Notorious Victoria: The Uncensored Life of Victoria Woodhull - Visionary, Suffragist, and First Woman to Run for President

by Mary Gabriel

Overview

“A remarkable biography . . . Well written and researched, this book warrants a spot on every serious American history student’s bookshelf.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
She was the first woman to run for president. She was the first woman to address the U.S. Congress and to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street. She’s the woman Gloria Steinem called “the most controversial suffragist of them all.” So why have most people never heard of Victoria Woodhull? In this extensively researched biography, journalist Mary Gabriel offers readers a balanced portrait of a unique and complicated woman who was years ahead of her time—and perhaps ahead of our own.
 
“One of the most controversial American women of the late nineteenth century springs to life in this study that leaves no stone unturned.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“[A] deftly written biography . . . of a hell-raising visionary.” —Mirabella
 
“A meaty slice of feminist history peppered with Victorian drama.” —Civilization
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616207526
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	01/28/1998
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	530,077
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mary Gabriel worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades. She is the author of Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone.

Table of Contents

Prologue	1
PART ONE
Homer, 1850	7
San Francisco, 1855	12
St. Louis, 1865	18
PART TWO
Pittsburgh, 1868	29
New York City, 1868	32
New York City, September 1869	37
New York City, February 1870	42
New York City, April 1870	54
New York City, May 1870	58
New York City, November 1870	68
PART THREE
Washington, D.C., January 1871	73
Washington, D.C., February 1871	82
New York City, April 1871	88
New York City, Early May 1871	94
New York City, Mid-May 1871	99
New York City, Late May 1871	110
New York City, June 1871	114
New York City, July 1871	123
New York City, August 1871	127
Troy, September 1871	130
Hartford, October1871	133
New York City, Early November 1871	136
New York City, Late November 1871	143
New York City, December 1871	151
Washington, D.C., January 1872	158
New York City, May 9, 1872	164
New York City, May 10, 1872	170
Boston, September 1872	175
PART FOUR
New York City, November 2, 1872	183
New York City, November 5, 1872	192
New York City, November 20, 1872	194
New York City, January 1873	198
New York City, June 1873	204
New York City, June 23, 1873	210
Chicago, September 1873	214
New York City, Late September 1873	219
New York City, March 1874	225
New York City, August 1874	230
New York City, April 1875	235
New York City, May 1875	237
New York City, October 1876	240
PART FIVE
London, August 1877	245
London, October 1883	249
London, October 1885	256
New York City, April 1886	259
London, January 1893	264
London, February 1894	268
London, January 1895	278
Las Palmas, March 1897	281
London, December 1901	285
Bredon's Norton, August 1914	289
Bredon's Norton, June 9, 1927	297
Cosmopolitical Party Platform	303
Notes	309
Bibliography	347
Acknowledgments	355
Index	359

Editorial Reviews

"A remarkable biography . . . Well written and researched, this book warrants a spot on every serious American history student's bookshelf." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"One of the most controversial American women of the late nineteenth century springs to life in this study that leaves no stone unturned." -Publishers Weekly

"[A] deftly written biography . . . of a hell-raising visionary." -Mirabella

"A meaty slice of feminist history peppered with Victorian drama." -Civilization

From the Publisher

YAA fine biography of a little-known 19th-century suffragette. Woodhull's achievements read like fiction, especially considering her times. Born into poverty in 1837 to a family largely unconcerned with nuances of the law, she showed great promise early on. Taking advantage of the contemporary enchantment with spiritualism, she and her sister worked as clairvoyants while teenagers. Married at age 15 to an alcoholic and soon the mother of a retarded child, she worked on the stage until summoned home by her sister. The pair traveled as spiritual healers for several years until guided to New York by Victoria's second husband, James Blood, a progressive idealist who encouraged his wife's interest in women's rights. In New York she and her sister procured a patron, millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, and established a brokerage firm and a newspaper to voice their liberal views. Both succeeded, testifying to Woodhull's capability, credibility, and vision. She ran for President of the U.S and espoused the fledgling Communist cause. She was a promoter of free love, to the horror of the nation. When it was revealed that she lived with her husband, ex-husband, and lover at the same time, she was widely reviled, financially ruined, jailed on trumped-up charges, and hounded out of the country. Young adults will enjoy her story, and marvel at 19th-century morals. A highly readable addition to biography and women's rights shelves.Catherine Noonan, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

School Library Journal

The most amazing thing about Victoria Woodhull, besides her too-unbelievable-for-fiction array of "firsts" -- she was, among other things, the first woman to run for president of the United States (in 1872, with abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her vice-presidential candidate); the first woman to operate a Wall Street brokerage firm; and the first woman to speak before a U.S. congressional committee -- is that it wasn't sexist Victorian-era men who destroyed her reputation and plotted to keep her out of history books, thus assuring her current obscurity. Instead it was her feminist "sisters," specifically such icons as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, infuriated by Woodhull's departure from their ranks to create her own Equal Rights Party, deleted her accomplishments from the definitive accounts of early feminism. And it was none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe -- beloved author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and genteel women's rights activist -- who helped lambaste Woodhull in a series of trumped-up obscenity lawsuits that would eventually cost Woodhull her hard-earned fortune, her freedom (in several brief jail-terms) and her good name.

And what had Woodhull done to suffer such wrath? Her greatest travesty was to expose -- in her popular financial-cum-political-cum-feminist newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin Weekly -- the adulterous affairs of the conservative head of the American Woman's Suffrage Association, preacher Henry Ward Beecher. And then there was the matter of Woodhull's class and her racy, rollicking rise to power: Born impoverished in Ohio in 1838, she escaped her child-bride marriage to a womanizing alcoholic by becoming a traveling clairvoyant and spiritualist. With the help of her beautiful younger sister and lifelong cohort, Tennessee, Victoria nabbed multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt as a "client" and generous mentor who would later provide backing for her brokerage firm. Finally, Woodhull offended the feminist mainstream by eloquently advocating "free love" and pillorying the inequities of marriage in an era when most feminists focused on women's voting rights.

Fortunately, not one of these players is romanticized or demonized by Gabriel, a Reuters correspondent. Her no-nonsense, prime-source-heavy narrative deftly sets Woodhull's remarkable biography within the political machinations of the Victorian era's feminist matriarchy. There's not a lily-white or faint-hearted woman in the lot -- least of all Woodhull, who, far from being a victim, comes across as someone who rose fast, played hardball and went down fighting. And perhaps the unpalatable aspect of such warfare to feminists of the women-are-nurturers school has contributed to Woodhull's virtual invisibility (the only other recent biography is Lois Beachy Underhill's 1995 The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull.

What Gabriel also highlights as extraordinary about Woodhull is her unerring individualism and bravery in bucking the system, whether male- or female-dominated. As such, she was obviously way ahead of her time -- and, in some ways, ahead of ours. Salon Jan. 23, 1998

Megan Harlan

A biography, by a reporter for Reuters, of the eccentric 19th-century social reformer.

NY Times Book Review

Mary Gabriel...gives the first detailed account of Woodhull's years as a bossy, conservative lady of the manor. -- Millicent Bell, The New York Review of Books

Millicent Bell

Mary Gabriel's book keeps the focus on its heroine [acknowledging] that Victoria's story is also very funny, and that she had a natural flair for showwomanship. -- Richard Brookhiser, The New York Times Book Review

Richard Brookhiser