The Scarlet Sisters (15 page)

Tennie elaborated on her abused childhood: “I was kept down and deprived of all that a child needs, so at fifteen I ran away, from sheer desperation… they brought me back and kept me locked up for a year. I told such wonderful things for a child that my father made from fifty to a hundred dollars a day at hotels, simply by letting people see the strange clairvoyant child… I never had any happiness till I came to live with my darling sister Vicky.” Tennie was stalked by her mother, who “has shown
an insane determination… to force me to go back to the business… she annoyed everybody at hotels and boarding houses, and I was forced to constantly change my boarding house… She hates Colonel Blood and Vicky because they upheld me.”

After this explosive trial, Woodhull furiously sketched her father’s viciousness a few months later in the famous biography of her penned by journalist and free love friend Theodore Tilton, describing their father enacting his blackmail schemes: “At times a Mephistopheles… watching for a moment when his ill word to a stranger will blight their business schemes, drops in upon some capitalist whose money is in their hands, lodges an indictment against his own flesh and blood, takes out his handkerchief to hide a few well-feigned tears, clasps his hands with an unfelt agony, hobbles off smiling sardonically… and the next day repents.” The biography went on: “Victoria’s rescue of her [Tennie] excited the wrath of these parasites—which has continued hot and undying against both to this day. The fond and fierce mother alternately loves and hates the two united defiers [
sic
] of her morbid will.”

But there was no safe haven for Victoria and Tennie. Horrified at being smeared by association, suffragists clamored for Woodhull’s departure from their midst. The AWSA wing gleefully trashed her. When member Mary Livermore accused her of advocating and practicing “licentuosness [
sic
],” Woodhull sharply warned (the apparently sexually active) Livermore that those “who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and you very well know that most people do live in these brittle tenements.”

As if the trial hadn’t been enough, crazy Annie was back in action within days, concocting a tale that made front-page news. She had been kidnapped, yanked into a carriage, blindfolded, taken to a dank place, and given nothing but bread and water for three days, then released. “I believe,” she said, that “he [Blood] was the one had me taken off.” She told reporters that Victoria was afraid “that some night he may pour hot lead in her ears and kill her if she vexes him, or if she leaves him he may shoot her down in the streets.”

By now one would think readers might have tired of the wretched family saga, but a small item created more sensation:
DR. SPAR
[
sic
]
FOUND DEAD IN A HOTEL
. Sparr had registered at a hotel under an assumed name. Finding the door locked the next day, the chambermaid used a stepladder to look through the transom and saw Sparr lying on the floor “in nearly a nude state.” The doctor and coroner stated that Sparr “evidently had fallen out of bed and struck his head against the panel of the door with so much force as to partially burst it out… Apoplexy or heart disease may have caused death.” The New York
Sun
spiced up its page-one story, hinting that Sparr was the victim of “self-murder… induced by domestic infelicities.” An unsigned, incomplete letter written in pencil, found in a satchel in the room, began, “Vickey, [
sic
] Colonel and Tenny [
sic
] included,” and referred to “poor old mother, Pa and Polly,” warning the sisters and Blood that they “dare not put them out.”

The
Brooklyn Eagle
paraphrased whatever Woodhull said about Sparr’s death, implying that she was plugging her presidential campaign, thus editorializing that Woodhull was unfit to head the “shrieking sisterhood” whose “most popular leader” had “kicked about the corpse” of a brother-in-law.

For the Stanton-Anthony branch, the arduous task of damage control lay ahead. Victoria drew some comfort from a letter sent to her from Stanton, then lecturing in Wyoming: “The grief I felt in the vile raking of your personal and family affairs was three-fold—sympathy for you, shame for the men who persecuted you and the dangers I saw in the abuse of one of our greatest blessings, a free press.” She praised Victoria for her brave speeches: “You have attacked, too, the last stronghold of the enemy—the social subordination of woman.”

In the aftermath of the trial’s sensational smorgasbord, reporters began to dig into the sisters’ past. The
St. Louis Times
wrote about Buck absconding with money from mail at the Homer post office and the suspicion that he had set fire to his gristmill for insurance. The paper also hinted at a tawdry past for Woodhull, yet gave no facts. She ran “a house in Chicago in a grand and peculiar style” and then was the “proprietress of an eclectic institution” in St. Louis. Others did not report but harangued: “Now her shameful life has been exposed, it will follow that the enemies of female suffrage will point to her as a fair representative of
the movement.” Henry C. Bowen, Beecher’s Plymouth Church mentor and publisher of the religious
Independent
, slammed Stanton, Anthony, and Isabella Beecher Hooker for being “foolish” enough “to have given a prominent place to Mrs. Woodhull.” The
New-York Daily Tribune
’s Horace Greeley, who was strongly against divorce reform, tore into Woodhull as “one who has two husbands after a sort, and lives in the same house with them both, sharing the couch of one, but bearing the name of the other, to indicate her impartiality perhaps.” This was particularly galling to Woodhull and others in the movement who blamed Greeley for his emotionally battered wife and miserable marriage. Woodhull shot back in the
Weekly
: “Mr. Greeley’s home has always been a sort of domestic hell.”

Perhaps the biggest blow to Tennie was the response of Commodore Vanderbilt to her claims in court that she had “humbugged” him. For a year, the now-married Vanderbilt had distanced himself from the sisters, and he had not been seen as their financial guru for months. Immediately after what he would have considered a stinging insult by Tennie—that she had duped him—Vanderbilt told a reporter, “They h’aint no friends of mine. From what I hear, you shouldn’t be associating with such folks.”

Other women might have crumpled from the barrage of hostile publicity and invective, but Victoria and Tennie were far from done. They lashed back at the stinging assault from those whose private lives were not as pure as they seemed. Four days after the end of the trial, Woodhull flashed a warning in the
New York Times
and the New York
World
: “I do not intend to be made the scapegoat of sacrifice to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover over the foulness of their lives and the feculence of their thoughts with a hypocritical mantle.” Her sharp threat was aimed at the Plymouth Church’s minister, Henry Ward Beecher, revered as the “most famous man in America.” Woodhull did not name him, but wrote enough for Beecher to recognize himself among her “judges” who “preach against ‘Free Love’ openly and practice it privately… I believe in public justice.”

Beecher thought, wrongly, that he was safe from Woodhull’s threats, but she had just learned of smoldering gossip that was about to ignite.

CHAPTER NINE

Sex and the City, circa 1871

Underneath the Victorian cloak of unctuous morality, sex was everywhere—except in the marriage bed, Woodhull argued. “Marriage,” she said, “is a license to cohabit sexually… [yet] the enforcement of this method eventually defeats the original object… it is the common experience among the married who have lived together strictly according to the marriage covenant, for from five to ten years, that they are sexually estranged… I know there are exceptions to this rule but they are the exceptions… Sexual estrangement in from five to ten years!”

On stages across the country, in 150 performances, Victoria delivered this strong brew, addressing the crowd directly: “Marriage,” she shouted, “is a fraud upon human happiness!… Think of it, men and women, whom nature has blessed with such possibilities for happiness as are conferred on no other order of creation! Your God-ordained capacity blasted, prostituted to death, by enforced sexual relations where there is neither attraction or sexual adaptation; and by ignorance of sexual science!… from the moment that the sexual instinct is dead in any person, male or female… a person begins actually to die. It is the fountain from which life proceeds. Dry up the fountain and the stream will disappear.”

Woodhull confronted the gossip about her head-on: “I have been generally denounced by the press as an advocate of promiscuousness,” but she asserted that she was the opposite, a true romantic, and cited what
comprised “proper” sexual relations. This was her clearest definition of free love: “First love of each by each of the parties; second, a desire for the commerce on the part of each, arising from the previous love; and third, mutual and reciprocal benefit.” She pointedly added for the religious in her audiences who viewed sex as a sin except when for propagation, “Let your religious faith be what it may, if it does not include the sexual act it is impotent.” Nothing could be holier than an act that begets children, she said, but she made it clear that sex should be enjoyed for its own sake as long as both parties agreed—a main tenet of her free love position. Her definition of “improper sexual commerce” included that “which is claimed by legal right, as in marriage, second, where the female, to please the male, accords it” as a duty and without love.

Both sisters decried the economic dependency of women that kept them trapped in repugnant marriages. A century and a half before the terms
date rape
and
domestic rape
were coined, Victoria and Tennie shouted to packed houses about domestic abuse. “Night after night there are thousands of rapes committed under cover of this accursed license; and millions—yes, I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak—millions of poor, heart-broken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands,” said Victoria. Nothing “except marriage… invests men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their wills. Yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality!” Her voice penetrating to the farthest row, she received boos and cheers as she shouted, “I say, eternal damnation, sink such morality!” She urged men to worship women, “rather than to command or appropriate… Remember that it is a pretension and a fraud to think of ownership in, or control over, the person of a woman.”

She chastised the “virtuous women” who abhor prostitutes while condoning their clients. She wove a tale of women reformers who “resolved to visit ‘the houses’ and learn who it was that supported them, and then afterward to ostracize them.” After a week, those in this Women’s Crusade “suddenly stopped” their inquiry. The women had “pressed their investigations until they pressed themselves into the faces of the best men
of the city, some of them their husbands and brothers,” she said archly. “When they found their best men—their husbands and brothers—were supporting these women… they should have taken [the women] home and seated them at their tables beside their companion, and said: ‘if you are good enough for our husbands to consort with, you are good enough to sit at our tables with them.’ ” If enough women organized such homey visits of professional prostitutes, “prostitution, so called, would be abolished at once. It is the women who stand in the way. They, knowing that their husbands visit these women, continue to live on, doing their best to damn the women, but saying nothing about the men.”

Tennie defined
sex radicals
, a term that applied to the sisters: “We are engaged in introducing new social views which look to radical and sweeping changes in the present system.” This concept included freedom for women to choose their partners, to marry or not, to divorce and be able to retain their children, and to control their own bodies regarding when or even if to have children. “We now stand on the very brink of a social earthquake,” she told audiences in her booming voice: “What this earthquake may destroy, who may be swallowed up in its yawning chasm, or whether we ourselves may be swallowed up we do not know. But that great good to the human family will come of it we feel assured.” In Tennie’s speeches, which were given to audiences around the country and published as a pamphlet by the
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
Company, her central theme was sexual equality. Her compassion for prostitutes led detractors to say this was a pursuit she knew all too well. Why were prostitutes arrested while their clients went free? she asked, and threatened to expose clients who were the “best” men in town. Why should an unmarried woman who became pregnant deserve disgrace while the man who impregnated her was never asked to account for anything? she cried.

Tennie, her assurance on the subject a contrast to her youthful face—as “fair as an infants [
sic
]”—related the story of a young beauty who demanded thousands of dollars before she would marry a rich old man. “Now, I say that the poor prostitute, suffering for bread and naked for clothes, who sells herself to some man for a few hours to obtain the few
dollars with which to procure them, and thus sustain her life; or the young maiden involuntarily yielding herself up to him to whom her young heart goes out in purity, is an angel compared to this woman who sold herself… to the man she detested, for one hundred thousand dollars.… But such is the force of public opinion” that while the prostitute “would be kicked from the doorstep” and the unmarried girl who engaged in sex with a man she loved would be “turned from her father’s home,” the designing young married woman is “a worshipped belle of New York—a virtuous woman.”

Victoria could certainly be challenged for her assumption that “those who are called prostitutes… are free women, sexually, when compared to married women.” Refusal was seldom an option for prostitutes. An estimated twenty thousand prostitutes worked in New York City in 1868, which prompted a Methodist minister to exclaim that Manhattan housed more prostitutes than parishioners. Transplanted impoverished southern belles were forced to choose between starving and whoring along with Yankee girls and mulattos who had once been their slaves.