September 22, 2018 • 29 mins
Today we revisit a Sarah and Deblina episode from 2011. In 1872, the Equal Rights Party nominated Victoria Woodhull for president, but her radical views and an personal scandal caused her to lose many supporters. In this episode, Sarah and Deblina recount the life of the first woman to run for U.S. president.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We are coming up on the birthday of
Victoria Woodhall, who was born on September. She ran for
president of the United States before the nineteenth Amendment prohibited
denying citizens the right to vote because of their sex.
This episode is from It is much requested, and it
is from prior hosts Sarah and Deblina Enjoy. Welcome to
(00:28):
Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Debliina
Chokoboarding and I'm Sarah Dowdy and we are barreling right
along through women's history one. So far, we've covered a
couple of women of pirate leader and a warrior queen,
(00:51):
for example, who both made a name for themselves by
fighting against the establishment. In this episode, however, we're going
to take a at one who sought to become part
of the establishment and kind of effect change from within,
kind of the biggest part of the establishment exactly. And um,
by that, we mean we're about to talk about Victoria Woodhull,
(01:13):
the first woman to run for president of the United States. Yeah,
and her bid for the presidency was really remarkable. And
that's not just because it happened almost fifty years before
women even had the right to vote, the legal right
to vote. It was miraculous because she had this really
sketchy pass. She basically came out of nowhere. Uh, the
(01:34):
previous entry on her resume before presidential candidate was clairvoyant.
That's something you're unlikely to see to make and um,
in a couple of years, she became the leading voice
in the women's rights movement. So a remarkable biography. Yeah,
you could probably do an entire series on just all
(01:54):
the details of her really unconventional and turbulent sometimes cookie
downright cookie life, but we're mostly going to focus on
the meteoric rise that led to her nomination for president
and of course the scandal that caused it all to
go horribly wrong. And you'll see that it really makes
today's nominees for the most part, not in all cases,
(02:16):
but for the most part, look pretty tame bland. Yeah,
certainly their names, the names in this podcast are going
to be great. I just I want to get you
psycked up for that everyone. And you know, by saying
that she's exciting, we're not just talking about in terms
of the scandal. Even her background is really fascinating and unique.
So we'll get into that a little bit at first.
(02:37):
She was born Victoria Claughlin on September eight in Homer, Ohio,
and her mom, Annie Claughlin, named her after the then
eighteen year old Queen of England, so she keeps popping
up Victoria. So Victoria Claughlin was the fifth of seven
living kids, and while she was growing up, her family
(02:58):
had a lot of financial struggle. Um, she didn't really
let that get to her though. She was still a
very confident kid and she kind of held court on
this with her family, telling stories to the other kids.
And she was really smart. She had a photographic memory.
And there, you know, we we should mention too because
this comes into play later that her intelligence was not
(03:21):
educated intelligence. She she only went to school from ages
eight to eleven. She was just a a smart, quick
learning kid. Yeah, and that's all. That's all the school
and she had the opportunity to get at the time,
we should say. But she was nicknamed Little Queen because
of her proud demeanor and her she would intensely concentrate
on things, So people thought that was very queen like,
(03:42):
just like Madame de Pompadour, very similar her dad. But
Claughlin was kind of a rascal who just hopped from
job to job. I think he had something like a
dozen jobs. But eventually his grand get rich scheme was
to start calling two of his daughters, Victoria and Tennessee
spiritual mediums and set them up as this traveling spiritualist
(04:04):
medicine show, which sounds like a really off the wall idea,
but it wasn't quite as out there as it seems
because Buck had heard about this other pair of sisters
from New York, Kate and Margaret Fox, and they had
earned huge amounts of money working as these traveling mediums,
and there was, you know, at the time, this growing
(04:25):
interest in spiritualism. I think that's something that comes up
in the podcast from time to time too. And women
were very important in that movement, partly because it gave
them influence. If you're speaking as a medium, nobody is
really holding you responsible for what you said, not quite
at least um, so you know, you could get away
(04:45):
with some stuff like a spooky loophole. So in addition
to this, Victoria had also been known to have religious
visions of her own from a very young age. In one,
for example, a young man in a tunic supposedly told
her quote, one day, you will lead your people. So
it seems kind of prophetic for what's coming up in
(05:06):
this podcast. But a lot of historians say that it
may have just been because her mother was really religious
that she said she had these visage. We're not and
we can't be really sure she actually had them or not,
but kind of the environment she was growing up in, yeah, definitely,
she might have just been picking up on what she
had seen, regardless of the motivations and the inspirations, I guess.
(05:27):
So Victoria and Tennessee did turn a pretty big profit
for their family doing this, though the girls weren't really
sure how to approach it at first. They kind of
went to their dad and they're like, what are we
supposed to do? And so Buck gave Victoria this advice.
He said, be a good listener child, and that's kind
of all he told her. But we'll see that that
comes into play later. Following that advice, that is, it
(05:48):
sort of becomes the foundation for some of her later ideas.
I think it would be awkward if your dad told
you and your sister to go be mediums, Like, oh, no,
where to start with that? Exactly, Um, but yeah, you're right.
It does prove to be a really big foundation to
her later beliefs, and marriage was another big foundation of
those later beliefs. And she got married for the first
(06:11):
time when she was only fifteen years old, to a
doctor named Kenning Woodhall, and it seemed like a promising
match at first, except that he turned out to be
a drunk and Victoria was very unhappy and wanted to
leave him, but because of Victorians social standards and the
marriage laws at the time, she was trapped. Her property
(06:33):
was her husband's and she really couldn't get out, so
she ended up because Canning was such a drunk and
also cheated on her, I think, and just basically wasn't
a great provider at that time. He wasn't a very
successful doctor even though he was one, he didn't have
that many patients, so she not too surprising, right, So
she supported him and her two kids, Byron and Zulu,
(06:56):
by dressmaking. Then she did a short stint with acting
when they were living out on the West Coast, and
then she influentially returned to the family business, which got
increasingly sketchy as the years got by. Buck actually started
claiming that Tennessee was a healer who could cure cancer,
and at one point later on down the road, she
is charged with manslaughter when a man dies of cancer.
(07:19):
This is kind of what I meant. Women didn't get
too much in trouble for what they said as clairvoyance.
Unless you go say you're going to cure someone's cancer,
unless you start making medical claims. This is a line
I guess. So Victoria's role, though, was different from Tennessee's.
She wasn't out curing cancer. It was more like the
job of a therapist. Onmost she listened to people's problems,
(07:42):
often problems about unhappy married life, and uh, hearing enough
stories convinced her that in some cases divorce was necessary
and called for. Yeah, and this is combined with her
own experience, right, So she's had her own unhappy marriage
and now she's hearing us from other people. So obviously
that would influence you a little bit. So she's starting
(08:03):
to change her mind. And this belief actually ends up
coming in handy when in eighteen sixty four she moves
to St. Louis and she meets a man by the
name of Colonel James Henry Blood who's just back from
the Civil War. He's also into spiritualism, and she likes
him immediately, not just because they have that in common,
but he's very attractive and so they hit it off.
But he comes to see her as a patient and
(08:25):
she supposedly, this is the story that is told that
she supposedly goes into a trance and tells him that
his destiny is to marry her from like a far
away voice, as if someone else, you will marry me. Um. So,
of course after that they said they must get married
even though they're both married. Even though they're both married
(08:46):
at the time, so they file for divorce and they
get married eventually in July eighteen sixty six. She does
keep the name woodhol though, which some find to be scandalous.
Some people think that because she kept the name, that
meant that she never really married Blood, but maybe she
just didn't want to be Victoria Blood. That's true. That's
a scary night sounding um. But Blood the husband did
(09:08):
have a really huge influence on Victoria's ideals and further
shaping them, and he becomes something of a mentor to
her and exposes her to these radical ideas of the time,
like birth control and free education and equal rights for women,
and um it starts to shape her into a new
(09:29):
person with some pretty new ideas. By the time, Victoria
and her extended family moved to New York City in
eighteen sixty eight, and this was also at the direction
of one of her visions. By the way, by that time,
she's committed to social reform, but she realizes that to
(09:52):
be a real player in the fight for equality, she
needs some cash. Most women's rights activists at a time
came from the upper and middle class, so that was
the example she had for getting in. Yeah, and that's
an important thing to keep in mind for some later
issues she runs into. But Victoria and Tennessee sat themselves
up as clairvoyance in New York City and they have
(10:13):
business cards and everything. They're like really going for it,
and they aren't making any claims about medical expertise anymore.
After that man's letter charge, you know, they've learned better
than that. And it seems like the business gets off
to an amazingly lucky start because one of their first
clients is seventy three year old multi millionaire commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. So, yeah,
(10:37):
he's the kind of guy who can make your clairvoyant career. Definitely.
And actually it's very unclear how much this no nonsense
railroad and shipping tycoon actually believed in the sisters spiritual powers.
But he liked them in general, and when we got
down to it, he really just thought they were pretty.
He liked hanging out with pretty women. So he takes
(10:58):
to them, and Vanderbilt teaches the sisters about the stock market.
And I saw a quote in an American Heritage. It
wasn't a quote, actually, it was said by John Gordon,
the writer of this article American Heritage, and he compared
this to getting stock tips from Warren Buffett. So just
to give all the listeners out there an example of
how major this was. This was a pretty significant person
(11:20):
to be giving you advice. So he gives them tips.
Colonel Blood invests money for them on their behalf using
Vanderbilts advice, and suddenly they found themselves with a little
bit of wealth. Yeah, it pays off pretty quickly. And
so now that they're secure, Victoria is ready to make
her debut into this women's rights movement, and she does
(11:41):
that in January eighteen sixty nine. But she knows that
her clairvoyant job title is going to hold her back
a little bit. She can't be or a former and
a working clairvoyant, or no one will take her seriously.
So she gives up her old line of work and
makes starts taking calculated steps to recreate herself again. Her
(12:03):
first opportunity for reinvention comes by September sixty nine, and
that happens to be Black Friday on Wall Street when
the market crashed. Investors began selling off their stocks in
a panic, and Victoria basically just sat outside the exchange
and bought up bargains. She supposedly made seven thousand dollars
by the end of eighteen sixty nine, although some people
(12:24):
think that she inflated that figure when she reported it.
But she made a lot of money, to say the least. Yeah.
After that, Victorian Tennessee, they think, Okay, we've had a
little success. We can probably become major players on Wall Street.
So they asked for Vanderbilt's backing to open their own
financial firm, and he shows his support. He gives them
seven thousand dollars to to do that. It's called Woodhull,
(12:47):
Claughlin and Company, and the sisters become the first female
stockbrokers on Wall Street, the first of many firsts for
at least Victoria, and they got a lot of attention
because of this, and they had a lot of really
influential people, and some people came by just to sort
of check out this company, you know, swing by and
see what it's all about. Walt Whitman even comes by.
(13:10):
He says something that sounds very Walt Whitman quote, you
have given an object lesson to the whole world. You
are prophecy of the future. There you go, Yes, put
that on their new business cards. And that's just from doing,
you know, a little walkthrough. Um. So, overall, I think
they had to rain in that people just walking through
(13:31):
randomly thing. But business was good. Some people suggest that
might have been because of Vanderbilt's name being behind it.
I think people automatically assume that maybe he was pulling
the strings. But regardless, they did well. Clairvoyant ability, you
never know, that could also be an aspect of it. Um.
So Victoria starts making some pretty influential friends and eventually
(13:52):
she enlists one of them, Stephen Pearl Andrews, who was
very educated, also another reformer, to help her buff up
her education a little bit, you know, polish her basic
reading and writing skills and and sort of get a
new start there as well. And so in April eighteen seventy,
the New York Herald begins to publish this series of
(14:14):
articles by Victoria, and she really comes out swinging for
the first one she does. She says, 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
(14:35):
woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business,
while others sought to show that there was no valid
reason why women should be treated socially and politically as
being inferior to man. I boldly entered the arena of
politics and business and exercise the rights I already possessed.
I therefore claimed the rights to speak for the unenfranchised
women of the country and announced myself as a candidate
(14:57):
for the presidency. So there you go. She dropped a
bomb with that one, definitely so. Ulysses s. Grant was
in his first term at this time, and most people
were thinking that he would run again in eight, so
the Republican nomination was out. She knew that she wouldn't
get the Democratic nomination, so if she was going to
(15:18):
run for president, she was going to have to nominate
herself and get enough support to get her name put
on the ballot. So that's what she sets out to do,
and she has pretty creative ways of going about it.
She does. She launches into this whole series of kind
of next steps to prepare for her. You can't really
call it a campaign, I guess, but it sort of
(15:39):
was an announced and an unannounced campaign a good way
to put up. So she started by getting this a big,
fancy house between Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York
City's Murray Hill district, which was one of the more
aristocratic neighborhoods. So again we see the whole class issue
coming up here. She wanted to establish herself as someone
who was somebody rather than you know, a poor girl
(16:02):
from Ohio, definitely. And the next thing she does is
buy a newspaper. Yeah, buying a newspaper meant that you're
someone really influential. So she does buy one, and she
calls it wood Hole and Claughland's Weekly, and she sets
this up as doing a certain number of things. Of course,
first and foremost, it supports Victoria's c wood Hole for President.
(16:23):
It's a mixture of mud raking, fads and scandals. For example,
she publishes in her publication the first English translation in
the US of the Communist Manifesto, totally bizarro. That was
one of the things that through me for the biggest
loop in this episode. I think, yeah, it's sort of
mentioned as a fact in her life, but seems like
(16:45):
it should be a very big deal. But I guess
when we have so many different things going on, it's
hard to make any one thing that prominent. Yeah, but
you know. So she is running this newspaper and it's
not as out there as it seems. It had a
circulation of toy Ney thousand people by fall eighteen seventies,
so she has a pretty large audience reading all this
(17:07):
Victoria Woodhall for President business. But even with all this,
she knows it's still going to be tough to get
elected if women can't vote for her, simple enough, right,
So she moves to Washington and declares herself a lobbyist
on behalf of women's suffrage. While she's in Washington, she
befriends a Congressman named Benjamin Butler who helps her kind
(17:28):
of navigate the political arena. So again another male presence
who's kind of helping her find her way. Together, they
decided that women actually didn't need an amendment to vote.
They already had the right under current laws. This is
what they kind of formulated in their minds. They found
in loophole, and the logic behind this was that the
fifteenth Amendment stated that the rights of citizens of the U.
(17:51):
S Shall not be denied or abridged. Then the fourteenth
Amendment said that all persons born are naturalized in the U. S.
Or citizens. So when you put the two together, it
means that all citizens have the right to vote. And
since women are citizens, they have the right to vote too. Yeah.
So Woodhall, thanks to Butler's influence, actually becomes the first
(18:11):
woman to address Congress on January eleventh, eighteen seventy one,
and get to make her case with this little loophole
and and try to see what everybody thinks about it.
It doesn't really work, but suffer Jets, including Susan B. Anthony,
were really impressed. I mean, how would you not be
impressed by the first woman speaking before Congress. Yeah, that's
(18:33):
a pretty big first. So Victoria was invited finally. She
had wanted this for a while, but because of her
background and because of her scandalous sort of scandalous newspaper
that she had, she wasn't invited before. But she was
finally invited to become part of the National Women's Suffrage Association.
But it was long before it became clear to the
(18:53):
others who were members that Victoria wasn't just interested in
women's rights. She started talking about things like national public education,
institutionalized welfare for the poor, and perhaps the most controversial
of things, she talked about free love. Yeah, it's not
quite the free love like what we think of today. Basically,
she wanted to reform marriage laws and make man and
(19:17):
wife equal partners in a marriage, a relationship that was
based on love and free will. That's free love. It
sounds a little more scandalous than it was, but still
it was something that was pretty radical for a lot
of the suffragists. A lot of them were not on
board with this idea at all. No. I mean, for
one thing, they didn't want women's rights to be diverted
(19:39):
by other concerns and on the other hand, some of
the ideas like free love were way too extreme for
a lot of the people who were involved. So regardless,
Victoria gave the speech about free love November seventy one,
(20:01):
and this was kind of a turning point for her
because after she gave the speech, it sparked this huge
controversy all around her and her cause. People pretty much
ignored her message of free love the way she had
interpreted it and was trying to get it across, and
they took it more as something that would be considered
immoral in that day, probably more like we consider free
(20:23):
love to be now. And so she was denounced in
the press. It was a big to do, yeah, and
leaders of the Suffrage Association withdrew their support. And so
Victoria now is not backed by this group of wealthy,
influential women and people anymore. Um, she's splintered off with
a group of more radical women activists. So this radical
(20:46):
group forms the Equal Rights Party, which has both men
and women involved, and it's a party about all sorts
of reforms, basically a reform minded party. And in eighteen
seven to the party nominated Victoria for president. Interestingly, they
also nominated Frederick Douglas, who was of course the very
(21:08):
famous African American leader in the anti slavery movement at
the time as vice president. He turned the offer down.
But wood Hall, of course, it does accept and in
her acceptance speech she says, quote, I have sometimes thought
that here is something providential and prophetic, and the fact
that my parents conferred upon me a name which forbids
the very thought of failure, So again bringing attention to
(21:32):
her queenly name again Little Queen. At this time, though
after she was nominated, the Little Queen Star was already
in decline. Her views had caused her to lose a
lot of supporters already and her Wall Street business as well.
She went broke and she got turned out of her
fancy home, and she had to suspend publication of her weekly.
(21:54):
So just a really kind of fast fall, you know,
because of the loss of her support and business, and
also because she had put so much money into these
campaigns that she was trying to pull off. Yeah, but
it was this one last scandal that really did her in,
and unfortunately it was instigated by Victoria herself. Yeah, here's
(22:16):
just a little background on that. The wealthy and influential
Beacher sisters from Boston, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame. They hated Victoria. According to
author Jacqueline McLean, who wrote a biography of Victoria Woodhull,
the Beacher's opposed women's suffrage, and we're really just critical
(22:37):
of how vocal Victoria was and everything that she did,
both in her paper and in the speeches that she gave.
But Victoria had something on them too. She had damaging
information about their brother, who was a prominent Brooklyn pastor,
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher now Reverend Beecher, had had an
affair with the wife of one of his colleagues, possibly
even impregnated her. She had a miscarriage. Yeah, very scanned lists.
(23:00):
And Victoria knew about this, but she hadn't used it yet.
I mean, this sort of war between the Beacher sisters
and Victoria had been going on for some time time.
So weird too if you think about it. The Beacher sisters, Yeah,
I mean, come on, we think of them as reformers too, definitely,
And and I know you were mentioning earlier, it is
strange that they were not reformers involved in the women's movement,
(23:21):
but so prominent in the abolition movement definitely, And I
think they were also Victoria saw them as being part
of that sort of elitist upper class set that she
just could the old establishment that she just couldn't break into.
So they were just always at odds because of that.
But in October eighteen seventy two, she revived the Weekly
(23:42):
for one issue to write an expose about the whole
affair with the reverend. Maybe there are different theories about
why she did this. Maybe it's because the Reverend wouldn't
lend her money when she came to him when she
was broke. Maybe it's because she just wanted to get
back up at all her critics, I mean, actually the
Beacher Sister, especially the Beacher Sister. She had been blasted
(24:03):
in the press for her free love ideas, and she
wanted to basically say, Okay, you guys are hypocrites because
I may be talking about free love, but you guys
are actually out there practicing it if you're having affairs
with you know, your colleagues wives. So that was sort
of the motivation behind it. But the issue, as you
would imagine, flew off the stands I think people were
(24:25):
buying not just the copies, but then buying used copies,
and the price kept going up. So it was very popular.
But it backfired against her in a big way. Victoria
and her sister were arrested for distributing indecent literature through
the mail and spent the election day itself in jail. Yeah,
and so after that, after a scandal of that magnitude,
(24:45):
even her biggest supporters turned against her. So her political career,
which hadn't ever really launched, I mean, to be honest,
it hadn't really gotten off the ground, came to an
end quite suddenly. Yeah. I think they were in jail
for about two months, and then kept getting re arrested
after that for various indecency charges and libel charges, and
(25:07):
so it was a struggle for her after that, as
she had to travel around again with her husband and
her sister giving speeches here and there for a little money.
But people didn't really take her seriously after that, more
of a side show than a speaker you are truly
interested in hearing, right, So yeah, kind of a disappointing
ending after a sort of promising rise. But we'll have
(25:28):
to wrap up the details of her life a little bit.
As I said at the beginning, there's so much to
say about her, even her later life after all of this,
that we could probably do a separate podcast on just
the post election Victoria. But instead we'll just give you
a little bit. She ends up divorcing Blood in eighteen
seventy six when she catches him with another woman. So
so much for free love, right, we know she's not
(25:51):
going to go for that. So in eighteen seventy seven
she joins up with her sister Tennessee again besides seeing
maybe they'll work better together, and they moved to England
and they get a fresh start. But the really weird
thing is it takes a hundred thousand dollars for them
to get to England and set up quite nicely. And
most people suspect that that money came from a very
(26:13):
prominent source. Yeah, a lot of people suspect that they
were actually bribed to leave the country by Vanderbilt's son
William after his death. And that's because of some feuding
that was going on between the Vanderbilt siblings over their
inheritance and William, since he got the biggest chunk, he
was afraid that the other siblings were going to try
(26:33):
to prove that their father was not well in his
mind when he made out his will and used the
the Clafland sisters unfortunately, as an example of why he
was unwell. So William might have bought them off and
sent them packing to England. Yeah, it's quite likely that
somebody did, and it was probably him, because they really
(26:55):
didn't have any money at that point. They weren't earning
much on the on Victoria's speech circuit. A good offer
for them to have taken, though, because once they're there,
both of the ladies end up becoming rich again. These
these women have made so many fortunes and lost so many.
This time it's the old fashioned way though. They just
marry rich and um Victoria I think you mentioned she
(27:16):
actually ends up inheriting not just her husband's fortune but
his father's as well. Yeah, unfortunately share her new husband,
who loves her by all accounts, he after he dies.
I think he dies maybe a day after a few
days after his father dies. So she inherits a ton
of money and retires to the English countryside with her
(27:37):
daughter Zulu, and they spend the rest of their life
kind of funding these philanthropic efforts and like education and
so forth. And um, she lives to be eighty eight,
she lives to be eight eight. She dies June nine
in her sleep, seven years after American women were granted
the right to vote. Yeah, so this kind of reminded
(27:59):
me a little bit of fire Chinese Pirates episode in
that it ends so well. Usually, usually I feel like
our podcast, even if they're upbeat, they have kind of
a tragic ending. Not this one. Yeah, this one has
sort of a if not a happy ending, because I
think that she did want to redeem her her name
and her character and her image, and maybe never quite
(28:20):
got where she wanted to get with that. But um,
a comfortable and a comfortable ending, a peaceful kind of ending.
So and as we said that at the end, thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
(28:41):
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumble, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(29:07):
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
H
Happy Saturday. We are coming up on the birthday of
Victoria Woodhall, who was born on September. She ran for
president of the United States before the nineteenth Amendment prohibited
denying citizens the right to vote because of their sex.
This episode is from It is much requested, and it
is from prior hosts Sarah and Deblina Enjoy. Welcome to
(00:28):
Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Debliina
Chokoboarding and I'm Sarah Dowdy and we are barreling right
along through women's history one. So far, we've covered a
couple of women of pirate leader and a warrior queen,
(00:51):
for example, who both made a name for themselves by
fighting against the establishment. In this episode, however, we're going
to take a at one who sought to become part
of the establishment and kind of effect change from within,
kind of the biggest part of the establishment exactly. And um,
by that, we mean we're about to talk about Victoria Woodhull,
(01:13):
the first woman to run for president of the United States. Yeah,
and her bid for the presidency was really remarkable. And
that's not just because it happened almost fifty years before
women even had the right to vote, the legal right
to vote. It was miraculous because she had this really
sketchy pass. She basically came out of nowhere. Uh, the
(01:34):
previous entry on her resume before presidential candidate was clairvoyant.
That's something you're unlikely to see to make and um,
in a couple of years, she became the leading voice
in the women's rights movement. So a remarkable biography. Yeah,
you could probably do an entire series on just all
(01:54):
the details of her really unconventional and turbulent sometimes cookie
downright cookie life, but we're mostly going to focus on
the meteoric rise that led to her nomination for president
and of course the scandal that caused it all to
go horribly wrong. And you'll see that it really makes
today's nominees for the most part, not in all cases,
(02:16):
but for the most part, look pretty tame bland. Yeah,
certainly their names, the names in this podcast are going
to be great. I just I want to get you
psycked up for that everyone. And you know, by saying
that she's exciting, we're not just talking about in terms
of the scandal. Even her background is really fascinating and unique.
So we'll get into that a little bit at first.
(02:37):
She was born Victoria Claughlin on September eight in Homer, Ohio,
and her mom, Annie Claughlin, named her after the then
eighteen year old Queen of England, so she keeps popping
up Victoria. So Victoria Claughlin was the fifth of seven
living kids, and while she was growing up, her family
(02:58):
had a lot of financial struggle. Um, she didn't really
let that get to her though. She was still a
very confident kid and she kind of held court on
this with her family, telling stories to the other kids.
And she was really smart. She had a photographic memory.
And there, you know, we we should mention too because
this comes into play later that her intelligence was not
(03:21):
educated intelligence. She she only went to school from ages
eight to eleven. She was just a a smart, quick
learning kid. Yeah, and that's all. That's all the school
and she had the opportunity to get at the time,
we should say. But she was nicknamed Little Queen because
of her proud demeanor and her she would intensely concentrate
on things, So people thought that was very queen like,
(03:42):
just like Madame de Pompadour, very similar her dad. But
Claughlin was kind of a rascal who just hopped from
job to job. I think he had something like a
dozen jobs. But eventually his grand get rich scheme was
to start calling two of his daughters, Victoria and Tennessee
spiritual mediums and set them up as this traveling spiritualist
(04:04):
medicine show, which sounds like a really off the wall idea,
but it wasn't quite as out there as it seems
because Buck had heard about this other pair of sisters
from New York, Kate and Margaret Fox, and they had
earned huge amounts of money working as these traveling mediums,
and there was, you know, at the time, this growing
(04:25):
interest in spiritualism. I think that's something that comes up
in the podcast from time to time too. And women
were very important in that movement, partly because it gave
them influence. If you're speaking as a medium, nobody is
really holding you responsible for what you said, not quite
at least um, so you know, you could get away
(04:45):
with some stuff like a spooky loophole. So in addition
to this, Victoria had also been known to have religious
visions of her own from a very young age. In one,
for example, a young man in a tunic supposedly told
her quote, one day, you will lead your people. So
it seems kind of prophetic for what's coming up in
(05:06):
this podcast. But a lot of historians say that it
may have just been because her mother was really religious
that she said she had these visage. We're not and
we can't be really sure she actually had them or not,
but kind of the environment she was growing up in, yeah, definitely,
she might have just been picking up on what she
had seen, regardless of the motivations and the inspirations, I guess.
(05:27):
So Victoria and Tennessee did turn a pretty big profit
for their family doing this, though the girls weren't really
sure how to approach it at first. They kind of
went to their dad and they're like, what are we
supposed to do? And so Buck gave Victoria this advice.
He said, be a good listener child, and that's kind
of all he told her. But we'll see that that
comes into play later. Following that advice, that is, it
(05:48):
sort of becomes the foundation for some of her later ideas.
I think it would be awkward if your dad told
you and your sister to go be mediums, Like, oh, no,
where to start with that? Exactly, Um, but yeah, you're right.
It does prove to be a really big foundation to
her later beliefs, and marriage was another big foundation of
those later beliefs. And she got married for the first
(06:11):
time when she was only fifteen years old, to a
doctor named Kenning Woodhall, and it seemed like a promising
match at first, except that he turned out to be
a drunk and Victoria was very unhappy and wanted to
leave him, but because of Victorians social standards and the
marriage laws at the time, she was trapped. Her property
(06:33):
was her husband's and she really couldn't get out, so
she ended up because Canning was such a drunk and
also cheated on her, I think, and just basically wasn't
a great provider at that time. He wasn't a very
successful doctor even though he was one, he didn't have
that many patients, so she not too surprising, right, So
she supported him and her two kids, Byron and Zulu,
(06:56):
by dressmaking. Then she did a short stint with acting
when they were living out on the West Coast, and
then she influentially returned to the family business, which got
increasingly sketchy as the years got by. Buck actually started
claiming that Tennessee was a healer who could cure cancer,
and at one point later on down the road, she
is charged with manslaughter when a man dies of cancer.
(07:19):
This is kind of what I meant. Women didn't get
too much in trouble for what they said as clairvoyance.
Unless you go say you're going to cure someone's cancer,
unless you start making medical claims. This is a line
I guess. So Victoria's role, though, was different from Tennessee's.
She wasn't out curing cancer. It was more like the
job of a therapist. Onmost she listened to people's problems,
(07:42):
often problems about unhappy married life, and uh, hearing enough
stories convinced her that in some cases divorce was necessary
and called for. Yeah, and this is combined with her
own experience, right, So she's had her own unhappy marriage
and now she's hearing us from other people. So obviously
that would influence you a little bit. So she's starting
(08:03):
to change her mind. And this belief actually ends up
coming in handy when in eighteen sixty four she moves
to St. Louis and she meets a man by the
name of Colonel James Henry Blood who's just back from
the Civil War. He's also into spiritualism, and she likes
him immediately, not just because they have that in common,
but he's very attractive and so they hit it off.
But he comes to see her as a patient and
(08:25):
she supposedly, this is the story that is told that
she supposedly goes into a trance and tells him that
his destiny is to marry her from like a far
away voice, as if someone else, you will marry me. Um. So,
of course after that they said they must get married
even though they're both married. Even though they're both married
(08:46):
at the time, so they file for divorce and they
get married eventually in July eighteen sixty six. She does
keep the name woodhol though, which some find to be scandalous.
Some people think that because she kept the name, that
meant that she never really married Blood, but maybe she
just didn't want to be Victoria Blood. That's true. That's
a scary night sounding um. But Blood the husband did
(09:08):
have a really huge influence on Victoria's ideals and further
shaping them, and he becomes something of a mentor to
her and exposes her to these radical ideas of the time,
like birth control and free education and equal rights for women,
and um it starts to shape her into a new
(09:29):
person with some pretty new ideas. By the time, Victoria
and her extended family moved to New York City in
eighteen sixty eight, and this was also at the direction
of one of her visions. By the way, by that time,
she's committed to social reform, but she realizes that to
(09:52):
be a real player in the fight for equality, she
needs some cash. Most women's rights activists at a time
came from the upper and middle class, so that was
the example she had for getting in. Yeah, and that's
an important thing to keep in mind for some later
issues she runs into. But Victoria and Tennessee sat themselves
up as clairvoyance in New York City and they have
(10:13):
business cards and everything. They're like really going for it,
and they aren't making any claims about medical expertise anymore.
After that man's letter charge, you know, they've learned better
than that. And it seems like the business gets off
to an amazingly lucky start because one of their first
clients is seventy three year old multi millionaire commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. So, yeah,
(10:37):
he's the kind of guy who can make your clairvoyant career. Definitely.
And actually it's very unclear how much this no nonsense
railroad and shipping tycoon actually believed in the sisters spiritual powers.
But he liked them in general, and when we got
down to it, he really just thought they were pretty.
He liked hanging out with pretty women. So he takes
(10:58):
to them, and Vanderbilt teaches the sisters about the stock market.
And I saw a quote in an American Heritage. It
wasn't a quote, actually, it was said by John Gordon,
the writer of this article American Heritage, and he compared
this to getting stock tips from Warren Buffett. So just
to give all the listeners out there an example of
how major this was. This was a pretty significant person
(11:20):
to be giving you advice. So he gives them tips.
Colonel Blood invests money for them on their behalf using
Vanderbilts advice, and suddenly they found themselves with a little
bit of wealth. Yeah, it pays off pretty quickly. And
so now that they're secure, Victoria is ready to make
her debut into this women's rights movement, and she does
(11:41):
that in January eighteen sixty nine. But she knows that
her clairvoyant job title is going to hold her back
a little bit. She can't be or a former and
a working clairvoyant, or no one will take her seriously.
So she gives up her old line of work and
makes starts taking calculated steps to recreate herself again. Her
(12:03):
first opportunity for reinvention comes by September sixty nine, and
that happens to be Black Friday on Wall Street when
the market crashed. Investors began selling off their stocks in
a panic, and Victoria basically just sat outside the exchange
and bought up bargains. She supposedly made seven thousand dollars
by the end of eighteen sixty nine, although some people
(12:24):
think that she inflated that figure when she reported it.
But she made a lot of money, to say the least. Yeah.
After that, Victorian Tennessee, they think, Okay, we've had a
little success. We can probably become major players on Wall Street.
So they asked for Vanderbilt's backing to open their own
financial firm, and he shows his support. He gives them
seven thousand dollars to to do that. It's called Woodhull,
(12:47):
Claughlin and Company, and the sisters become the first female
stockbrokers on Wall Street, the first of many firsts for
at least Victoria, and they got a lot of attention
because of this, and they had a lot of really
influential people, and some people came by just to sort
of check out this company, you know, swing by and
see what it's all about. Walt Whitman even comes by.
(13:10):
He says something that sounds very Walt Whitman quote, you
have given an object lesson to the whole world. You
are prophecy of the future. There you go, Yes, put
that on their new business cards. And that's just from doing,
you know, a little walkthrough. Um. So, overall, I think
they had to rain in that people just walking through
(13:31):
randomly thing. But business was good. Some people suggest that
might have been because of Vanderbilt's name being behind it.
I think people automatically assume that maybe he was pulling
the strings. But regardless, they did well. Clairvoyant ability, you
never know, that could also be an aspect of it. Um.
So Victoria starts making some pretty influential friends and eventually
(13:52):
she enlists one of them, Stephen Pearl Andrews, who was
very educated, also another reformer, to help her buff up
her education a little bit, you know, polish her basic
reading and writing skills and and sort of get a
new start there as well. And so in April eighteen seventy,
the New York Herald begins to publish this series of
(14:14):
articles by Victoria, and she really comes out swinging for
the first one she does. She says, 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
(14:35):
woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business,
while others sought to show that there was no valid
reason why women should be treated socially and politically as
being inferior to man. I boldly entered the arena of
politics and business and exercise the rights I already possessed.
I therefore claimed the rights to speak for the unenfranchised
women of the country and announced myself as a candidate
(14:57):
for the presidency. So there you go. She dropped a
bomb with that one, definitely so. Ulysses s. Grant was
in his first term at this time, and most people
were thinking that he would run again in eight, so
the Republican nomination was out. She knew that she wouldn't
get the Democratic nomination, so if she was going to
(15:18):
run for president, she was going to have to nominate
herself and get enough support to get her name put
on the ballot. So that's what she sets out to do,
and she has pretty creative ways of going about it.
She does. She launches into this whole series of kind
of next steps to prepare for her. You can't really
call it a campaign, I guess, but it sort of
(15:39):
was an announced and an unannounced campaign a good way
to put up. So she started by getting this a big,
fancy house between Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York
City's Murray Hill district, which was one of the more
aristocratic neighborhoods. So again we see the whole class issue
coming up here. She wanted to establish herself as someone
who was somebody rather than you know, a poor girl
(16:02):
from Ohio, definitely. And the next thing she does is
buy a newspaper. Yeah, buying a newspaper meant that you're
someone really influential. So she does buy one, and she
calls it wood Hole and Claughland's Weekly, and she sets
this up as doing a certain number of things. Of course,
first and foremost, it supports Victoria's c wood Hole for President.
(16:23):
It's a mixture of mud raking, fads and scandals. For example,
she publishes in her publication the first English translation in
the US of the Communist Manifesto, totally bizarro. That was
one of the things that through me for the biggest
loop in this episode. I think, yeah, it's sort of
mentioned as a fact in her life, but seems like
(16:45):
it should be a very big deal. But I guess
when we have so many different things going on, it's
hard to make any one thing that prominent. Yeah, but
you know. So she is running this newspaper and it's
not as out there as it seems. It had a
circulation of toy Ney thousand people by fall eighteen seventies,
so she has a pretty large audience reading all this
(17:07):
Victoria Woodhall for President business. But even with all this,
she knows it's still going to be tough to get
elected if women can't vote for her, simple enough, right,
So she moves to Washington and declares herself a lobbyist
on behalf of women's suffrage. While she's in Washington, she
befriends a Congressman named Benjamin Butler who helps her kind
(17:28):
of navigate the political arena. So again another male presence
who's kind of helping her find her way. Together, they
decided that women actually didn't need an amendment to vote.
They already had the right under current laws. This is
what they kind of formulated in their minds. They found
in loophole, and the logic behind this was that the
fifteenth Amendment stated that the rights of citizens of the U.
(17:51):
S Shall not be denied or abridged. Then the fourteenth
Amendment said that all persons born are naturalized in the U. S.
Or citizens. So when you put the two together, it
means that all citizens have the right to vote. And
since women are citizens, they have the right to vote too. Yeah.
So Woodhall, thanks to Butler's influence, actually becomes the first
(18:11):
woman to address Congress on January eleventh, eighteen seventy one,
and get to make her case with this little loophole
and and try to see what everybody thinks about it.
It doesn't really work, but suffer Jets, including Susan B. Anthony,
were really impressed. I mean, how would you not be
impressed by the first woman speaking before Congress. Yeah, that's
(18:33):
a pretty big first. So Victoria was invited finally. She
had wanted this for a while, but because of her
background and because of her scandalous sort of scandalous newspaper
that she had, she wasn't invited before. But she was
finally invited to become part of the National Women's Suffrage Association.
But it was long before it became clear to the
(18:53):
others who were members that Victoria wasn't just interested in
women's rights. She started talking about things like national public education,
institutionalized welfare for the poor, and perhaps the most controversial
of things, she talked about free love. Yeah, it's not
quite the free love like what we think of today. Basically,
she wanted to reform marriage laws and make man and
(19:17):
wife equal partners in a marriage, a relationship that was
based on love and free will. That's free love. It
sounds a little more scandalous than it was, but still
it was something that was pretty radical for a lot
of the suffragists. A lot of them were not on
board with this idea at all. No. I mean, for
one thing, they didn't want women's rights to be diverted
(19:39):
by other concerns and on the other hand, some of
the ideas like free love were way too extreme for
a lot of the people who were involved. So regardless,
Victoria gave the speech about free love November seventy one,
(20:01):
and this was kind of a turning point for her
because after she gave the speech, it sparked this huge
controversy all around her and her cause. People pretty much
ignored her message of free love the way she had
interpreted it and was trying to get it across, and
they took it more as something that would be considered
immoral in that day, probably more like we consider free
(20:23):
love to be now. And so she was denounced in
the press. It was a big to do, yeah, and
leaders of the Suffrage Association withdrew their support. And so
Victoria now is not backed by this group of wealthy,
influential women and people anymore. Um, she's splintered off with
a group of more radical women activists. So this radical
(20:46):
group forms the Equal Rights Party, which has both men
and women involved, and it's a party about all sorts
of reforms, basically a reform minded party. And in eighteen
seven to the party nominated Victoria for president. Interestingly, they
also nominated Frederick Douglas, who was of course the very
(21:08):
famous African American leader in the anti slavery movement at
the time as vice president. He turned the offer down.
But wood Hall, of course, it does accept and in
her acceptance speech she says, quote, I have sometimes thought
that here is something providential and prophetic, and the fact
that my parents conferred upon me a name which forbids
the very thought of failure, So again bringing attention to
(21:32):
her queenly name again Little Queen. At this time, though
after she was nominated, the Little Queen Star was already
in decline. Her views had caused her to lose a
lot of supporters already and her Wall Street business as well.
She went broke and she got turned out of her
fancy home, and she had to suspend publication of her weekly.
(21:54):
So just a really kind of fast fall, you know,
because of the loss of her support and business, and
also because she had put so much money into these
campaigns that she was trying to pull off. Yeah, but
it was this one last scandal that really did her in,
and unfortunately it was instigated by Victoria herself. Yeah, here's
(22:16):
just a little background on that. The wealthy and influential
Beacher sisters from Boston, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame. They hated Victoria. According to
author Jacqueline McLean, who wrote a biography of Victoria Woodhull,
the Beacher's opposed women's suffrage, and we're really just critical
(22:37):
of how vocal Victoria was and everything that she did,
both in her paper and in the speeches that she gave.
But Victoria had something on them too. She had damaging
information about their brother, who was a prominent Brooklyn pastor,
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher now Reverend Beecher, had had an
affair with the wife of one of his colleagues, possibly
even impregnated her. She had a miscarriage. Yeah, very scanned lists.
(23:00):
And Victoria knew about this, but she hadn't used it yet.
I mean, this sort of war between the Beacher sisters
and Victoria had been going on for some time time.
So weird too if you think about it. The Beacher sisters, Yeah,
I mean, come on, we think of them as reformers too, definitely,
And and I know you were mentioning earlier, it is
strange that they were not reformers involved in the women's movement,
(23:21):
but so prominent in the abolition movement definitely, And I
think they were also Victoria saw them as being part
of that sort of elitist upper class set that she
just could the old establishment that she just couldn't break into.
So they were just always at odds because of that.
But in October eighteen seventy two, she revived the Weekly
(23:42):
for one issue to write an expose about the whole
affair with the reverend. Maybe there are different theories about
why she did this. Maybe it's because the Reverend wouldn't
lend her money when she came to him when she
was broke. Maybe it's because she just wanted to get
back up at all her critics, I mean, actually the
Beacher Sister, especially the Beacher Sister. She had been blasted
(24:03):
in the press for her free love ideas, and she
wanted to basically say, Okay, you guys are hypocrites because
I may be talking about free love, but you guys
are actually out there practicing it if you're having affairs
with you know, your colleagues wives. So that was sort
of the motivation behind it. But the issue, as you
would imagine, flew off the stands I think people were
(24:25):
buying not just the copies, but then buying used copies,
and the price kept going up. So it was very popular.
But it backfired against her in a big way. Victoria
and her sister were arrested for distributing indecent literature through
the mail and spent the election day itself in jail. Yeah,
and so after that, after a scandal of that magnitude,
(24:45):
even her biggest supporters turned against her. So her political career,
which hadn't ever really launched, I mean, to be honest,
it hadn't really gotten off the ground, came to an
end quite suddenly. Yeah. I think they were in jail
for about two months, and then kept getting re arrested
after that for various indecency charges and libel charges, and
(25:07):
so it was a struggle for her after that, as
she had to travel around again with her husband and
her sister giving speeches here and there for a little money.
But people didn't really take her seriously after that, more
of a side show than a speaker you are truly
interested in hearing, right, So yeah, kind of a disappointing
ending after a sort of promising rise. But we'll have
(25:28):
to wrap up the details of her life a little bit.
As I said at the beginning, there's so much to
say about her, even her later life after all of this,
that we could probably do a separate podcast on just
the post election Victoria. But instead we'll just give you
a little bit. She ends up divorcing Blood in eighteen
seventy six when she catches him with another woman. So
so much for free love, right, we know she's not
(25:51):
going to go for that. So in eighteen seventy seven
she joins up with her sister Tennessee again besides seeing
maybe they'll work better together, and they moved to England
and they get a fresh start. But the really weird
thing is it takes a hundred thousand dollars for them
to get to England and set up quite nicely. And
most people suspect that that money came from a very
(26:13):
prominent source. Yeah, a lot of people suspect that they
were actually bribed to leave the country by Vanderbilt's son
William after his death. And that's because of some feuding
that was going on between the Vanderbilt siblings over their
inheritance and William, since he got the biggest chunk, he
was afraid that the other siblings were going to try
(26:33):
to prove that their father was not well in his
mind when he made out his will and used the
the Clafland sisters unfortunately, as an example of why he
was unwell. So William might have bought them off and
sent them packing to England. Yeah, it's quite likely that
somebody did, and it was probably him, because they really
(26:55):
didn't have any money at that point. They weren't earning
much on the on Victoria's speech circuit. A good offer
for them to have taken, though, because once they're there,
both of the ladies end up becoming rich again. These
these women have made so many fortunes and lost so many.
This time it's the old fashioned way though. They just
marry rich and um Victoria I think you mentioned she
(27:16):
actually ends up inheriting not just her husband's fortune but
his father's as well. Yeah, unfortunately share her new husband,
who loves her by all accounts, he after he dies.
I think he dies maybe a day after a few
days after his father dies. So she inherits a ton
of money and retires to the English countryside with her
(27:37):
daughter Zulu, and they spend the rest of their life
kind of funding these philanthropic efforts and like education and
so forth. And um, she lives to be eighty eight,
she lives to be eight eight. She dies June nine
in her sleep, seven years after American women were granted
the right to vote. Yeah, so this kind of reminded
(27:59):
me a little bit of fire Chinese Pirates episode in
that it ends so well. Usually, usually I feel like
our podcast, even if they're upbeat, they have kind of
a tragic ending. Not this one. Yeah, this one has
sort of a if not a happy ending, because I
think that she did want to redeem her her name
and her character and her image, and maybe never quite
(28:20):
got where she wanted to get with that. But um,
a comfortable and a comfortable ending, a peaceful kind of ending.
So and as we said that at the end, thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
(28:41):
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumble, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(29:07):
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.