The Scarlet Sisters (12 page)

Actually the idea had first been raised by a Missouri lawyer and his wife, Francis and Virginia Minor, who argued that since the Fourteenth Amendment did not explicitly prohibit women from voting, individual states could not prevent them from doing so. But Stanton and Anthony had seemed unaware that this loophole was a possible tool. Once alerted, they, along with several hundred other women, including Victoria and Tennie, tried, and in some cases succeeded in, casting ballots. Susan B. Anthony, thrilled at casting her vote in the 1872 general election, was gladly arrested, and never paid a $100 fine, pointing out that her sin was merely that of being a woman. The judge, faced with this strong woman, did not make her pay. Both Tennie and Victoria made news when they tried to vote in the fall of 1871, a full year before Anthony.

On the final evening of the convention, Anthony’s praise of Woodhull, with a nod to Tennie, was unstinting. “In this age of rapid thought and action, of telegraphs and railways, the old stage coach won’t do,” Anthony declared. Victoria and Tennie had captured “the spirit of the age” as stockbrokers, an avocation “never heretofore” opened to women and “one of the most difficult avocations that belongs to human kind.” Woodhull had helped advance “our cause by as many years at least” as it would take to engineer the “ramifications of an amendment to the constitution.”

On that last day, a smitten reporter found that “while women were wasting their breath at the convention,” Tennie was off knocking on congressional doors, lobbying as a “worker” ought to “when a favorite measure is before congress. Oh, the irresistible Tennie!”

After Woodhull’s electrifying debut before the Judiciary Committee, she became an instant hero to the Stanton-Anthony liberal wing of suffragists, named the National Woman Suffrage Association, or NWSA. Although Congress had refused Woodhull’s request to address the entire body, she was now a star. Lecture requests poured in. Following Woodhull’s memorial the sisters took full advantage of her celebrity status. They churned out and disseminated several thousand copies of Woodhull’s memorial. For maximum publicity they continued to purposely set themselves apart from other
suffragists, dressing precisely alike and wearing, as reporters noticed, “masculine coat-tails” on their jackets. They reveled in the validating praise from Anthony: Woodhull was “young, handsome and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture congress, Victoria is the woman we are after.”

Despite her shaky performance at the January suffragist convention in Washington’s Lincoln Hall, when Woodhull merely read her position, the group called her back for an encore in the same hall in February. Followers and the merely curious alike flooded the space. When all the chairs were taken, people crushed together in the back. Woodhull, facing the largest crowd ever assembled in that hall, rose to speak. Tennie watched nervously as her sister again began hesitantly. Woodhull’s face drained of color, and her pauses were disconcertingly long. Impulsively, Isabella Hooker stood up and put an arm around her. Then the rhythm of her ideas took over, and Victoria was transformed. She always said it was her “spirits” that guided her while speaking.

“I and others of my sex” are controlled by a government in “whose administration we are denied the right to participate, though we are a large part of this country. I am subject to tyranny!” she shouted, loud and clear. “I am taxed in every conceivable way.” As a rare businesswoman, she could appeal to the men who had come to the hall to hear this new celebrity: “For publishing a paper I must pay… for engaging in the banking and brokerage business I must pay.” She added to this list the taxes that she and other women consumers had to pay for “tea, coffee and sugar,” all to maintain a government “in which I have no voice.”

Victoria cuttingly said that she was not pleading for those “who are blessed by the best of wealth, comfort and ease,” but for “the toiling female millions.” She urged women to push for the vote, to petition for rights. She warned Congress that if nothing changed concerning the “utter exclusion of women,” there was no recourse than to start a new women’s government.

She was hyping her presidential candidacy as much as she was speaking for women’s rights. Her voice carrying to the farthest corners of the hall, Woodhull, no longer nervous, shouted, “We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the
south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough [
sic
] this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead!”

The Victorian political world was used to flamboyant hyperbole from men, but not from women. In contrast to Woodhull’s fiery call for revolution, the audience response was a heartfelt but ironic gesture. Hundreds of women supporters signaled their approval by a seen-but-not-heard fluttering of white handkerchiefs. This time the press was laudatory: “Mrs. Woodhull has opened her Presidential campaign with a very effective speech,” wrote the friendly
New York Herald
. “A brave eloquent and unanswerable argument,” wrote Washington, DC’s
Daily Republican
. “A masterly argument,” wrote the
Chronicle
.

Stanton, who had yet to meet Woodhull, as she was lecturing in the Midwest, read an account of her speech and raved to the young woman in a letter sent from Ohio. Her speech was “ahead of anything, said or written—bless your dear soul for all you are doing to help strike the chains from woman’s spirit.” The most famous American suffragists—Stanton, Anthony, Paulina Wright Davis, and Isabella Hooker—all bowed down to her.

Victoria and Tennie returned to New York that spring filled with happy dreams for the future. In May, Victoria would make her grand debut in not one but two Manhattan lecture halls. She was invited to give a major speech on labor issues at Cooper Union. In her NWSA address at Apollo Hall, she would use that moment to discuss her presidency.

In a few breathtaking months, Victoria had made such a sensation that the newspapers dubbed the upcoming NWSA Apollo gathering “Woodhull’s Women.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Free Love, Suffrage, and Abolition

On Woodhull’s big day before Congress, suffragist Lucy Stone was far from the crowd that fêted Woodhull—both geographically and philosophically. Huddled in Massachusetts with her conservative set, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), Stone seethed at Woodhull’s success. Deeply opposed to free love views, Stone regarded Victoria and Tennie—who were being embraced by Stone’s enemies Stanton and Anthony—as meddling misfits. When a Stone stalwart, Mary Livermore, swore that AWSA would have nothing to do with a memorial that came from a woman with “unclean hands,” Anthony poured out her fury in a letter to a Spiritualist woman friend, underlining vehemently: “Our fastidious Boston friends can’t see nor hear of the Woodhull shot…” The Stone group, whom Anthony called the “Boston Malcontents,” would rather “women should grovel in the mire of disenfranchisement another whole century [than] be lifted out by what they term unclean hands.”

Long before, when Victoria and Tennie were just child vagabonds, Stanton had already staked out a difference that would lead to a future rift in the women’s movement; she shocked the sexually repressed Lucy Stone with her graphic comments on sex. When a man sought sex and a woman did not, Stanton railed in an 1856 letter to Stone, “the woman must be sacrificed; and what is worse, women have come to think so too.”

In many respects it seemed as if Stone and Stanton would have been
permanent allies. Like many women pioneers in suffrage, they rebelled early. Both were whip smart and stung by fathers who belittled their fight for an education. By dogged determination both became well educated. Like other suffragists, they watched mothers reduced to repeated childbearing and household drudgery. Women of the early nineteenth century, like Victoria and Tennie’s mother, routinely bore ten and twelve children. Many suffragist daughters vowed this would not happen to them. Although Stanton had seven children, she never was a docile homemaker, and she continued her tireless suffragist lectures and writing. Both Stone and Stanton were brave abolitionists and outspoken suffragists. Stone showed the same spark of Stanton’s rebellion by refusing to take Henry Blackwell’s name when they married in 1855. Blackwell also concurred with Lucy’s wish to strike the words
to obey
from their vows.

Their joint progressiveness, however, stopped at the bedroom door. Sex so repulsed Stone that her biographer Andrea Moore Kerr surmised that Stone’s adult traits mirrored those of women who had been sexually abused as children, in her case, probably by her domineering father, who also beat her when drunk. Among the adult traits Stone shared with sexually abused children, in addition to abhorrence of sex, were a need to feel in control, low self-esteem, and disgust with men. To Lucy’s shame, her husband ended up supporting the women’s movement in more ways than one, carrying on a celebrated affair with another feminist. His philandering hardened his wife’s abhorrence of sex. “I have been a disappointed woman… in education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman,” said Stone. She once fiercely vowed to an audience of two thousand, “it shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.” Some suffragists, viewing a woman so soured by life, understood Blackwell’s escape into a celebrated affair.

By contrast, Stanton had an unabashed joy of sex. She once slammed Walt Whitman because he was “ignorant of the great natural fact that a healthy woman has as much passion as a man, that she needs nothing stronger than the law of attraction to draw her to the male.” Stanton had
known passion in her youth, so in love with her brother-in-law that she considered eloping. Her marriage had no such ardor. The discontented Stanton’s shocking battle for liberalized divorce laws long preceded that of the sisters. Unlike Stone, she was among the few early suffragists who, like the Claflin sisters, “insisted that woman’s most basic right was to control her body.” This included deciding when to have children, which meant (perish the thought) that wives could refuse sex or practice some of the primitive forms of birth control available at the time.

Stanton correctly saw that the “heart of the woman question was domestic and not legal or political.” Marriage itself was not the enemy, but the “present form that makes man master, woman slave,” she said. Her expanding the fight beyond suffrage clashed not only with Lucy Stone but with her partner Anthony’s single-minded pursuit of the vote. Their disagreements would worsen when Stanton embraced Victoria. In 1871, Stanton penned a sharp letter to Anthony: “Men and women dabbling with the suffrage movement should be… emphatically warned that what they mean logically if not consciously… is next, social equality, and next Freedom or in a word Free Love.”

The edgy animosity between Stanton-Anthony and Stone burst into a firestorm during the embattled days of Reconstruction, when reformers clashed over whether blacks should get the vote before women. For years, women suffragists and male abolitionists had spoken with one voice; freedom for blacks and women. In 1866 they founded the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). Then, the following year, abolitionists and suffragists tangled when two separate voting referendums, one for black males and one for women, were placed on the ballot in Kansas, pitting against each other two groups that had fought side by side.

Anthony and Stanton stumped for the women’s referendum in Kansas with George Francis Train, an openly racist eccentric millionaire fond of using the word
nigger
. They were beholden to him. Train was bankrolling their
Revolution
newspaper. When both referendums were defeated, many reformers blamed Anthony and Stanton. The courageous abolitionist
leader William Lloyd Garrison—who once barely escaped lynching by pro-slavery mobs as he was dragged through the streets of Boston—castigated the two women for aligning with Train, “a crack-brained harlequin and semi-lunatic.” Lucy Stone was appalled. Anthony defended Train, arguing that he had made possible, with his generous endowment, her dream of publishing a women’s rights paper. “If the Devil himself had come up and said ‘ladies I will help you establish a paper’ I should have said Amen!” Antagonism within the AERA continued until Train left the paper in 1869. (Without his funds, Stanton and Anthony were forced to sell it.)

More hostility occurred at the May 12, 1869, AERA convention in New York. While Anthony, Stone, and many other women argued that women should get the vote before blacks, Stanton’s fervency led her down the low road of racism. She and Anthony, propelled by grief, betrayal, and fear that the women’s vote would be delayed for decades, vehemently opposed males at the convention who argued that this was “the Negro’s hour.” Intense shouting broke out on both sides, and Anthony was drowned out when she argued that discussion of the women’s vote should be first and the Negroes’ last.

No one had fought harder for women’s suffrage than Stone, but she was also overwhelmed by the horrific news from the South. The Klan was orchestrating whippings, beatings, lynchings, burnings, and mass killings. When blacks had gathered to demand the vote in New Orleans in 1866, thirty-four men and women were slaughtered. Stone argued that the woman’s vote was imperative. Yet, in the end, if the amendment could not be changed for women, Stone conceded, “I will be thankful in my soul if
any
body can get out of the terrible pit.”

An enraged Stanton shouted that she did not believe in allowing “ignorant negroes and foreigners to make laws” for her to obey. In no way should women stand aside “and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.” She derided former slaves with their “incoming pauperism, ignorance and degradation” who “wouldn’t know a ballot from an order for a mule.” Although many women at the convention supported the “women first”
concept, Stanton’s racist rhetoric was the brilliant leader’s flawed moment in history. Once she started, she seemed unable to control her rage. In private she was even more cutting, writing her cousin that she was annoyed at his persistence “in putting Sambo, Hans, Patrick and Yung Fung” before the women. Her partner, Anthony, vowed, “I will cut off this right arm of mine rather than work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” But Stanton descended into the worst racist stereotype, raising the specter of rape against white women, warning in the
Revolution
that if the black man got the vote before women it would “culminate in fearful outrages on womanhood, especially in the south.”