Victoria Woodhull for President
In January of 1871, the National Woman Suffrage Association was meeting in Washington, DC. On January 11, Victoria Woodhull arranged to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the topic of woman suffrage, so the NWSA convention was postponed a day so that those attending could see Woodhull testifying. The speech was written with Rep. Benjamin Butler, and made the case that women already had the right to vote based on the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The NWSA leadership then invited Woodhull to address their gathering. The leadership of NWSA -- which included Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Isabella Beecher Hooker -- were so taken with the speech that they began promoting Woodhull as an advocate and speaker for woman suffrage.
Others thought less of Woodhull. Susan B. Anthony, though not entirely rejecting Woodhull, helped defeat Woodhull's attempt to take over the NWSA. Others who were more skeptical of Woodhull included Lucy Stone, also an active woman's suffrage activist, and two sisters of Isabella Beecher Hooker, the more famous Harriet Beecher Stowe and the writer and teacher, Catherine Beecher. These two Beecher sisters were especialy horrified by Victoria Woodhull's advocacy of the doctrine of free love. So was their brother, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a famous and popular Congregationalist minister. And he spoke out against her ideas.
Victoria Woodhull made a spectacular target for scandal-hungry newspapers. Her ex-husband was living with the family. The sisters lost the support of Cornelius Vanderbilt when their mother spoofed Tennessee's name as the author of a blackmailing letter to Vanderbilt. Rumors of lovers visiting the household were common.
Theodore Tilton was a supporter and officer of the NWSA, and also a close friend of Woodhull's critic, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Victoria Woodhull confidentially that Tilton's wife, Elizabeth, had been involved in an affair with the Rev. Beecher. When Beecher refused to introduce Victoria Woodhull at a November, 1871, lecture at Steinway Halls, she visited him privately and reportedly confronted him about his affair, and he still refused to do the honors at her lecture. In her speech the next day, she referred indirectly to the affair as an example of sexual hypocrisy and the double standard, and, when taunted by her sister Utica at the speech, made a strong statement of her own advocacy of free love.
Because of the scandal this caused, Woodhull lost a significant amount of business, though her lectures were still in demand. She and her family had trouble meeting their bills, and were evicted from their home.
The next year, a breakaway group from the NWSA, the National Radical Reformers, nominated Victoria Woodhull as a candidate for president of the Equal Rights Party. They nominated Frederick Douglass, a newspaper editor who was a former slave and abolitionist, as Vice President. There's no record that Douglass accepted the nomination. Susan B. Anthony opposed the nomination of Woodhull, while Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Isabella Beecher Hooker supported her run for the presidency.
Also in 1872, the Weekly published the first translation into English of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels.
