In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (32 page)

Attractive as Woodhull’s new departure strategy seemed, Stanton was worried about her unsavory reputation. Still outside the range of Woodhull’s magnetism, she could be more objective than Anthony and Hooker. Uncharacteristically cautious, she told Anthony bluntly, “Do not have another Train affair with Mrs. Woodhull.”
¹²
Compared to Woodhull, Train was a saint; Woodhull would be even more dangerous and damaging to their cause.

Victoria Claflin Woodhull came to the women’s movement from a sordid past. One of ten children born to an obscure family, she had an itinerant childhood and a meager education. Her family staged a traveling medicine show; the adolescent Victoria took the part of a psychic healer. At fifteen she married Canning Woodhull, a physician and a drunkard. They had two children. The couple separated, and Victoria returned to her flamboyant family. She was especially close to her younger sister Tennessee. Together they specialized in spiritualism and séances. Allegations of fraud, blackmail, prostitution, and manslaughter chased the Claflins from town to town in the Midwest. After the war Victoria divorced Dr. Woodhull to marry her lover, Col. James Blood, but she kept her first husband’s name.

Following a vision Woodhull moved her entire extended family to New York City in 1868. With admirable enterprise the Claflin sisters called upon Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad magnate and a recent widower. Enamored of Tennessee, he established the sisters as financial speculators and stockbrokers. Vanderbilt leaked them information, and Woodhull, Claflin and Company was soon successful. In 1870 the sisters moved their firm to Wall Street and their ménage into a mansion on Murray Hill.

Another male mentor encouraged Woodhull to enter politics. In April 1870 she declared herself a candidate for president of the United States. Soon after, she and Tennessee published
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly
to expound her political platform. More strident and eccentric than the
Revolution
, but better financed, the
Weekly
combined gossip, muckraking, and politics. The paper favored free love, short skirts, and legalized prostitution, and it printed the first translation of the Communist Manifesto in America.
¹³

Having succeeded in all these outlandish enterprises, Victoria Woodhull next seized upon women’s rights. Her speech to the Judiciary Committee in January 1871 was the first major public address of her career. It was rumored to have been written by Rep. Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, another admirer. Having charmed her way into Congress, Woodhull proceeded to disarm Mrs. Hooker’s convention. Despite Stanton’s warning, Anthony was ready to defend Woodhull. Anthony sympathized with any woman attacked for radical views or unconventional behavior, and now she was enchanted by the lovely looking Mrs. Woodhull.

Because Anthony had sided with Woodhull, so did Stanton. Even before she met “the Woodhull,” Stanton had defended her before hostile lyceum audiences. The two finally did meet at the May 1871 meeting of the National. The New York press had been full of negative publicity about Woodhull and her unusual living arrangements; both Colonel Blood and Dr. Woodhull now shared her home. Anthony was growing increasingly wary and had begun to distance herself from Woodhull. But Stanton, acting on Anthony’s earlier endorsement, was cordial. She seated Woodhull between Lucretia Mott and herself on the platform. By now an accomplished orator, Woodhull delivered an electrifying speech. “We mean treason, we mean secession,” Woodhull declared. “We are plotting revolution; we will overthrow this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead.” Thrilled by such rhetoric, Mrs. Stanton became Woodhull’s staunchest defender. “Victoria C. Woodhull stands before us today a grand, brave woman, radical alike in political, religious, and social principles,” she proclaimed, in praise similar to that she had lavished on Train.
¹⁴

Woodhull soon became another source of discord between Stanton and Anthony, festering like the
Revolution
debt and Stanton’s absenteeism. The tension between them had been apparent as early as 1870. When the
New York Sun
, referring to the
Revolution
, reported that they had dissolved their partnership, Stanton asked Anthony if she wanted a divorce. “Have you been getting a
divorce
out in Chicago without notifying me? I should like to know my status. I shall not allow any such proceedings. I consider our relation for life so make the best of it.” Although Stanton assured Anthony that her love was “unchanged, undimmed by time and friction,” the situation deteriorated. They disagreed more often and less gently. To restore their earlier intimacy, the two old friends decided to take a trip together. Both of them looked forward to it. Wrote Stanton, “As I go dragging around
in these despicable hotels, I think of you and often wish we had at least the little comfort of enduring it together.”
¹⁵

The itinerary included speaking engagements in the Far West and a vacation in California. Stanton and Anthony left as soon as the May meeting adjourned. Leland Stanford, governor of California and president of the Central Pacific Railroad, sent them free passes. Stanton reported on their adventures in letters to her family. They moved at a leisurely pace and stayed with prominent citizens. They shared the lecture platform, speaking twice in each city. In Salt Lake City they were invited to address Mormon women in the Tabernacle. Convinced that they would never be allowed to return, they talked about marriage and women’s rights, birth control and divorce, in a marathon five-hour session. Stanton was sympathetic toward Mormon women. She approved their practice of abstinence from intercourse during pregnancy and lactation and always supported their effort to win suffrage in the Utah Territory.
¹⁶

According to Anthony, she and Stanton enjoyed hours of conversation. “We have a drawing-room all to ourselves, and here we are just as cozy and happy as lovers.” But their bliss was marred by disagreements. Anthony badgered Stanton, and Stanton annoyed Anthony. Stanton was peeved when Anthony scolded her for continual snacking and progressive weight gain. Anthony could not persuade Stanton to challenge Mrs. Hooker for the presidency of the National. More serious, she was jealous of Stanton’s public appeal. A dynamic speaker, Stanton attracted immense audiences, standing ovations, gifts of fruit and flowers, and invitations to dine. As Anthony confessed to her family, she resented that she was not also called upon, “instead of merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant scintillations as they emanante from her never exhausted magazine. There is no alternative—whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at the cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years.”
¹⁷

The crisis came to a head when the pair reached San Francisco in late 1871. The town was caught up in the trial of a prostitute, Laura Fair, for the murder of Alexander Crittenden, an attorney who had hired her services. Stanton and Anthony defended the crime, visited the woman in jail, and called a public meeting to discuss the case. Before an audience of twelve hundred women Stanton laid the blame on the uncontrolled sexual drive of men, which made both wives and whores its victims. Anthony followed with identical arguments, but she was booed. Although both women had made the same point, Anthony’s intensity was unrelieved by the humor that marked Stanton’s presentation. The California press attacked only Anthony; the Eastern papers scorned Stanton.
¹⁸

Bearing the brunt of the local criticism, Anthony expected Stanton to come to her defense, but Stanton remained silent. “Never in all my hard experience have I been under such fire,” Anthony confided to her diary. Anthony was hurt and angry, but there is no record of a private apology or a public defense by Stanton. Once again she selfishly, thoughtlessly ignored the needs of her best friend. Nonetheless, they continued on their journey as planned, going to Yosemite for a vacation. They spent days riding horseback on “men’s saddles” in “linen bloomers.” Stanton’s weight had become such a hindrance that she wore out two mares and had to be conveyed by buckboard.
¹⁹

After two unhappy weeks, the women returned to San Francisco. Anthony refused to lecture or attend meetings. At the end of August, Stanton learned that her mother was ill and cut short her trip. After Stanton returned east, Anthony spoke throughout the Northwest for several months more. “I miss Mrs. Stanton,” she wrote her family. “Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people call on
me
.”
²⁰

Hurrying across the country to her mother’s deathbed, Stanton found Margaret Cady “impatient to see me.” A week later Mrs. Cady died in her sleep at age eighty-six. Stanton asked Theodore Tilton to notice the death in his newspaper, the
Independent
. She wanted her mother to be remembered as a “grand brave woman” who had hoped to vote before she died.
²¹
Stanton was eager to tie her mother to suffrage and to publicize her mother’s approval of her own actions and career.

After the funeral Stanton returned to Tenafly rather than rejoin Anthony. There she was “busy, busy, busy getting the four [youngest children] ready for school” and nursing two of the older ones through a long illness. As she eventually apologized to Anthony, “I have had no time or thought of speeches or to write letters even to you.”
²²
They would not travel together again for more than a decade, and never again for an extended period.

In an effort to assuage Anthony, Stanton did attend the National’s January 1872 convention. Mrs. Hooker presided; Stanton, Anthony, and Woodhull sat behind her on the dias. This time only Anthony and Stanton met with the Senate Judiciary Committee to present the new departure arguments. Anthony managed to confine Woodhull to a single speech on spiritualism. In her own speech, Anthony defended Woodhull’s right to speak but tried to dissociate the National from Woodhull’s platform of bizarre causes.
²³
She feared that the suffragists had not only further alienated the conservatives but had also made themselves vulnerable to a Woodhull takeover. She was right to worry.

In the spring of 1872, while Anthony was in Kansas, Woodhull published a call for the creation of an independent third party to advance her
presidential aspirations. With Stanton’s approval, she planned to turn the May meeting of the National into a nominating convention for the so-called People’s party. The third-party scheme did not alarm Stanton, who went so far as to write the call and to sign the names of the National’s leadership, including Anthony’s.
²⁴
Then Stanton returned to the lecture circuit, leaving the field open for Woodhull. Anthony was indignant. When her protests went unanswered and she was unable to arouse either Stanton or Hooker, Anthony rushed to New York.

The showdown came in May 1872. The night before the National meeting convened, Anthony and Stanton had a heated argument about Woodhull. They did not resolve their differences, and neither relented. The next day Anthony refused to share Steinway Hall with the People’s party. As the lessee, Anthony could insist that they meet elsewhere. Annoyed at Anthony’s seeming pettiness, Stanton refused to preside; Anthony was elected both president pro tem and for the following year. Over Anthony’s objections, Stanton called in her keynote speech for women to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment as members of the new third party. Anthony had more success in controlling the other speakers and refused to recognize Mrs. Woodhull.

Tension mounted throughout the day. At the close of the evening session Woodhull moved that the meeting adjourn to Apollo Hall to nominate candidates for the People’s party. The motion was seconded, but Anthony refused to call the question. An appeal was made to overrule the chair. Woodhull stood and demanded an immediate vote; her motion passed. Anthony declared the vote out of order and then adjourned the meeting until the next morning. But Woodhull seized the podium and kept talking. She would not leave. Finally, a furious Anthony, in her capacity as tenant, ordered the janitor to turn off the lights.
²⁵

Without the official backing of the suffragists, Woodhull overnight turned the People’s party into the Equal Rights party. It nominated her for president and Frederick Douglass for vice-president. Douglass declined and chose rather to support Ulysses S. Grant for reelection. Convinced that the Woodhull connection would condemn them all, Anthony was relieved at their narrow escape. She was still angry with Stanton. “There never was such a foolish muddle—all come of Mrs. S. [Stanton] consulting and conceding to Woodhull,” Anthony recorded in her diary. “I never was so hurt by the folly of Stanton.” Stanton never publicly referred to the incident again, but in private correspondence she discounted any damage Woodhull may have caused. According to Lucretia Mott, “Elizabeth . . . is disposed to be very cautious how she identifies herself in any way with [Woodhull] now.”
²⁶
Woodhull reacted to the censure and contempt of her former admirers by attacking them in
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly
.

Stanton spent the summer of 1872 in Tenafly, enjoying a respite from politics. With her housekeeper away on vacation and all of her children “flocking home,” she was busy with household demands. As she reported to Libby Miller, “I have everything running like clockwork, splendidly.” The increasingly plump Mrs. Stanton added that she planned to “try hard work for the summer and see if I could take down my robust proportion.” Now that her children were “intelligent companions,” ranging in age from thirteen to thirty, Stanton found them “a real pleasure.” She rejoiced at having survived “the tearing, the tumbling, the feeding . . . [the] pap spoons and diapers.” But by the Fourth of July, Stanton was so tired she could hardly see the fireworks. She begged her housekeeper to hurry back. Other summers during the 1870s were spent entirely in research and rehearsal for the circuit.
²⁷
In reports of any summer’s activities, there are few references to her husband.