The Scarlet Sisters (11 page)

“Madam, you are not a citizen, you are a woman!”

Late in the fall of 1870, Victoria—now a stockbroker, publisher, and candidate for president—set up shop in the nation’s capital, among other female lobbyists, who, like any “public women” (the name simultaneously used for prostitutes), were viewed as having dubious reputations. She took rooms in the Willard Hotel, known to every politician as an unofficial branch of government. Grant contemptuously coined the term
lobbyists
after trying to run the gauntlet of favor-seekers who clogged the hotel’s lobby from one end to the other. That lobby and the plush dining room and bar, filled with male ribaldry, the fog of cigar smoke, and the smell of whiskey, were the places to do the nation’s business after hours. Women were relegated to the second-floor sitting rooms.

With her piercing blue eyes, Victoria observed life at the Willard, watching the after-hours coming and going of congressmen and lobbyists, and later shocked audiences with her observations. “Where is prostitution in its greatest luxury? Washington! Everybody knows what the ‘third house’ in Washington is. It consists of the lobbyists who are there to obtain legislation—to push this little scheme, or that small appropriation.” Lobbyists distributed to brothel madams “ten, fifteen and even twenty thousand dollars.” To spellbound audiences, Victoria asked, “Why? To secure their influence with Representatives and Senators. I say it boldly, that it is the best men of the country who support the houses of prostitution!”

As she paraded through the Willard, aware of the male glances at her face and fine figure, Woodhull was secure in knowing at least one extremely valuable ally in the nation’s capital, Massachusetts congressman Ben Butler. She had begun a stealthy pursuit of Congress back in 1869, when she and Tennie were unknowns, at which time she sent Tennie down to scout out any members who might be sympathetic to the sisters’ suffragist goal. It didn’t take Tennie long to cultivate the liberal Yankee. Lincoln had wanted Butler for his running mate in 1864, but had settled for southern sympathizer Andrew Johnson, to balance the ticket. Now Butler was President Grant’s favorite congressman.

Everyone agreed that Butler was brilliant—and that he was ugly, with an oversize head on a squat body. He waddled through Hill corridors, resembling a plump bullfrog with drooping eyelids and one eye that wandered off on its own course. But he captivated admirers and bested foes with a scholar’s mind and an amazing memory: as a child, he read weighty tomes before entering Exeter at age eight. Butler had grown rich as a lawyer. Butler played hardball politics, but he befriended the working class and poor to build a populist power base. He fought for the impeachment of President Johnson, pushed for an eight-hour workday and the Fourteenth Amendment, and was among the few major politicians who championed the vote for women.

Despite their educational deficits, the sisters were quick studies who captivated brilliant men, not just by their looks but also by their intelligence. Victoria’s desire to learn everything, her ability to listen with an admiring, unwavering gaze—all were aphrodisiacs to the powerful men she favored. For her part, Tennie was comfortable with newspaper reporters, who loved her give-and-take, joshing conversation.

Gossip was inevitable when Victoria was seen with Butler. He loved his actress wife, but she was far away in Europe, being treated for thyroid cancer. Butler had openly pursued Anna Dickinson, the charismatic national abolitionist lecturer. At the height of her fame, Dickinson had many admirers, including the handsome
New-York Daily Tribune
editor Whitelaw Reid. Susan B. Anthony also wrote sexually charged letters to
Dickinson, calling her “Darling Dicky”: “I hope to snuggle you closer than ever,” but fell out with her when Dickinson did not support suffrage.

Victoria and Butler were close friends, but no facts corroborate biographers who use specious evidence to state categorically that they were lovers. Third-hand gossip was passed down that Butler “consented to champion her in Congress in return for an opportunity to feast his eyes upon her naked person.” The “evidence” was Woodhull’s comment that “I went at night” to ask for Butler’s help, something a proper Victorian woman would not do. Yet the ambitious Victoria would have met Butler at any time to reach her monumental goal. She went to see him at night and “asked him to open the [judiciary] committee for me.”

The sisters had learned through Butler that the Sixteenth Amendment for women’s suffrage was dead in committee, with no one pushing it onto the floor or urging debate. Victoria then formulated her bold initiative. No woman had ever addressed a congressional committee before. Butler agreed to Victoria’s doing so and, with his command of crisp legalese, helped draft her unique petition to Congress, called a “memorial.”

On January 10, 1871, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker anxiously walked the marble halls of Congress, lobbying any member who would listen to her agenda. She had called a women’s suffrage convention “on my own… I had to dip into my husband’s pockets for the funds.”

As she knocked on doors, Hooker heard some news that made her gasp in shock and surprise: “a Mrs. Woodhull had presented a petition to congress and that it had been referred to the Judiciary committee for a hearing on the morrow.” Hooker was furious that this stranger had the audacity to upstage her convention, without ever having discussed it with her. She rushed to find Susan B. Anthony, who was in town for the convention and also lobbying the Hill. Stunned, they cornered George Julian, a radical Republican congressman, who verified the story, saying that he would be introducing Woodhull to the Judiciary Committee the next morning. Hooker and Anthony deliberated for three hours. “What were we to do?” Hooker recalled. They decided they had to postpone the
convention, at least until the next afternoon, after Woodhull had met with the Judiciary. They hunted down Victoria and talked to her “all that evening.” Hooker and Anthony were astounded to find out that Woodhull was operating “on her own.” All Hooker’s animosity faded; “I was fascinated by Mrs. Woodhull’s talent and personality.”

On the morning of January 11, 1871, Hooker was among those who stared at the woman who had overnight hijacked her women’s suffrage convention, this stranger who was about to make history.

When Woodhull walked into the room to face the committee, she held tightly to Butler with one hand and with the other clutched Tennie, who covered her dark dress with a ruffled green taffeta shawl. Tennie sat protectively beside her sister as Woodhull faced the eight men arrayed in front of her across a large rectangular table. Suffragists crowded behind and around the men in the small room, a makeshift arrangement made when one of the large marble-pillared rooms was unavailable.

As an unsteady Woodhull stood up to address the committee, Hooker thought that Victoria was going to faint. “Her face flushed in patches.” “She soon collected herself,” recalled Hooker. “Her argument was very ably debated.”

During this violent Reconstruction era, when the Ku Klux Klan was growing in strength, women’s suffrage was in turmoil. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments sought equal protection for “citizens.” Woodhull was now arguing that the Fifteenth Amendment, which read that no “citizen” shall be denied the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous servitude,” pertained to women as an “inalienable right,” since the word
citizens
(not
males
) was used in both the Constitution and the two amendments. Radical suffragists had quickly latched on to the “previous servitude” clause. When a man asked Anthony how women could qualify as having had a “previous state of servitude,” laughter and applause greeted her answer: “servitude of the hardest kind, and just for board and clothes, at that.”

Woodhull’s memorial galvanized what was termed the “New Departure” phase of suffrage. She hammered home the point that the
Constitution and the Fifteenth Amendment made no distinction “on account of sex.” She also read portions of the Fourteenth Amendment—adopted in 1868—that stated “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of
citizens
of the United States, nor deny to any
person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.” Her voice gathering strength, Woodhull argued that because Congress “has the power… to enforce the provisions of the 15th amendment… women as citizens should be included” in the right to vote under the protection of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Newspapers played judge and declared Woodhull wrong in her argument that the right of women to vote was “declared by the fifteenth amendment, and invincibly guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment.” Sputtered one editorial, “Congress and the States did not intend to do this.” Yet the editorial writer was forced to add, “Did they in fact
do
it? This is the question to be argued today.”

Woodhull wasted no time in acting out the condescending conversation she had had prior to her committee hearing with representative John Bingham of Ohio, who sat on the Judiciary Committee. “Madam,” he told her, “you are no citizen.” When Victoria asked him what she was, he sputtered, “You are a woman!”

In fact, the only deviation from the wording
citizen
or
person
anywhere in the Constitution or amendments came in the
second
article of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, written by Bingham. Woodhull handed Bingham a copy of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. He put on his glasses to look at his own words: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States… No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of any citizens.” A red-faced Bingham nonetheless remained obstinate, clinging to the Section 2 clause that stated there would be a penalty if the right to vote were denied to “male inhabitants.” (Lest there be any confusion about former women slaves having a right to vote.)

Watching the historic moment before the Judiciary Committee, one
reporter observed, “The youth, beauty and wealth of Mrs. Woodhull carried the day, and the grave legislators, ‘e’en Ben Butler’ bowed before these attractions.” But they did not bow far enough. The Judiciary Committee turned down Woodhull’s petition, with only Butler and William Loughbridge of Iowa in favor. Bingham wrote the majority opinion, stressing that the word
male
applied, citing Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause and ignoring Section 1, thus arguing that the Constitution and the Fifteenth Amendment were void regarding women as “citizens” being able to vote.

Congress weakly fobbed off this hot potato as a states’ rights problem. For the next half-century, male legislators and judges decided that whatever kind of citizens women were, they were not voting citizens. Still, it was a decisive personal victory for Victoria, as suffragists applauded.

Tennie, looking on lovingly, won praise for her support of Victoria. Throughout the sisters’ years in Manhattan, reporters and observers continued to be enraptured with Tennie’s looks, comparing her full face and peaches-and-cream complexion to that of a sweet, innocent child—so in contrast to the risqué rumors that followed her. In fact, Tennie almost stole the show in looks alone during Victoria’s famous moment. In a page-one article, a transfixed reporter wrote of Tennie, “She is young, pretty, interesting and quick as a bird both in movement and speech.” Her short hair and boyish hat “gives her the appearance of a frisky lad, ready for mischief of any kind. But there is a peculiarly smooth tone to her voice.” Her animated movements in any other woman would have appeared “unladylike,” but in Tennie, each “lends a positive charm to her conversation and gives an emphasis to her speech that makes her logic irresistible.”

Immediately following the hearing, Isabella Hooker asked Woodhull to address the convention the suffragists had postponed to hear her memorial. Hooker became a fervent follower, earning the wrath of and vicious public attacks by her family—half brother Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and famed half sisters Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and Catharine—the latter, ardently anti-suffrage.

The stir created by Woodhull brought newspaper reporters to a
packed suffrage convention at Washington’s Lincoln Hall that same afternoon and evening. At 3:00 p.m. “fresh from the scene of their contest in the Capitol, wreathed with smiles” came Hooker, Paulina Wright Davis, Anthony—“the hero of a hundred fights”—and the “two New York sensations, Woodhull and Claflin.” In their matching dresses, neckties, short hair and “nobby Alpine hats” they were “the very picture of the advanced ideas they are advocating,” wrote one reporter.

Another reporter noted that at times Woodhull sat “sphinx-like.” He watched the “pale, sad face of this unflinching woman… if her veins were open they would be found to contain ice.” But Woodhull was more scared stiff than ice-cold, petrified of being the center of attention among famous leaders in the women’s suffragist movement. As Hooker rose to introduce her, Woodhull swayed, and Hooker thought she would fall. Woodhull had none of the polish or the ringing elocution of later speeches, nor the background of the educated women steeped in women’s suffrage and equal rights since Seneca Falls. She apologized, timidly saying she was not used to public speaking and would just read her Judiciary Committee petition.

Applause filled the packed hall as Woodhull restated her women’s right memorial. Then she and Tennie listened to the intelligent, fiery speakers who followed, mentally taking notes. Victoria’s brief stint on the stage and Tennie’s schooling in disingenuous fortune-telling were good training for engaging an audience; now they absorbed ways to electrify crowds with serious arguments. Soon Victoria would be known as one of the top female orators in the country, and both sisters would later speak to several thousand in auditoriums.

There was a triumphant air in Lincoln Hall, which was packed with suffragists and supporters who embraced Woodhull’s memorial, feeling certain that it would recharge the troops and give new life to the struggle. Anthony said that a “poor lone woman” had presented a solution that had not occurred to those who “had opted to labor on in the old way for five, ten, fifteen or perhaps twenty years to come, to secure the passage of another amendment to the Constitution… we were too slow for the
times.” Anthony thought this new departure could succeed, thrilled that “the fourteenth amendment is good enough for women.”