Victoria Woodhull

Victoria Woodhull
Personal details
Born	Victoria California Claflin (1838-09-23)September 23, 1838 Homer, Ohio, US
Died	June 9, 1927(1927-06-09) (aged 88) Bredon, Worcestershire, UK
Resting place	Cremated remains scattered at sea from Newhaven, East Sussex, UK
Political party	Equal Rights
Spouse(s)	Dr. Canning Woodhull ​ ​ (m. 1853; div. 1865)​ Colonel James Blood ​ ​ (m. 1865; div. 1876)​ John Biddulph Martin ​ ​ (m. 1883; died 1897)​
Children	Byron and Zulu "Zula" Maude Woodhull
Relatives	Tennessee Claflin (sister) See Claflin family
Occupation	Suffragist, politician, feminist, writer
Known for	Politics, women's rights, women's suffrage, feminism, civil rights, anti-slavery, stockbroker, journalism, free love
Signature

Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), was a prominent eugenicist and an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for President of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, it was not necessarily a legal candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35 (Woodhull's 35th birthday fell seven months after the March inauguration).

Her eugenicist beliefs, foundational to the American eugenics movement which in turn influenced Adolf Hitler, were detailed in her tract "The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit" published by The Women's Anthropological Association of America in 1891. According to the Eugenics Archive, "Woodhull was an early advocate of eugenic principles in both the United States and Great Britain - she claimed to start advocating for eugenic practices in the early 1870s, before Francis Galton even coined the term." She considered the procreation of the "inferior" a grave threat to America. The September 1892 issue of her newspaper The Humanitarian argued for a revised Constitution, saying that the Constitution's foundational principle of Creator-endowed equality was flawed: "A progressive government is only possible by having a high ideal which would insure the survival of the fittest, and the elimination of the unfit; and the assumption that all are equal denies that there are any fittest to survive." While Woodhull would eventually disavow her beliefs in spiritualism, free love, socialism, and equal rights, her eugenics beliefs spanned nearly sixty years, from the 1870s until her 1827 death, and grew more extreme with time.

An activist for women's rights and labor reforms, for a time Woodhull advocated "free love", by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference (rather than sanctioning polyamory). She later repudiated these views.

Woodhull twice went from rags to riches, first as a "magnetic healer", self-proclaimed clairvoyant, and grifter. Together with her sister Tennessee Claflin, she was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street, making a second fortune.

Woodhull was politically active in the early 1870s, and in 1872 was nominated by the Equal Rights Party for the United States presidency on a platform of women's suffrage and equal rights for women. She announced abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass as her running mate without his consent, and he never acknowledged the ticket, which did not stop Woodhull from trading on his name and accomplishments to garner publicity and votes (the latter unsuccessfully).

Lauded for decades as an icon of white feminism, Woodhull's once-sanitized status has over the last twenty years undergone a shift away from admiration of her suffragism and/or apologia for her charlatanism, appropriation without consent of Frederick Douglass in her political campaign, eugenics, ableism, classism, and Nationalism, to a fuller consideration of her writings and beliefs as these became widely available in the first years of this century. In discussing Woodhull's eugenicist magazine The Humanitarian, in an essay titled "Victoria Woodhull-Martin and The Humanitarian (1892-1901): Feminism and Eugenics at the Fin de Siècle," scholar Solveig C. Robinson writes:

The likeliest reason for the magazine’s neglect, even by those who would seem most likely to engage with it, must be its overt concern with the subject of eugenics. Scholars working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—the very period during which feminist scholarship (especially feminist recovery work) has emerged as an important critical force—have reacted with understandable revulsion to the more extreme policies adopted by earlier eugenicist institutions and governments, policies that included miscegenation laws, forced sterilizations and euthanasia for the developmentally disabled, and ultimately genocide. But in this effort to distance themselves from distasteful and even horrific practices, the same scholars seem to have sidestepped the fact that eugenics was embraced by many progressive thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including feminists, who saw it as one more aspect of the positivist effort to improve human conditions by rational, scientific means.

Woodhull purported for a time to believe in spiritualism, which she said gave her belief in a better life, though she also used spiritualism to generate income. She claimed that she was guided in 1868 by Demosthenes regarding symbolism to use supporting her theories of free love. later repudiated spiritualism.

Early life and education

Victoria California Claflin was born the seventh of ten children (six of whom survived to maturity) in the frontier town of Homer, Licking County, Ohio. Her mother, Madame Roxanna "Roxy" Hummel Claflin, born to unmarried parents and illiterate, was a follower of Austrian mystic Franz Mesmer and the spiritualist movement. Her father, Reuben "Buck" Buckman Claflin, Esquire, was a con man, lawyer and snake oil salesman. He came from an impoverished branch of the Massachusetts-based Scots-American Claflin family, distant cousins to Massachusetts Governor William Claflin.

According to biographer Theodore Tilton, a backer of Woodhull after she exposed his wife's affair and had her lover Beecher tried, Woodhull was whipped by her father. Biographer Barbara Goldsmith claimed she was starved and sexually abused by her father. Goldsmith based the incest claim on Tilton's biography: "But the parents, as if not unwilling to be rid of a daughter whose sorrow was ripening her into a woman before her time, were delighted at the unexpected offer." Biographer Myra MacPherson disputes Goldsmith's claim that "Vickie often intimated that he sexually abused her" as well as the accuracy of Goldsmith's: "Years later, Vickie would say that Buck made her 'a woman before my time.'" Macpherson wrote, "Not only did Victoria not say this, there was no 'often' involved, nor was it about incest."

Woodhull had only three years of formal education. She was forced to leave school and home with her family when her father, after having "insured it heavily," burned the family's rotting gristmill. When he tried to get compensated by insurance, his arson and fraud were discovered, and he was run off by a group of town vigilantes. The town held a benefit to raise funds to pay the family to leave Ohio.

Marriages

First marriage and family

Victoria Woodhull, c. 1860s

When she was 14, Victoria met 28-year-old Canning Woodhull (listed as "Channing" in some records), a doctor from a town outside Rochester, New York. Her family had consulted him to treat her for an unspecified chronic illness. Woodhull practiced medicine in Ohio at a time when the state did not require formal medical education and licensing. By some accounts, Woodhull abducted Victoria to marry her. Woodhull claimed to be the nephew of Caleb Smith Woodhull, mayor of New York City from 1849 to 1851. He was in fact a distant cousin. They were married on November 20, 1853. Their marriage certificate was recorded in Cleveland on November 23, 1853, when Victoria was two months past her 15th birthday.

Victoria soon learned that her husband was an alcoholic and a womanizer. She often worked to support the family. She and Canning had two children, Byron and Zulu (later called Zula) Maude Woodhull. Byron was born with an intellectual disability in 1854, a condition Victoria without evidence believed was caused by her husband's alcoholism. Another version recounted that that her son's disability was caused by a fall from a window. Eventually Victoria divorced her husband and kept his surname.

Second marriage

About 1866, Woodhull married Colonel James Harvey Blood. Blood had served in the Union Army in Missouri during the American Civil War, and had been elected as city auditor of St. Louis, Missouri.

Free love

Woodhull's support of free love, which she later repudiated, likely started after she discovered Canning's infidelity. Women married in the United States during the 19th century had few options to escape a loveless or even abusive marriage. Divorce was limited by law and socially scandalous. Women who divorced were stigmatized and often ostracized. Victoria Woodhull felt that women should have the choice to leave unbearable marriages.

Woodhull believed in monogamous relationships, although she also said she had the right to change her mind. The choice to have sex or not was, in every case, the woman's choice, since this would place her in an equal status to the man, who had the capacity to rape and physically overcome a woman, whereas a woman did not have that capacity with respect to a man. Woodhull said:

To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold . . .

In this same speech, which became known as the "Steinway speech," delivered on Monday, November 20, 1871, in Steinway Hall, New York City, Woodhull said of free love: "Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.

Woodhull railed against the hypocrisy of society's tolerating married men who had mistresses and extramarital sex.

Prostitution rumors and stance

She spoke out against prostitution and considered marriage for material gain a form of it. In her journal, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, Woodhull supported the legalization of prostitution. A personal account from one of Colonel Blood's friends claims that Tennessee was held against her will in a brothel until Woodhull rescued her, but this story remains unconfirmed.

Religious shift and repudiation of free love

While Woodhull's earlier radicalism had stemmed from the Christian socialism of the 1850s, she was involved in Spiritualism and eschewed Christian in favor of spiritualist language until 1875, when she began espousing Christianity and changed political stances. She exposed Spiritualist frauds in her periodical, alienating Spiritualist followers. She wrote articles against promiscuity, calling it a "curse of society". Woodhull repudiated her earlier views on free love in favor of increasingly conservative stances idealizing purity, motherhood, marriage, and the Bible. She claimed that earlier works with which she now disagreed had been written in her name without her consent, though no evidence of this has been found. She began publishing her eugenicist beliefs.

Careers

Stockbroker

Cabinet card of Woodhull by Mathew Brady

In 1870, Woodhull, with sister Tennessee Celeste Claflin (a fortune teller who claimed an ability to cure diseases "from cold sores to cancer" and used lye to do so, injuring patients), opened a brokerage firm on Wall Street. "Petticoats Among the Bovine and Ursine Animals," the New York Sun headlined. Woodhull, Claflin & Company opened with the assistance of wealthy Cornelius Vanderbilt, a believer in Woodhull's skills as a medium. He is rumored to have been Tennessee's lover and to have considered marrying her. Woodhull made a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange, advising clients including Vanderbilt; on one occasion she told him to sell his shares short for a dollar and cents each, which he did, earning millions. Newspapers such as the New York Herald hailed Woodhull and Claflin as "the Queens of Finance" and "the Bewitching Brokers." Many men's journals (e.g., The Days' Doings) published sexualized images of the pair running their firm (although they did not participate in the day-to-day business of the firm), linking the concept of public-minded unchaperoned women with ideas of "sexual immorality" and prostitution.

Newspaper editor

Woodhull and Claflin used money made from their brokerage to found a newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, and were among the first women in the United States to do so. It began publication on May 14, 1870. The Revolution, a weekly newspaper founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had begun publication two years earlier in 1868. At its height, Woodhull's newspaper had a national circulation of 20,000. Its primary purpose was to support Victoria Claflin Woodhull's presidential candidacy. Published for six years, feminism was among the newspaper's topics. It became notorious for publishing controversial opinions on taboo topics, advocating sex education, free love, women's suffrage, short skirts, spiritualism, vegetarianism, and licensed prostitution. History states the paper advocated birth control; some historians disagree, though other white female eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger also touted birth control. The paper is known for printing the first English version of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto on December 30, 1871. Marx later publicly repudiated Woodhull. James Blood and Stephen Pearl Andrews wrote the majority of the articles.

In 1872, the Weekly published a story that set off a months-long national scandal. Henry Ward Beecher, a renowned abolitionist preacher of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church, had condemned Woodhull's free love philosophy in his sermons. Church member Theodore Tilton, later Woodhull's biographer, disclosed to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that his wife had confessed that Beecher was committing adultery with her. Provoked by what she perceived as hypocrisy and seeking publicity for the election which was days away, Woodhull published the affair. On November 2, 1872, Woodhull, Claflin and Colonel Blood were arrested and charged with publishing an obscene newspaper and circulating it through the United States Postal Service. In the raid, 3,000 copies of the newspaper were found. It was this arrest and Woodhull's acquittal that propelled Congress to pass the 1873 Comstock Laws. Beecher stood trial for adultery in 1875 in what proved to be one of the most sensational legal episodes of the era, gripping the attention of hundreds of thousands of Americans. The trial ended with a hung jury.

George Francis Train, an espouser of racist ideology who later put himself forward for the non-existent position of dictator of America, defended Woodhull. Other feminists of her time, including Susan B. Anthony, disagreed with some of her views and tactics. Some characterized her as opportunistic and unpredictable. In one incident, Woodhull had a run in with Anthony during a meeting of the National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA). (The radical NWSA later merged with the conservative American Women's Suffrage Association [AWSA] to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association.)

Women's rights advocate

Woodhull entered the male domain of national politics, arranging to testify on women's suffrage before the House Judiciary Committee. She argued that women had the right to vote since the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteed the protection of that right for all citizens. Learning of Woodhull's planned address, suffrage leaders postponed opening the 1871 National Woman Suffrage Association's third annual convention in Washington in order to attend the hearing. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Isabella Beecher Hooker applauded her statement. that "[W]omen are the equals of men before the law, and are equal in all their rights.", though Woodhull would within years begin publicly refuting equality in her eugenicist writings.

After this first public appearance as a woman's rights advocate, Woodhull moved to the leadership circle of the suffrage movement. Although her Constitutional argument was not original, she focused public attention on the cause. Woodhull was the first woman to petition Congress in person. Numerous newspapers reported her appearance before Congress. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper printed a full-page engraving of Woodhull, surrounded by prominent suffragists, delivering her argument.

First International

Woodhull joined the International Workingmen's Association, also known as the First International. She supported its goals in her newspaper. In the United States, many Northern radicals, former abolitionists, and other activists became involved in the organization founded in England. In 1871, German-American and ethnic Irish, fearing its goals were going to be lost in the broad-based egalitarianism promoted by the Americans, expelled most English-speaking members of the First International's American sections, leading to the quick decline of the organization, as it failed to attract the American ethnic working class. Karl Marx commented disparagingly on Woodhull in 1872, and expressed approval of the expulsions.

Despite Marx's disparagement, recent scholarship has shown that Woodhull was for a time a significant presence in the socialist movement even while, as a stockbroker, she supported free market capitalism, and later derided socialized programs for the "unfit" in her eugenicist writings. Woodhull called herself a revolutionary and her conception of social and political reorganization was, like Marx, based upon economics, as were her eugenic beliefs, which were classist as well as ableist and racist. In an 1896 article titled "Woman Suffrage in the United States", she concluded that "suffrage is only one phase of the larger question of women's emancipation. More important is the question of her social and economic position. Her financial independence underlies all the rest." Ellen Carol DuBois refers to her as a "socialist feminist," though Woodhull's capitalist and, later, pro-life politics undermine DuBois' assertion.

Presidential candidate

Main article: United States presidential election, 1872

"Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan!" 1872 caricature by Thomas Nast: Wife, carrying a heavy burden of children and drunk husband, admonishing (Mrs.) Satan (Victoria Woodhull), "I'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps." Mrs. Satan's sign reads, "Be saved by free love."

Woodhull announced her candidacy for president by writing a letter to the editor of the New York Herald on April 2, 1870. In 1871, she spoke against the government being composed only of men. She proposed developing a new constitution and a new government, a proposal she would later espouse again as a means of creating a master class of citizens and the gradual dying off of the "unfit." . On May 10, 1872, she was nominated for President of the United States by the newly formed Equal Rights Party at Apollo Hall in New York City. Her nomination was ratified at the convention on June 6, 1872. Cari M. Carpenter says in her introduction to The Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull, "Woodhull ran on the equal rights ticket even as she took advantage of her white privilege and depended on racist figures like George Francis Train."

Woodhull's campaign was also notable for the "nomination" of Frederick Douglass as vice-presidential candidate, although he did not take part in the convention, acknowledge his nomination, or take an active role in the campaign. His nomination stirred up controversy about the mixing of whites and blacks in public life and fears of miscegenation [source?]. The Equal Rights Party hoped to use the nomination to co-opt African-American civil rights activists and thus gain votes, as exclusion of female suffrage from the Fifteenth Amendment two years earlier caused a substantial rift between the groups. Johnathan Stauffer, Harvard professor of African American studies and English, said that "Many have speculated that Douglass didn't want to recognize the nomination for fear of being associated with Woodhull, who was seen as a loose cannon and controversial even among radical feminists and abolitionists." Historian and Harvard Law professor Kenneth Mack has said that "Douglass also likely didn't recognize the vice presidential nomination in 1872 because he was already supporting a different presidential candidate, Ulysses S. Grant," due to Grant's support of Civil Rights acts in 1870 and 1871, including one aimed at curbing the Klu Klux Klan's power.

Four days before the election, on November 2, 1872, Woodhull devoted an issue of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly to the alleged adulterous affair between Elizabeth Tilton and Henry Ward Beecher. Woodhull said she published the article to highlight what she saw as a sexual double standard between Beecher's denouncing of free love and his alleged adultery. U.S. Federal Marshals then arrested Woodhull, husband Blood, and sister Tennie on charges of "publishing an obscene newspaper." The sisters were held in the Ludlow Street Jail for the next month. The arrest was arranged by Anthony Comstock, self-appointed moral defender of the nation. The three were acquitted on a technicality six months later. The arrest prevented Woodhull from attempting to vote during the 1872 presidential election. Theodore Tilton sued Beecher for "alienation of affection;" the 1875 trial resulted in a hung jury.

Woodhull did not receive a single electoral vote in the election of 1872, while six different candidates received at least one.

Woodhull again tried to garner nominations for the presidency in 1884 and 1892. Her 1892 attempt culminated in nomination by the "National Woman Suffragists' Nominating Convention" on September 21. Marietta L. B. Stow of California was nominated as the candidate for vice president. The convention was held at Willard's Hotel in Boonville, New York, and Anna M. Parker was its president. Some women's suffrage organizations repudiated the nominations, claiming that the nominating committee was unauthorized. Woodhull was quoted as saying that she was "destined" by "prophecy" to be elected president of the United States in the upcoming election.

Life in England and third marriage

John Biddulph Martin (1886)

In October 1876, Woodhull divorced her second husband, Colonel Blood. After Cornelius Vanderbilt's death in 1877, William Henry Vanderbilt paid Woodhull and her sister Claflin $1,000 (equivalent to $24,000 in 2019) to leave the country because he was worried they might testify in hearings on the distribution of the elder Vanderbilt's estate [source?]. The sisters moved to Great Britain in August 1877. Woodhull made her first public appearance as a lecturer at St. James's Hall in London on December 4, 1877. The lecture was titled "The Human Body, the Temple of God," and had been previously presented in the United States. Present at one lecture was banker John Biddulph Martin. They began to see each other and married on October 31, 1883. His family disapproved of the union.

From then on, she went by Victoria Woodhull Martin. Under that name, she published the eugenicist magazine The Humanitarian from 1892 to 1901 with help from her daughter, Zula Woodhull. After her husband died in 1901, Martin gave up publishing and retired to the country, establishing residence at Bredon's Norton, where she built a village school with Tennessee and Zula. Through her work at the Bredon's Norton school, she became a champion for education reform in English village schools with the addition of kindergarten curriculum.

Eugenics

Woodhull promoted eugenics, espoused by many white thinkers in the early 20th century prior to World War II, with sterilization without permission occurring in California into the 1970s. This tied into her views on abortion, as she without evidence blamed abortion for assorted problems with pregnancies. Her eugenic beliefs may have been partly motivated by the intellectual impairment of her white son, but were clearly racist and classist, as well as ableist. In addition to sex education and "marrying well," she advocated pre-natal care as a way to bear healthier children and prevent mental and physical "defects." Michael W. Perry wrote in his book "Lady Eugenist" that Woodhull supported the forcible sterilization of those she considered unfit to breed. He cited a 1927 New York Times article in which she concurred with the ruling of Buck v. Bell, in which the court decided that forced sterilization of those considered "unfit" was legal. By the time of this article's publication she had espoused eugenics since as early as the 1870s.

In her 1891 screed "The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit," Woodhull argued that social Darwinism and the survival of the "fittest," of which she spoke favorably in the tract, was threatened by the procreation of the "unfit": "A great many seem to think that interference with marriages of the unfit will only give greater opportunities to races, lower in the scale of development who are multiplying so fast, to overcome and conquer the more advanced races. We have an example of this in the rapid multiplication of the negroes in Africa, who at some not far distant day will outnumber and overrun the whites if the rapid increase be not checked. Eventually, if America is owned and governed by the negroes, would it be the survival of the fittest?"

She used fear-mongering in "The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit," citing China and India as containing "vast hordes" she claimed were a threat to white civilization, a claim made against immigrants by espousers of racist and Nationalist ideologies throughout American history. She argued against welfare programs for the poor, claiming that, via taxation and charity, such programs deplete the financial resources of those she deemed "fit" and thus decrease their ability to breed by leaving them in financially limited circumstances.

The "Manifesto" printed in the first edition of Woodhull's newspaper The Humanitarian in July of 1892 says: "We recognize that the overworked, the badly bred, and the underfed will not have their higher faculties developed sufficiently to appreciate real value. We think the physically exhausted should not be allowed to breed in ignorance of the injurious effects that their depleted condition will have on their offspring." In the same issue, Woodhull contends: "A man is unfortunate enough to have some terrible disease; he desires to marry; if he has no deterring influence to counteract this wish he satisfies the desire. But if he were confronted with such consequences as these--I shall be ostracized by an educated public opinion if I reproduce my diseased condition in my offspring, if I produce a criminal I shall be judged the culprit--it would make him reflect. The humanitarian Government by stigmatizing such marriages as crimes would gradually enforce upon the public mind the responsibility of parentage...It has long ago been shown that pauperism and crime are hereditary." Advocating a vastly increased carceral state to confine the "unfit," she wrote: "In the humanitarian Government of the future, when our legislators have a thorough knowledge of psychology and pathology, our criminal courts will be presided over by a team of scientists who will examine the nature and cause of the malady, whether the patient be curable or incurable, the effects of the environment and whether association with others of the same type by the power of suggestion would not intensify the malady instead of acting as a corrective. Those who are deemed incurable must be confined in the same way the insane and idiots are now."

In that same 1892 issue of The Humanitarian, an article "By the Editor" titled "An Aristocracy of Blood" advocated the creation of a superior lineage of humans, with physical and mental faculties measured by scientific experiments and tests and the results noted in a "pedigree register"; Woodhull used animal breeding as analogy, and said that this pedigree register should catalogue personal history and physical details such as height and eye color, all of which would "furnish valuable statistical and scientific data for the improvement of the race." The article continues: "In the animal kingdom much has been accomplished toward perfecting breeds of stock by the rejection for breeding purposes of all those animals which proved defective. In modern civilization, individuals who vary in the direction of progress in the human species are not carefully selected to propagate their kind, and as the result the unfit are not eliminated." In creating a pedigree of blood, "The ideal standard of excellence, would advance in proportion as the ideal became real."

In the September 1892 issue of The Humanitarian, a reprinting of "The Declaration of Independence" is followed by "A Declaration of In[ter]dependence" in which the editors (Victoria Woodhull and her daughter Zula) advocate a convention to draft "a revision" of the Constitution ("the people have grown beyond it"). Woodhull argues:

A progressive government is only possible by having a high ideal which would insure the survival of the fittest, and the elimination of the unfit; and the assumption that all are equal denies that there are any fittest to survive.

And: "As long as the laws are decided by a majority vote, and the majority are the ignorant, because of the rapid multiplication of the unfit, the tendency will be to lower the moral standard instead of making it higher." She proposes the revised Constitution and the formation of a "Humanitarian government" with the power to "avert these evils by raising the standard of humanity," presumably by instituting such measures as the blood pedigree register, increased institutionalization, and the elimination of philanthropic and government assistance to those deemed "unfit," that their bloodlines might die out.

Woodhull's Humanitarian also published the eugenic arguments of other writers. For example, in the August 1892 issue, an article by John Biddulph Martin titled "Philanthropy and Economics" reiterated the arguments Woodhull earlier published in "The Multiplication of the Unfit", saying that philanthropy and government assistance, while well-intentioned, are misguided because they "have not produced a result in any way satisfactory." Martin decried taxpayer government programs to aid the poor, and in so doing foreshadowed arguments against the welfare state as "spreading the very evils that we fain we would alleviate, but also defrauding the more industrious and more provident members of society." Martin argued for "discrimination," in which those who might benefit from assistance would be helped, and those congenitally "unfit" would not.

In 1888 Woodhull published one of her most famous essays, "Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race." Here she again argued that society should "incarcerate "the insane, the idiots, the epileptics, the drunkards, the criminals," and stated that, if animals evidenced "such infirmities and propensities, we should soon exterminate them." She advocated, through selective breeding, the creation of "a race of gods," writing that "The best minds of to-day have accepted the fact that if a superior people are to be created, they must be bred; and if imbeciles, criminals, paupers, and otherwise unfit are undesirable citizens, they must not be bred. The first principle of the breeder's art is to weed out the inferior animals to avoid conditions which give a tendency to reversion and then to bring together superior animals under the most favorable conditions." She concluded: "And by this means we should have inaugurated the upper million and the lower ten. Any social conditions which tend to transpose these terms are subversive to the true interests of humanity."

In the journal Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, in an essay titled "Victoria Woodhull-Martin and The Humanitarian (1892-1901): Feminism and Eugenics at the Fin de Siècle," scholar Solveig C. Robinson cites Michael W. Perry, who Robinson calls "one of the very few historians to write about either The Humanitarian or this phase of Woodhull’s career," as noting that "Woodhull was something of a pioneer in the field of eugenics." Perry writes that "While Woodhull’s contributions to the field of eugenics were dismissed in the late twentieth century by historian Geoffrey Searle because of her lack of scientific standing (and her gender), earlier she had been credited with having popularized the message of eugenics. For example, in an article about the 1912 International Eugenics Congress in London, the influential Pall Mall Gazette credited Woodhull with being 'the first one to impress upon the nation the importance of race propagation on scientific principles.'"

In her 1890 seventy-page pamphlet “Humanitarian Government,” Woodhull advocated denying marriages to the unfit, creating a birth registry to track children's development, and requiring everyone to have a physician-certified certificate to be presented upon application for a marriage license.

Solveig R. Robinson points out: "One of the most disturbing lines of discussion, and one that trails through the magazine’s pages over a five-year period, relates to the treatment of epileptics and others deemed mentally 'defective.' While other articles in the magazine’s run, including those by Woodhull herself, clearly assert that the mentally and physically unfit should not be allowed to procreate, a short item entitled 'Wanted a Lethal Chamber' in the March 1895 'Notes and Comments' section [of The Humanitarian] goes much further. Describing a farm set up in Buckinghamshire for the care of epileptics, the piece begins by praising the humane and enlightened treatment of the inmates, noting that 'nourishing food, good air, occupation and ‘common interests and sympathies’ appear, as might be expected, to exercise a beneficial effect.' However, the writer speculates that in light of the undesirability of 'the propagation of epileptic children,' not seclusion but euthanasia might be indicated. 'We hear a great deal about the painless extinction of life in the lower animals,' the author posits, 'Why should not the theory be applied to those who through a hereditary curse, are physically and mentally lower than the animals. The survival of the fittest can only be brought about by the elimination of the unfit. It is not a colony but a lethal chamber which is wanted.'”

Though Woodhull never proposed wholesale genocide, her influential writings and those she chose for publication contained most elements of Hitler's Final Solution: an initial focus on the mentally and physically disabled, the creation through breeding of a superior person and a master class, registration with the state, the carrying of papers, scientific experiments on living subjects, and a chamber in which to kill those deemed unfit through "eugenic euthanasia."

Her opposition to abortion is frequently cited by fellow abortion opponents when writing about first wave feminism.

Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth.

In a speech, she stated:

Women by nature, are appointed to the holy mission of motherhood, and by this mission, are directly charged with the care of the embryotic life...The rights of children, then, as individuals, begin while yet they are in foetal life. Children do not come into existence by any will or consent of their own." Woodhull argued that abortion should not take place while simultaneously arguing that only the "fit" should conceive, and that "defects" were the parents', but particularly the mothers', fault: "In the insane desire for dress and display , which characterizes so many women, lies the bane of life for their children. The cold heartlessness of the woman of fashion contains the germ of destruction for her daughter and the seeds of vice for her son. No warm-hearted, generous-souled children can spring from such soil." And: "In other words, and plainly, the condition of the parents at the time of the conception is a matter of prime importance, since the life principle with which the new organism is to begin its growth should be of the highest order. Cases of partial and total idiocy have been traced to the beastly inebriation of the parents at and previous to conception. On the other extreme, some of the highest intellects and the most noble and loveable characters the world ever produced, owed their condition to the peculiarly happy circumstances under which they began life, much of the after portion of the growing process of which having been under favorable circumstances. Many mothers can trace the irritable and nervously disagreeable condition of their children to their own condition at this time.

In the same speech, she concluded that when children were created only by "fit" parents, "Then will the prophecies of all ages have reached the consummation; then will commence the earthly reign of the King of kings and Lord of lords, as prophesied by all the holy prophets of the world; then old things shall pass away, and all things become new; then The Christ shall sit upon the throne, and from his inexhausted fountain of love, justice shall continually flow over all the earth, 'as the waters cover the sea.'"

In Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, in an essay called When Is It Not Murder to Take a Life?, she asserted:

Women who do not wish to bear children have no right to conceive them; and they who, having conceived them, then destroy them, are murderers; and no amount of sophistry nor excuses can, by one iota, mitigate the enormity of the crime...Many women who would be shocked at the very thought of killing their children after birth, deliberately destroy them previously. If there is any difference in the actual crime we should be glad to have those who practice the latter, point it out. The truth of the matter is that it is just as much a murder to destroy life in its embryotic condition, as it is to destroy it after the fully developed form is attained, for it is the self-same life that is taken.

Woodhull-Martin died on June 9, 1927 in Worcestershire.

Legacy and honors

A cenotaph of Victoria Woodhull is located at Tewkesbury Abbey.

There is a historical marker located outside the Homer Public Library in Licking County, Ohio to mark Woodhull as the "First Woman Candidate For President of the United States."

There is a memorial clock tower in her honor at the Robbins Hunter Museum, Granville, Ohio. A likeness of Victoria made out of linden wood appears on the hours.

The 1980 Broadway musical Onward Victoria was inspired by Woodhull's life.

The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership was founded by Naomi Wolf and Margot Magowan in 1997.

In 2001, Victoria Woodhull was inducted posthumously into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

The Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance is an American human rights and sexual freedom advocacy organization, founded in 2003, and named in honor of Victoria Woodhull.

She was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008 and was included in a map of historical sites related or dedicated to important women.

External audio
Mrs. President
Get to Know The First Woman Who Ever Ran for President, 7:57, The Takeaway, WNYC

On September 26, 2008, she posthumously received the "Ronald H. Brown Trailblazer Award" from the St. John's University School of Law in Queens, New York. Mary L. Shearer, owner of the registered trademark Victoria Woodhull® and a great-great-grand-stepdaughter of Col. James H. Blood, accepted the award on Victoria Woodhull's behalf. Trailblazer Awards are presented "to individuals whose work and activities in the business and community demonstrate a commitment to uplifting under-represented groups and individuals."

Victoria Bond composed the opera Mrs. President about Woodhull. It premiered in 2012 in Anchorage, Alaska.

In March 2017, Amazon Studios announced production of a movie based on her life, produced by and starring Brie Larson as Victoria Woodhull.

See also

• List of suffragists and suffragettes
• List of women's rights activists
• Ubermensch
• Master Race
• The Final Solution
• Ezra Heywood
• Swami Laura Horos
• Onward Victoria
• Timeline of women's rights (other than voting)
• Timeline of women's suffrage
• International Workingmen's Association in America

• Eugenics
• Eugenics in the United States
• Nazi Eugenics
• Nazi human experimentation
• Chinese Exclusion Act
• Magnet therapy
• Animal Magnetism
• Pseudoscience
• White supremacy
• Forced sterilization
• Nationalism
• Xenophobia
• Stephen Miller (political advisor)
• America First (policy)

Further reading

• Brough, James (1980). The Vixens. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-22688-6. Historical Fiction
• Caplan, Sheri J. (2013). Petticoats and Pinstripes: Portraits of Women in Wall Street's History. Praeger. ISBN 978-1-4408-0265-2.
• Carpenter, Cari M. (2010). Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• Dubois, Ellen Carol; Dumenil, Lynn (2012). Through Women's Eyes: An American History with Documents. Bedford Books / St. Martin's. ISBN 978-0312676032.
• Davis, Paulina W., ed. (1871). A history of the national woman's rights movement for twenty years. New York: Journeymen Printers' Cooperative Association.
• Evelina, Nicole (2007). Madame Presidentess: A novel of Victoria Woodhull. Lawson Gartner Publishing. ISBN 978-0996763196.
• Fitzpatrick, Ellen (2016). The Highest Glass Ceiling : Women's Quest for the American Presidency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-08893-1. LCCN 2015045620.
• Frisken, Amanda (2004). Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-3798-6.
• Frisken, Amanda (2012). Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America. EBL-Schweitzer. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0812201987. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
• Gabriel, Mary (1998). Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull Uncensored. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books. ISBN 1-56512-132-5.
• Goldsmith, Barbara (1998). Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York City: Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-095332-2.
• Hayden, W. (2013). Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Feminism. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0809331024.
• Johnson, Gerald W. (June 1956). "Dynamic Victoria Woodhull". American Heritage. 7 (4).
• Krull, Kathleen (2004). A Woman for President: The Story of Victoria Woodhull. Walker Childrens. ISBN 9780802789082.
• Lefkowitz Horowitz, Helen (2000). "Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s". The Journal of American History. 87 (2): 403–34. doi:10.2307/2568758. JSTOR 2568758. PMID 17722380.
• MacPherson, Myra (2014). The scarlet sisters : sex, suffrage, and scandal in the Gilded Age. (biography of Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Celeste Claflin). New York City: Twelve. ISBN 978-0446570237. LCCN 2013027618.
• Marberry, M.M. (1967). Vicky. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
• Meade, Marion (1976). Free Woman. Alfred A. Knopf, Harper & Brothers.
• Riddle, A.G. (1871). The Right of women to exercise the elective franchise under the Fourteenth Article of the Constitution: speech of A.G. Riddle in the Suffrage Convention at Washington, January 11, 1871: the argument was made in support of the Woodhull memorial, before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, and reproduced in the Convention. Washington.
• Sachs, Emanie (1928). The Terrible Siren. Harper & Brothers.
• Safronoff, Cindy Peyser (2015). Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs Victoria Clafin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage - The Untold Story of America's Nineteenth-Century Culture War. Seattle: this one thing.
• Schrupp, Antje (2002). Das Aufsehen erregende Leben der Victoria Woodhull (in German). Helmer.
• The Staff of the Historian's Office and National Portrait Gallery (1972). If Elected...' Unsuccessful candidates for the presidency 1796–1968. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Offices.
• Stern, Madeleine B. (1974). The Victoria Woodhull reader. Weston. ISBN 978-0-87730-009-0.
• Tilton, Theodore (1871). Biography of Victoria C. Woodhull. New York City: Golden Age. p. 4.
• Underhill, Lois Beachy (1996). The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull. Bridgehampton NY: Penguin Books. ISBN 0140256385.

Own publications

• Woodhull, Victoria C. (2005) [1874]. Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull. Seattle. ISBN 1-58742-050-3.. Four of her most important early and radical speeches on sexuality as facsimiles of the original published versions. Includes: "The Principle of Social Freedom" (1872), "The Scare-crows of Sexual Slavery" (1873), "The Elixir of Life" (1873), and "Tried as by Fire" (1873–74).
• Woodhull, Victoria C. (2005) [1893]. Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull. Seattle. ISBN 1-58742-040-6.. Seven of her most important speeches and writings on eugenics. Five are facsimiles of the original, published versions. Includes: "Children—Their Rights and Privileges" (1871), "The Garden of Eden" (1875, publ. 1890), "Stirpiculture" (1888), "Humanitarian Government" (1890), "The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit" (1891), and "The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race" (1893)
• Woodhull, Victoria C. (1870). Constitutional equality the logical result of the XIV and XV Amendments, which not only declare who are citizens, but also define their rights, one of which is the right to vote without regard to sex. New York.
• Woodhull, Victoria C. (1871). The Origin, Tendencies and Principles of Government, or, A Review of the Rise and Fall of Nations from Early Historic Time to the Present. New York: Woodhull, Claflin & Company.
• Woodhull, Victoria C. (1871). Speech of Victoria C. Woodhull on the great political issue of constitutional equality, delivered in Lincoln Hall, Washington, Cooper Institute, New York Academy of Music, Brooklyn, Academy of Music, Philadelphia, Opera House, Syracuse: together with her secession speech delivered at Apollo Hall.
• Woodhull, Victoria C. Martin (1891). The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit. New York.

External links

• Weston, Victoria. America's Victoria, Remembering Victoria Woodhull features Gloria Steinem and actress Kate Capshaw. Zoie Films Productions (1998). PBS and Canadian Broadcasts. America's Victoria: Remembering Victoria Woodhull (1998) (TV) at IMDb
• Woodhull on harvard.edu
• Biographical timeline
• Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s, The Journal of American History, 87, No. 2, September 2000, by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, pp. 403–34
• Stephanie Athey, Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America. Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. In: "Genders. Presenting Innovative Work in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences", 31, 2000
• "Legal Contender... Victoria C. Woodhull: First Woman to Run for President", The Women's Quarterly (Fall 1988)
• Victoria Woodhull, Topics in Chronicling America, Library of Congress
• "A lecture on constitutional equality," delivered at Lincoln hall, Washington, D.C., Thursday, February 16, 1871, by Victoria C. Woodhul, American Memory, Library of Congress
• A history of the national woman's rights movement, for twenty years, with the proceedings of the decade meeting held at Apollo hall, October 20, 1870, from 1850 to 1870, with an appendix containing the history of the movement during the winter of 1871, in the national capitol, comp. by Paulina W. Davis., American Memory, Library of Congress
• "And the truth shall make you free." A speech on the principles of social freedom, delivered in Steinway hall, Nov. 20, 1871, by Victoria C. Woodhull, American Memory, Library of Congress
• "Tried as by Fire" at the University of South Carolina Library's Digital Collections Page
• "Victoria Claflin Woodhull". Suffragist, Social Reformer. Find a Grave. April 9, 2004. Retrieved August 17, 2011.
• Movie review: "America's Victoria, Remembering Victoria Woodhull", The American Journal of History
• http://www.victoria-woodhull.com/