by Mary Gabriel
JUST AS VICTORIA’S legal problems appeared to be abating, a family matter once again dragged her name back into the press. Victoria’s sister Utica was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and taken to Jefferson Market Court. She was released when no one appeared to press charges, but she came back on the same day to file a complaint against Victoria and Blood. She charged they had beaten her and had her arrested without cause. Just two days after the couple’s obscenity case ended in an acquittal, a summons was issued for their arrest on the new charges brought by Utica.
The following day, July 1, The New York Times published a statement from Victoria under the headline “A Charming Family” explaining the circumstances. She wrote: “The statements of yesterday that Col. Blood and myself had committed an assault upon Utica Brooker are unqualifiedly false. Mrs. Brooker, in a drunken or insane rage, attacked Mrs. Miles—her sister—with a heavy chair, for which and her subsequent acts, Mrs. Miles had her arrested for disorderly conduct. It was, however, at my special solicitation that Mrs. Miles did not appear against Mrs. Brooker. It was expressly understood that she should not return to the house further to molest us; but no sooner was she released than she did return and at once began her insane and disorderly conduct.
“Her complaint is purely malicious, and by her own avowal was made to affect the public against me, Respectfully, Victoria C. Woodhull.”
A week later, Utica died. The Herald reported that the coroner and his deputy were called to Victoria’s house at four o’clock in the afternoon on July 10, to hold an inquest into the death of Mrs. Utica Brooker, who had died the day before. The paper also reported that Utica “had an unconquerable appetite for intoxicating liquors and had been in the habit of drinking to great excess for the last twelve or fifteen years, but particularly so of late. She would take brandy, gin, whiskey, rum, wine and beer [and] when such beverages were not at hand Mrs. Brooker has been known to swallow large draughts of bay-rum. The result was that at intervals, she was a raving maniac, and, jumping from bed, would pursue her sisters, who would flee for their lives till she became pacified.”
Tennie asked to remain in the room while the coroner performed the autopsy, but he refused. He determined that Utica had died of Bright’s disease of the kidneys, a result of excessive intemperance. She was thirty-one.
Tennie and Victoria paid seventy-five dollars to have Canning Woodhull moved to Greenwood Cemetery to be with Utica. The two had succumbed to the same disease in life and the sisters likely believed it fitting that they should comfort each other in death.
CHICAGO, SEPTEMBER 1873
Victoria was no longer invited to women’s conventions or labor gatherings; she had been abandoned by both of those constituencies, which had once proudly called her a leader. One group continued to consider Victoria Woodhull its president, however, though opposition to her reign was growing. The spiritualists had stood by Victoria throughout the tumultuous year of the Beecher case, but some in the group were beginning to believe it was time to elect a new leader. In the fall of 1873, the divided spiritualists invited Victoria to be the keynote speaker at two major events, one in Vineland, New Jersey, and the other in Chicago.
The Herald called the Vineland gathering “A Witches’ Sabbath,” and the reporter declared Victoria’s address her most outrageous ever. In “The Scarecrows of Social Freedom,” Victoria sought to show how in religion, politics, and the home, scarecrows were used by those in power to prevent those without power from seeking it. She took special aim at the home, which she said under the present system was a community of “little hot hells, in which the two principals torment each other until one or the other gives up the contest.”
In the home, the scarecrow was the children: women were told that if they left a bad marriage their children would suffer. Victoria argued, however, that children suffered when women stayed in bad marriages: “Why do you not, in the place of asking what will become of the children, ask what is becoming of them now? Go ask the fifty thousand houseless, half starved, wholly untaught children of New York City, who live from the swill barrels of the rich Christians, what is becoming of them, and they will tell you they don’t know. But it will be plain to be seen that they are going to the bad, surely. I cannot understand how it is that the critics of social freedom should be so terribly concerned about the children who are to be, when they have no concern whatever for those who are. Solicitude for children. . . . Why, it is simply absurd! There is no such thing. This pretended solicitude is something pumped up in the imaginations of these idealists as a scarecrow to prevent [the] inquirer after freedom from finding the direct road.”
The Herald reporter said the crowd of long-haired men and short-haired women applauded the “coarse” speech warmly. But there was a growing faction of dissenters in the crowd who were not sure that Victoria C. Woodhull and her radical social theories were what the spiritualists needed. Like the old guard in the women’s movement who thought the vote its only issue, or the purists in the International who saw its mission as purely a quest for jobs and wages, some among the spiritualists wanted the movement to break away from the issues that Victoria promoted, like equality and education, and concentrate instead on more traditional pursuits, like communicating with the dead. One member urged the spiritualists to “stick to their haunted furniture and musical instruments.”
By September, a large faction of spiritualists had decided to split from the national organization over Woodhull—some because they objected to her radical stance, others because they did not believe she had gone far enough. On the last day of a three-day spiritualist convention in Chicago, Judge Edmund S. Holbrooke read a protest from the dissenting group: “The Woodhull, as soon as she was elected President of the Association, treated the election as an endorsement of her aspirations to the Presidential chair of the United States, and conducted herself accordingly; that failing in this aspiration, and being abandoned by her associates in the woman suffrage movement, she became the most unscrupulous advocate of free-love in its worst features. This the protesters hold to be an element foreign to true and pure Spiritualism and abhorrent to the views, sentiments and sensibilities of cultivated and refined society.”
Judge Holbrooke’s dissent was mild in comparison with the exchange between Victoria and one of her spiritualist critics who believed she should be more forthcoming about her personal practices concerning free love. There was a confessional element among the spiritualists who thought, either sincerely or out of a sense of voyeurism, that Victoria would be a better advocate of the principles she championed if she detailed her personal experiences as a free lover. Among those was a man named Cotton who called upon Victoria in Chicago to “divulge the whole thing” and describe how “not for love nor lust, but for power to carry on this glorious work” she had “prostituted herself sexually to do it.” The challenge was greeted with loud cries from the audience demanding Mrs. Woodhull speak.
Victoria had long ago lost her reticence before an audience. In fact, at a speech shortly before the spiritualist convention, a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter had described her air as no less than “menacing”: “Her body she poised lightly upon her right leg, the left thrown forward, her right arm was held tight across her chest, a la Tom Sayers, while the left was flung carelessly behind her back.”
Victoria said, “Mr. Cotton has been coming to these things for some time, and I suppose he wants a reply. . . . First of all, I want to know what it is he is trying to get at. Now, Mr. Cotton, will you please tell me? I want to fully understand you to know what you want me to do? What is it that you want me to explain?
“I am a little confused. I am thinking whether I shall lose any of my womanly dignity if I stoop to answer this man. I am really considering whether I shall. A man questioning my virtue! Have I any right as a woman to answer him?”
The chairman of the meeting interjected that he hardly thought it necessary and Mr. Cotton himself said he did not think he was “worth the powder to shoot at,�
� but he added that he had information he could use to detail Victoria’s private life if she chose not to tell the gathering herself.
Victoria threw the issue out to the audience saying, “If this Convention wants to know anything special about my sexual organs let us have it understood.”
“Did he tell the truth?” one man in the audience asked Victoria of Cotton.
“Suppose he did tell the truth,” Victoria replied. “Has Mr. Cotton ever had sexual intercourse with Mrs. Woodhull?”
To which Cotton replied, “No.”
“Do you know of any man that has?” she asked him.
Again Cotton replied, “No.”
“Then, what in the name of heaven can you prove? Have you in your eagerness to do something for the public weal, which I suppose you consider in danger, caught up the uncomprehended sayings of some busybody who thinks he knows more about my business than I do myself and better how to manage it, that you come before this convention and arraign me for hypocrisy? I hurl the intention back in your face, sir, and stand boldly before you and this Convention, and declare that I never had sexual intercourse with any man of whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world with the act. I am not ashamed of any act of my life. At the time, it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any desire that has been gratified or of any passion alluded to. Every one of them are a part of my own soul’s life, for which, thank God, I am not accountable to you.”
Victoria was only beginning. Cotton’s feeble challenge and the crowd of spiritualists eager to hear details of her private life enraged her. Dismissing Cotton she continued, “I have my own proper business to attend to tonight. I want to know why people congregate in this Convention and make me their president. Is it because I have shown any cowardice during the last two years? Or is it because I have gone through the very depths of hell to give you freedom? I want to know. Is it because I have been a coward, or is it because I have braved the penitentiary and every other damnable thing that could be put up to hinder me giving you the truth?
“Well, now, when I came out of my prison I came out of it a beggar. I appealed to the Spiritualists, to the reformers of the country, to send in their money that I might send you my paper. But did you do it? No; you left me to starve in the streets; you left my paper to die; you sent in a few paltry dollars, but not enough to meet the necessary payments. I knew my paper had to live, or I should assuredly be sent to Sing Sing. Hence, I went to the world’s people. I went to your bankers, presidents of railroads, gamblers, prostitutes, and got the money that has sent you the paper you have been reading, and I do not think that any of you are worse for handling it.
“I used whatever influence I had to get that money and that’s my own business, and none of yours; and if I devoted my body to my work and my soul to God, that is my business and not yours. I have gone before the world devoting heart and soul to this cause. I have been willing and still am willing to yield up my life, if need be, to further its interests.
“All my mind; all my might; all my strength; all my faculties are engaged in this labor, and when any of them are demanded, they are not withheld. . . . Hence I say, suppose I have been obliged to crucify my body in whatsoever way to fulfill my duty, what business is that of Mr. Cotton? I prostituted my body by speaking to you last night when I was scarcely able to stand alone. I shall do the same to-night, in order to advance a great truth to the world that shall prove its salvation. And you prostituted me by the failure to come to my support when I needed you. I have racked my brain, my body, my strength, my health, my all that this cause might live; aye, even that this Convention might meet under the favorable auspices under which it has met. And now this man stands up to demand of me if I have sold my body to help this on, just as if there was no other prostitution except that of sexuality! Bah! such cant and from men. . . .
“Once and for all time, let me assure the highly respectable male citizen from Vineland that I have done whatever was necessary to perform what I conceived to be my duty, and so long as I live I shall continue to do whatever is necessary, even to giving my life, but that shall be the last resort. Everything else before that, even if it be the crucifixion of my body in the manner for which I am now arraigned. If you do not want one to be forced to that extreme, come to my rescue as you ought to have done before, and not let me fight the battle all alone and be subjected even to the possibility of a thing so utterly abhorrent to me as to submit sexually for money to a man I do not love. If Mr. Cotton, or if any of you are so terribly alarmed lest I may have been obliged to do this, let him and you manifest your alarm by rallying to my support so as to insure that no such exigency shall ever again arise.”
Despite her stirring speech, the national spiritualist movement continued to break apart into warring factions. In fact, by September 1873 the whole world looked as though it might come apart.
NEW YORK CITY, LATE SEPTEMBER 1873
In her speeches and the Weekly, Victoria had long warned of an impending debacle due to reckless, if not criminal, speculation on Wall Street, but it is likely that few remembered those warnings in the panic of Friday, September 18, 1873, when newspapers around the country announced, “The Financial Crash, The Money World Shaken from Centre to Circumference.”
On Thursday, September 17, the great New York banking house of Jay Cooke & Co. had failed. Cooke’s overdrafts on Northern Pacific Railroad credit had mounted into the millions and he was forced to declare bankruptcy. One day later, thirty New York City banks and brokerage firms collapsed and the stock market was temporarily suspended. By January, five thousand businesses had been forced to close in what would be the nation’s worst economic crisis to date. What one writer called “the bursting of the American bubble of speculation” put tens of thousands of workers out on the streets, and in rural areas almost equal numbers of farmers lost their land to auctioneers. In New York City alone, up to 105,000 workers, or about a quarter of the city’s population, were unemployed by December and charities were feeding up to 7,000 people a day.
On October 17, while a Woman’s Congress was being held in New York that was heralded in the press as “high-toned and high-minded,” Victoria was addressing a separate, standing-room-only crowd at the Cooper Institute, advocating for the rights of the “lower million” over the “upper ten.” Four thousand people crammed into the hall to hear Victoria. The Herald reported that the aisles and entrances were jammed and that the reporters’ area in front of the stage was “invaded” by the masses hoping to secure a seat. The crowd gathered at the Cooper Institute was so eager to hear Victoria that it drove the preliminary speakers off the stage and demanded the Woodhull.
Victoria was worn and ill when she came out from behind the stage to meet the alternately cheering and hissing group. She was wearing a black skirt and a black braided jacket that fit tight around her waist. Her collar was turned up and her hair fell carelessly over her ears. Her only ornament was a rose tucked into her dress.
The boisterous crowd would have been a difficult audience under any circumstances, but it was made more so by the fact that Victoria had a severe cold and her usually strong voice was reduced to a husky rasp. Members of the audience shouted encouragement as she struggled to make herself heard, crying “Wet your whistle, old woman” and “Go in, old gal.” She proceeded and eventually the crowd quieted down and allowed her voice to be heard above theirs.
She told them that she spoke “for the people, the great, honest, industrial masses, who, being obliged to toil everyday to obtain their barely needed sustenance, have no time to look after the person to whom they have intrusted their interests, and who, knowing they are being robbed day after day, year after year, cannot leave their labor to counsel together as to the means of relief. Want stands at their home-door, grinning a ghastly grin at their families, and warning them to waste no time; they know there is something wrong somewhere, but they have not the opportunity to find it out.”
As Victoria began to detail the origins
of the beleaguered workers’ circumstances, she regained her energy, laid down the copy of her lecture, and “pranced up and down the platform” according to one reporter.
“I charge upon this government that it is a failure,” she tried to shout through the hall, “because it has neither secured freedom (and by this I mean the personal rights of individuals), maintained equality, nor administered justice to its citizens. These three terms constitute the political trinity. . . .
“The bondholders, money-lenders and railroad kings say to the politicians: If you will legislate for our interests, we will retain you in power, and, together (you with the public offices and patronage and we with our immense dependencies and money), we can control the destinies of the country, and change the government to suit ourselves; and now finally, comes in the threatened church power, and it says: If you will make your government a Christian government, we will bring all the ‘Faithful’ to your support;—and thus united, let me warn you, they constitute the strongest power in the world. It is the government, all the wealth of the country, backed up by the church against the unorganized mass of reformers, every one of whom is pulling his or her little string in opposing directions.”
She described the Wall Street crash as a warning that the government, too, was about to fall. She warned that the newspapers would not report the truth of the crisis because they owed their very existence to advertisers that profited by the current system. She vowed that if God gave her the strength she would resume her political campaign to overthrow the government, which was full of men not fit to be picked up out of the gutter.
Victoria even berated the crowd for allowing themselves to be “ignorant slaves” to such men, but she predicted that within a few months they would be freed from their chains by a bloody revolution: “Not much longer shall thousands of men, women and children eke out a miserable life upon what a ‘sport’ would disdain to feed his dogs, while the favored few wallow in superfluities.”
