The Scarlet Sisters (46 page)

The sisters left this world without the final imprint of their version of who they were and what they had accomplished. Victoria and Tennie belonged to the ages, which must now puzzle over and debate their worth, which continues to change with passing generations and shifting attitudes about women.

EPILOGUE

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin always said they were a hundred years ahead of their time, but one hundred and fifty would be more like it—and then some. Case in point: Society should leave “the love affairs of the community to regulate themselves, instead of trusting to legislation to regulate them.” This is not a modern-day activist cheering the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, but Woodhull in 1871. “Put a woman on trial for anything—it is considered as a legitimate part of the defense to make the most searching inquiry into her sexual morality, and the decision generally turns upon the proof advanced in this regard.” These words are not a contemporary comment on the disparaging treatment of victims of domestic violence or rape—one of the reasons 54 percent of rapes go unreported today—but rather, Tennie Claflin speaking out in 1871.

If the sisters were alive today, they would find many of the same problems they railed against over a century and a half ago, sometimes on issues unheard of back then, but dovetailing with their sense of personal freedom. As soon as the Supreme Court ruled on DOMA in 2013, opponents vowed to fight state by state against further legalizing of same-sex marriage. Other issues, familiar to the sisters, continue to be fought with new and sometimes appalling twists. Politicians argue over the existence of “legitimate rape” and swear that rapes resulting in pregnancy are
“very low.” They sponsor legislation involving vaginal probes, and mandate ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. Right-wing “Family Values” politicians are caught in adultery scandals. Corporate crime on Wall Street and corruption on Capitol Hill seldom shock anyone anymore.

The Tea Party extremist War on Women, infused by right-wing political action committees, continues at a ferocious pace, most noticeably in their battle against pro-choice, which is always a polarizing force in political campaigns. In the summer of 2013, the mostly male GOP-dominated House passed the most severe anti-abortion bill in a decade that would nationally ban abortions after twenty weeks, knowing full well that the Senate would not pass it, but determined to send a message.

Just like the generations born after
Roe v. Wade
, Victoria and Tennessee grew up in an era of relaxed views on abortion. Not until their adulthood and the 1873 rise of Comstockery did abortion become a serious crime. Today
Roe v. Wade
has been whittled away to an alarming degree. Some 145 years after the sisters fought to give women the right to own their bodies, many states severely restrict reproductive rights, with some proposing laws that would make a fetus a person at the moment of fertilization. Anti-choice opposition has forced the closing of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, while politicians continually vow to end
Roe v. Wade
, which would once again criminalize abortion. Some states also impose limitations on access to contraception, making it harder for women who do not want to conceive. Texas governor Rick Perry led the battle in draconian achievements, and his legislation has so slashed Planned Parenthood funding that an estimated 200,000 women, especially poor women, have lost or could lose access to contraception, cancer screening, and basic preventive care.

As for sex education in schools—a goal of the sisters in the Victorian Age—ignorance rules the day across the nation; legislators in at least seven states last year fought to clamp down on comprehensive “medically accurate” sexual education. Some have banned Planned Parenthood representatives from teaching sex education and continue to push anti-abortion, abstinence, or creationism content.

A loud rallying cry to fight this ignorance was Senator Wendy Davis’s abortion filibuster in 2013 against a harsh Texas abortion bill. The stupendous national response led Davis to run for Texas governor. Her supporters had hoped for a close race, if not a win, as they tried to gain a progressive foothold but her loss showed how entrenched white voters, male and female, are in deeply red Texas. When headlines ridiculed “Wendy Couldn’t Even Carry Women,” angry Democrats noted that this referred only to white women. Davis lost the overall women’s vote 45% to 54%. However, a whopping 94% of black women and 64% of Latinas went for Davis, as did an overwhelming percentage of black males and Latinos. One hope for Texas Democrats is to increase voter registration rates and guard voters’ rights.

Sifting through the wreckage of the 2014 midterms, Democrats countered Republicans, who said the turnout belied the “War on Women” knock. The Republicans pointed, as proof, to their gain in women’s votes and toasted three extreme anti-choice rock star winners: Mia Love, the first black woman Republican congressman from Utah; Elise Stefanik from New York, who is “100 percent pro-life” and, at age thirty, the youngest woman ever elected to congress; and Toni Ernst, a combat veteran who champions the “ultimate personhood” bills (which would make a fetus a person at conception), elected as Iowa senator. Both Love and Ernst are gun-toting NRA advocates, oppose Obamacare, and follow all conservative stances.

Ironically, voters flatly rejected personhood bills on the ballot but voted for individual anti-choice candidates. NARAL detailed instances in which personhood hardliners, like Ernst, ran away from that stance, which helped them win elections. The Republican Party brought in coaches from savvy anti-abortion groups to teach candidates how to avoid answering the hard questions about reproductive rights. Fudging on extreme positions seems to have worked at least in the 2014 midterms, with a record low turnout of voters—only 36.6%. On reflection, though, it doesn’t make much sense because neither pro-nor anti-choice factions are all one-issue voters.

The bottom line is not whether there is a War on Women but on
which
women. All across the country Republican and Democratic PACs
and groups spent millions, vying for women’s votes. Women are not prepackaged gender-unity voters and, as I have demonstrated in this book, the fiercest foes against independence for women, in all forms, have been other women. Today, the disingenuously named pro-life Susan B. Anthony List is a formidable, financially backed battering ram to crush pro-choice initiatives. The war is clearly on pro-choice women.

The GOP-controlled Senate means an anti-choice House, with only four pro-choice Republican women. Their new majority leader is Mitch McConnell, who drubbed Alison Gunderson Grimes. In McConnell one can find the real War on Women strategy: He voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 and the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2012. He voted against the Violence Against Women Act because it contained a ban on assault weapons. He voted to kill VAWA in 2012 and 2013 because it included provisions for same-sex couples and immigrants.

While the battle against pro-choice remains the fiercest, dismissive treatment of other women’s rights are appalling. Recently, Republican congressmen fought to roll back VAWA and eventually tried to kill it entirely. President Obama finally renewed the law in March 2013. When Congresswomen Pat Schroeder and Louise Slaughter sponsored the original legislation in 1993, a woman was raped every sixteen seconds in the United States and one was beaten every fifteen seconds, recalls Slaughter, noting a reduction in violence against women since the law was passed in 1994. In 2012, she said, “It took years to get to where we are today and yet we are again fighting some of these same battles. Shameful doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

Schroeder, the longest-serving female member of the House (1973–1996), was one of the few voices in Congress in the 1970s calling for women’s rights. She battled for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), pro-choice and pro-contraception legislation, and equal pay for equal work, in addition to pushing for women in top corporate and political positions and for laws against domestic violence and rape, much as the sisters had done one hundred years before.

“Woodhull was amazing,” Schroeder said. “I could go on forever about how things have stalled,” she said, sighing. “I refused to go to the twentieth anniversary of my Family Medical Leave bill because no one has done one thing to expand it. I thought it was pathetic after we had to water it down. We are still the country that does the least for families.” In fact, Schroeder said, the United States is one of only three countries, out of 177 nations, that do not mandate paid parental leave. The other two? Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

House Republicans closed down the U.S. government in their 2013 fight to repeal Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act has already provided vital assistance to millions of women, giving them access to women’s health services, wellness care, and protection from gender discrimination.

But rather than tackle such important women’s issues, the twenty-first-century media have been awash with arguments about the Mommy Wars, with entire books written on the subject, and women agonizing about why their feminist mothers made them think they “could have it all.” Those who did it without any safety net years ago can sympathize, but media-centric fights about whether it is better for mothers to stay at home than to work tend toward elitist debates of little significance to the vast number of mothers who
have
to work. As Schroeder says, “If women can find a way to stay home and like that, great. Who cares? Can you imagine men having such a debate? The problem is 90% of women don’t have the opportunity for such a debate either. They must work. The media grinding away on such issues makes the women’s movement look elitist.

“Here are some horrors we should be more concerned about: Single women with children make less than single women or married women. And women still make $0.77 to the dollar that men make, with some women making much less. Paid sick leave, family medical leave, etc., are still not guaranteed,” Schroeder adds. Even a college degree—with women attending comparable schools, enrolling in the same major, and choosing the same profession—doesn’t help. After one year out of college, a 2012 study found, women on average were making $7,600 less than their male counterparts, or 82 cents on the dollar. A half century after
passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, “women continue to earn less than men do in nearly every occupation.” That the sisters, during their labor activist days, sought equal pay for equal work in Victorian-era America is nothing short of a miracle.

They were, of course, the epitome of the slogan “Well-behaved women seldom make history”—but then, any woman who fights the status quo, from the suffragists to Eleanor Roosevelt, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Hillary Clinton, Ann and Cecile Richards, and Wendy Davis, has to go against the grain. When Pat Schroeder, a Harvard Law graduate, ran for office in 1972, the headlines read “Housewife” or “Mother” runs for Congress. When facing one indignant male colleague after another who demanded how she could be both a member of Congress and a mother, she said, “Because I have a brain and a uterus and both work.”

As for the sisters’ legacy, Tennessee is now seldom mentioned, as if her fight for women’s equality, and especially her long battle for the vote, years after her Manhattan notoriety, never happened. I hope that this book will help remedy that. When Tennie faced wide-scale ridicule for attempting to become an honorary colonel and called for women in the military, little did she know that women would not be allowed to serve fully in combat until well into the twenty-first century—although this equality has been coupled with rampant sexual assault by male colleagues. Subsequent arguments would have seemed familiar to Tennie: for example, Tea Party congressman Allen West, in his argument against Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s battle to remove military sexual assault cases from the chain of command, linked sexual assaults to the problem of women being allowed in combat areas. Gillibrand noted that victims made such comments as “I could survive the rape but what I couldn’t survive was my commanding officer not having my back.” Gillibrand said, “Right now the person who is going to decide the case is her boss,” noting that “out of 3,000 who reported sexual assaults, 62% said they were retaliated against. That there were 26,000 cases of sexual assaults and rapes last year and less than 1 percent prosecuted is outrageous.”

Historians have been debating the worth of Tennie’s sister Victoria
well into the present. In the last years of the twentieth century, historian Andrea Kerr argued that the Stanton-Anthony “misalliance” with Woodhull “did incalculable harm” to the women’s movement. “While present-day historians may sympathize with Woodhull’s radical politics,” wrote Kerr, the embrace of an “exotic, blackmailing, free-love advocate” was a “political disaster” for suffragists, leading to a “purity crusade” by Lucy Stone to protect “the family.” Historian Ellen Dubois disagrees. Woodhull’s historic petition before the Judiciary Committee did incalculable good, not harm, and made the fight a principled battle involving the right of citizens to vote, rather than women “begging” for the “privilege.” This New Departure did galvanize the not-so-well-behaved women to fight for state laws and to invade polling precincts. Unfortunately, conservative factions of the movement, who, as I point out, had tangled with the more progressive wing well before the sisters entered the picture, watered down such militancy, and the vote was not achieved until 1920.

Certainly family scandals and the sisters’ adultery charge against Reverend Beecher, a darling of conservative suffragists, rocked the women’s movement, especially because newspapers aligned the suffragists with the sisters in order to denigrate them. However, claims that the two women set the vote back twenty years are simply untrue. Their time in the suffragist movement lasted less than two years, and even the radical wing welcomed them for but a brief time. The Beecher fallout could have been repaired, especially after respectable critics later felt that testimony in the 1875 trial gave credence to Woodhull’s charges of the preacher’s adultery.