had many friends who would have taken her in, perhaps even found room for all five of them. But she was too proud to reveal her troubles to anyone. That night, and for several weeks afterward, they slept on the floor of the brokerage office. Finally, her sister Polly managed to rent a house for them on East Thirty-fourth Street in her husband's name. Polly had been careful not to mention the name Woodhull.

Just as Vicky was starting to breathe again, a new calamity hit them. The owner of the building at 44 Broad Street raised the rent on their brokerage office by a thousand dollars a year. What's more, he demanded the whole year's rent in advance. She had no choice but to shut down the business, which hadn't been much of a business lately anyway.

Vicky was suspicious. She became convinced that her difficulties could not be accidental. Somebody was deliberately trying to persecute her and drive her from the city. Moreover, she felt positive she knew who was behind it. The Beecher family.

The gossip about Vicky had escalated to a new stage of viciousness. She and Tennie, rumor said, were blackmailing prominent citizens. Supposedly they were demanding huge sums of money by threatening to print scandalous items in the
Weekly
. The rumors made Vicky sick.

She did not feel much better when a woman complained to the newspapers that she had applied for a clerk's job at the
Weekly
, only to be told by Vicky that "we can't have our paper spoiled by women." There were so many lies that Vicky could not fight them all. Besides, at that point the paper was in no position to hire anyone, male or female. On June 28,
Woodhull and Claflin’s
Weekly
was forced to suspend publication. The money had run out.

"I am paralyzed in strength, health and purse," Vicky wrote to a friend after the
Weekly
closed, "and reduced to a condition in which I am obliged to stop all business."

When her creditors sued her for debts, she testified in court, "I own nothing, not even the clothes on my back."

In September she dragged herself out on the lecture circuit again, weary and discouraged. She went to earn money but also felt a sense of duty. The lectures had been a means of keeping her name before the voting public, but now she could fool herself no longer. Earlier in the summer, the Equal Rights party had organized local political clubs, Victoria Leagues, all over the country. They marched and sang and distributed
Victoria C. Woodhull for President
buttons.

But, as the election drew closer, the Equal Rights party disintegrated. With President Grant rated a shoo-in for a second term, their efforts on behalf of Vicky became nearly nonexistent. Vicky understood that she hadn't a prayer of being elected. Perhaps, in her heart, she had known that fact for some time, but she was not a person who got easily discouraged.

Now she felt herself surrounded by hostility. "Why?" she would ask herself repeatedly. "What have I done to warrant this abuse?"

One thing she had done, of course, was to thumb her nose at the puritanical codes held precious by Victorian society. The country's sentiment toward her was best summed up by Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a feminist and the first woman minister. Wrote Mrs. Blackwell to a friend shortly after Vicky's "free love" speech: "Independent of the morality of the question, nobody can succeed who begins by so gross a shock to public sentiment."

Another reason for the ostracism: Vicky was a woman. She clearly understood that men, especially powerful men like Henry Beecher, had the freedom to flout society's rules. They could practice "free love" in secret and get away with it. A woman could not. The unfair double standard, against which she had fought for so many years, finally caught up with her. Any woman rash enough to defy the rules that kept women in their place was bound to be punished sooner or later.

All that fall, an obsession gnawed at her. She was seized by a burning sickness to justify her actions and to vindicate herself. Coolly, deliberately, she reached a decision. The printed word would be her weapon. Somehow she would find the money to publish a special edition of the
Weekly
and print the full story about Henry Beecher and Lib Tilton.

And so Vicky prepared a bomb to drop on prudish Victorian America.

10

Freedom of the Press

On the morning of October 28, 1872, Vicky delivered a bundle of five hundred copies of the
Weekly
to a newsstand on the busy corner of Broad and Wall streets.

"Miz Woodhull," protested the news dealer, "I know doggone well I can't sell all these."

Vicky smiled. "Wait and see, Jake," she said mysteriously, "wait and see."

The
Weekly
did not look any different than usual. The front page carried advertisements. There were no sensational headlines on any page. But as Jake began to read the contents, he blew a whistle through his tobacco-stained teeth.

"Good God Almighty!" he swore.

By noon, Jake had sold all his copies. When he ran over to the
Weekly's
new headquarters at 48 Broad Street to pick up another load of papers, he found himself in the middle of a stampede. It looked like every news dealer in the city was there. Finally a policeman was called to direct traffic. Thus the most sensational scandal of the century began with a traffic jam.

This issue of the
Weekly
was no slapdash affair. Vicky, Tennie, James, and Stephen Pearl Andrews had spent over a month carefully planning the detailed expose. The lead article on Beecher, written by Vicky herself, ran eleven columns. She justified her attack on the minister in the name of social revolution. In effect she told her readers that you can't make scrambled eggs without breaking a few eggshells. If society is to be reformed, a few powerful men like Beecher must be hurt.

"The fault with which I therefore charge him," she wrote, "is not infidelity to the old ideas, but unfaithfulness to the new. I am prone to denounce him as a poltroon, a coward and a sneak for failing to stand shoulder to shoulder with me and others who are endeavoring to hasten a social regeneration which he believes in."

She ended the article with an apology. "I believe in the law of peace, in the right of privacy, in the sanctity of individual relations. It is nobody's business but their own what Mr. Beecher and Mrs. Tilton have done, or may choose at any time to do, as between themselves. And the world needs, too, to be taught just that lesson.

"It is not therefore Mr. Beecher as the individual I pursue, but Mr. Beecher as the representative man, Mr. Beecher as a power in the world. To Mr. Beecher, as the individual citizen, I tender my humble apology, meaning and deeply feeling what I say, for this or any interference with his private life."

Although most of the issue was devoted to various aspects of the Beecher-Tilton affair, Tennie contributed an article about a Wall Street broker named Luther Challis who made a habit of seducing adolescent girls. Her point was that a man could retain his respectable standing in the community, no matter how lecherously he behaved, while a woman could not.

New Yorkers found the
Weekly'
s revelations about Beecher the most horrifying, the most titillating news they had heard in years. Some, never having heard of the paper, asked news dealers for "that paper with the Beecher scandal" and were willing to pay almost anything. The price for a secondhand copy soared from 50 cents to $5 to $10. One man boasted he had paid $40. Those fortunate enough to possess copies rented them out for a dollar a day.

Although people went berserk to read every detail, most did not believe the story. After all, Beecher was a moral leader. Hadn't a publisher just given him $25,000 to write a book on the life of Jesus? If they accepted Beecher as a common adulterer, they might have to admit that their whole moral code was a sham.

Among those who had no doubt about Beecher's guilt was his sister Isabella. When she challenged him to admit his affair with Lib Tilton, he only shook his head sadly and said, "Think how barbarous it is to drag that poor dear child of a woman into this dirt."