The Scarlet Sisters (31 page)

Despite the obscenity acquittal and revelations of the tripartite agreement, the sisters were in no mood to celebrate. They still faced the Challis libel trial, with no date in sight. Also Woodhull was barely recovering from her illness. The June 21
Weekly
was filled with tributes to Victoria, a narcissistic preoccupation so extreme that it signaled emotional troubles. Articles saluted her bravery, purity, and truthfulness, combined with numerous passages of self-pity. She wrote that her “present physical state” began when she first “heard the click of the lock that confined her to a ‘six-by-eight’ cell” eight months before. She felt “keenly the month’s imprisonment,” and felt the “stabs” to the heart when friends who knew she was telling the truth deserted her, causing constant suffering.

Then, in July, within weeks of their obscenity trial victory, their tormented thirty-one-year-old sister, Utica, died. One of her last acts was once again to attack Victoria, Colonel Blood, and Tennie. Arrested for being drunk and disorderly, Utica charged the sisters with having beaten her. Soiled family linen was again aired in the papers as Woodhull revealed that Utica had attacked sister Meg Miles with a chair and “began her insane and disorderly conduct.” Woodhull sounded paranoid when she claimed in a statement to the
New York Times
that Utica’s “purely malicious” complaint “was made to affect the public against me.” A few days later, Utica was dead of Bright’s disease, her kidneys failing from years of alcoholism. The
New York Herald
did not spare Utica: “She would take brandy, whiskey, gin, rum, wine and beer.” She even downed “draughts of bay rum” and was also a morphine addict. “The result was that at times she was a raving maniac” who pursued her frightened sisters.

Woodhull decided to tell all in a eulogy, which alternated between writing about her dead sister and defending herself. The family had not realized that Utica’s violent behavior was caused by her dependence on alcohol and “stimulants,” Victoria wrote disingenuously. “We now
understand” that Utica “was a fit subject for an asylum, either for inebriates or the insane; but as the victim of a series of circumstances that conspired to make a lamentable ruin of one of the most divinely gifted of human beings, she deserved the keenest commiseration of every one, and their most compassionate endurance.” Victoria blamed Utica’s death on two disastrous marriages that made her a “sexual slave” to marital conformity. Woodhull wrote, “Indeed what might be said of her, ‘Cut off at thirty-one by marriage.’ ”

Yet thoughts of herself filled the
Weekly
. As she looked at her dead sister, Victoria was said to cry out, “Do you wonder… that I feel desperately in earnest to reform the evils of our social life when I remember what I have suffered in my own family? Opposed and misunderstood by my parents and sisters, compelled to bear an idiotic child by a drunken husband, O, my God! And the world thinks me only ambitious of notoriety!” The article then proceeded once again to denigrate her family, even Tennie: “She has unbounded benevolence, an exuberance of animal spirits, and a ready tongue, but seems to lack the interior life and inspiring power” of Victoria. Only Blood got off unscathed: “a nobler man never lived.”

Whispers of poison and rumors of the sisters’ imminent arrest filled Victoria’s mind, along with the idea that Comstock’s YMCA was at work. She requested an autopsy of her sister’s body, which revealed that Utica’s kidneys were enlarged to twice their natural size and “much decomposed.” Her uterus and vagina were pronounced “free from disease and as natural as those of a virgin.” Given that Utica had been arrested for soliciting and had had two marriages, the “virgin” comparison was a stretch, but the sisters clung to the “free from disease” phrase, since “remarks had been made” that an examination “would reveal the fact that the deceased was rotten with sexual disease.”

Reflecting some of the bitterness they felt over constant rumors and assumptions, Tennie and Woodhull rejected the “outward exhibition” of customary funerals. Utica was dressed in a pink silk wrapper, with a white flower at her breast, and laid in a plain casket, while Tennie and Victoria, wearing white roses on their dark dresses, were surrounded by “many of
their literary friends.” A plain hearse and four carriages took the casket and family, with Tennie weeping, to the cemetery.

The sisters brought the body of Canning Woodhull from another cemetery to lie near Utica, offering no explanation for the joining of the two hapless addicts who had died of the same disease.

During this period, there seems little doubt that Woodhull was either on the verge of a nervous breakdown or experiencing a full-blown collapse. Her writing and speeches contain an unnerving fixation. Yes, she was persecuted, but her preoccupation—with her imprisonment, unfair judges, the Comstock-Beecher brigade, and hectoring newspapers—became uncontrollable. In the past, reporters had described glimpses of high-strung fragility lurking behind her masterful control onstage. Now Victoria wrote at times as if only she, and not Tennie and Blood, had endured jail and castigation. The
Weekly
suffered from this self-absorption. Finally, in the fall, Victoria showed some of her combative spirit. She took on adversaries at the annual Spiritualist convention in Chicago, following a fiery speech at their August event in Vineland, New Jersey. There, Woodhull faced social freedom critics who said future children would suffer if mothers could leave bad marriages. Why, she asked, should such naysayers “be so terribly concerned about the children who are to be, when they have no concern whatever for those who
are
… Go to the fifty thousand houseless, half starved, wholly untaught children of New York City, who live from the swill barrels of the rich Christians, ask what is becoming of them and they will tell you they don’t know. But it is plain to be seen that they are going to the bad, surely.”

Woodhull no longer was invited to speak to suffragists. She and Tennie were no longer queens of laborers or, conversely, capitalists. Ads in the
Weekly
now reflected a narrower audience: “Psychometric Readings”; “Botanic Physicians” who promised “no poison used”; a painting for sale of the Fox sisters’ home, the “Birthplace of Modern Spiritualism.”

The
Chicago Daily Tribune
stingingly portrayed the Spiritualists at their September 10 annual meeting in Chicago as an insignificant band
of misfits, mocking them as old women, and men who looked like “old women too,” with a smattering of homely young women. The “Woodhull doctrines” were a last resort for “shelved virgins” or those “whom nature has denied even a modicum of the charms of the sex.”

However, Woodhull was praised both for her keynote speech—“A Slashing Address by the Presiding Genius”—and her final speech. Freed from the convoluted rhetoric of Stephen Pearl Andrews, she was electrifying the crowd with more personal language. At her first appearance at the three-day convention, the audience saw an unsteady, ghastly pale Woodhull, who was introduced as having been very ill. She appeared dazed and disconcerted by a hostile minority of conventiongoers, but recovered to attack them with fire: “As I sat listening to these terrific denunciations from the male virgins and immaculates [
sic
],” she related a story that revealed an uncharacteristically lighter sense of humor.

Woodhull had taken a Broadway stagecoach that was filled with several “gentlemen.” She sat down beside “an elegantly dressed lady” who quickly put her fan to her face and whispered in Victoria’s ear, “ ‘For heaven’s sake, Mrs. Woodhull, don’t recognize me here; it would ruin my business!’ I then recognized her as the keeper of a fashionable house of assignation, to which I had been upon an errand of inquiry… it soon occurred to me that some of the gentlemen present were her customers, who seeing that she knew me, would never again dare to visit her house.” As some of the Spiritualists laughed, Woodhull added, “So you see I am ostracized by those whom the world calls prostitutes almost as fearfully as I am by those whom I call the real prostitutes—those who come before you with a sanctified look, and with meek voices parading their virtue, which they profess to be in deadly fear of losing should social freedom prevail.” She would obey no man-made laws that subjugate women, “and especially will I spit upon” their social laws.

At an afternoon session, a heated confrontation with a Mr. Cotton ensued when he demanded to know if she had “prostituted herself sexually” to carry out her “glorious work.” Woodhull stared him down. “I want to fully understand you… what is it that you want me to explain?”
She looked at the rest of the audience. “I am thinking whether I shall lose any of my womanly dignity to answer this man… A
man
questioning my virtue!” Cotton drew some laughs when he said he was not “worth the powder to shoot at,” but said he had details of Victoria’s private life he would share with the audience if she didn’t. Woodhull, her voice stronger, let fly: “If this Convention wants to know anything about my sexual organs let us have it understood!”

A man asked her if Cotton was telling the truth.

She stared at Cotton and referred to herself in the third person. “Has Mr. Cotton ever had sex with Mrs. Woodhull?”

“No,” he replied.

“Do you know any man that has?”

“No.”

“Then what in the name of heaven can you prove?” asked an affronted Woodhull. How dare he come before this convention and “arraign me for hypocrisy? I hurl the intention back in your face, sir, and stand boldly before you and this Convention, and declare that I never had sexual intercourse with any man of whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world with the act.” This was a study in ambiguity, but still the frankest comment she had given regarding a personal embrace of free love. “I am not ashamed of any act of my life.” Her words echoed as the audience sat silent.
“At the time, it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any desire that has been gratified or any passion alluded to”
[emphasis added].

Brushing Cotton aside, Woodhull discussed how she felt about being ostracized. Why had this group made her their president? “Is it because I have shown any cowardice during the last two years? Or is it because I have gone through the very depths of hell to give you freedom? I want to know! Is it because I have been a coward, or is it because I have braved the penitentiary and every other damnable thing that could be put up to hinder me giving you the truth?”

Ignoring Tennie’s role, Woodhull was caught up in her go-it-alone theme. Victoria had always thought of herself as a singular queen, the charismatic center of the Woodhull machine, and indeed she was. Tennie
was her helper and partner, one who lectured engagingly and sometimes upstaged her, but Victoria did the dictating. Victoria showed this tendency when she wrote or spoke about the two of them, often unconsciously shifting into “I.” It was not a matter of her purposefully distancing herself from her younger sister as much as it was thoughtlessness and an overriding belief in “her destiny” as a leader. “When I came out of my prison I came out of it a beggar.” She had appealed to Spiritualists and reformers to send money to keep the
Weekly
afloat. “But did you do it? No! You left me to starve in the streets, you left my paper to die… Hence I went to your bankers, presidents of railroads, gamblers, prostitutes, and got the money that has sent you the paper you have been reading.”

Then Woodhull resorted to a tantalizing vagueness that detractors would view as proof: “I used whatever influence I had to get that money and that’s my own business, and none of yours and if I devoted my body to my work and my soul to God, that is my business and not yours… suppose I have been obliged to crucify my body in whatever way to fulfill my duty, what business is that of Mr. Cotton?”

Victoria would do “whatever is necessary” for her cause, “even if it be the crucifixion of my body in the manner for which I am now arraigned. If you do not want one to be forced to that extreme, come to my rescue as you ought to have done before and not let me fight the battle all alone.” She should not be “subjected even to the possibility of a thing so utterly abhorrent to me as to submit sexually for money to a man I do not love.”

After this last statement, clearly abhorring prostitution for herself, Woodhull could not resist leaving her audience wondering, neither confirming nor denying whether she had sold herself to keep the
Weekly
running. “If Mr. Cotton, or if any of you are so terribly alarmed lest I may have been obliged to do this, let him and you manifest your alarm by rallying to my support to insure that no such exigency shall ever again rise.”

When asked if she herself had “boasted” of prostitution to carry on the
Weekly
, Tennie answered with “a brazen-face impudence, ‘If you spiritualists had done your duty, we should not have to do so, but what are you going to do about it? How are you going to help yourselves?’ ”

The scene was intense, and Colonel Blood stood with the sisters to protect them as this ugly session ended. Despite this altercation, Woodhull gave a final electrifying speech that so awed the
Chicago Daily Tribune
reporter who covered the meeting that he declared, “She is one of the most active, energetic, and eloquent speakers that ever appeared in this city, and it may well be regretted that so highly gifted a woman should not have devoted herself to a more worthy cause.” Her lecture was “devoted to a really eloquent and exhaustive discourse… upon the evils, physical, mental, and social, that result from the present system of marriage and sexual relations.” The paper, however, decided the speech was “not of a character to be published in these columns.”

Woodhull was overwhelmingly reelected president of the American Association of Spiritualists. This did not stop detractors in the group from saying the election was rigged.

Soon Woodhull’s self-involvement would be subsumed by a far larger crisis. On Thursday, September 18, 1873, Jay Cooke and Company in Manhattan, the nation’s most powerful banking house, closed its doors, signaling a monumental financial crash. Like everyone else, the sisters would be absorbed in the Panic of 1873 that shook the world.