their own paper, _Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly_, an "Organ of Social
Regeneration and Constructive Reform," but Susan had barely noticed
its existence, so burdened had she been by the impending loss of her
own paper and by pressing lecture engagements. She was therefore
unaware that this new weekly explored a field wider than finance,
advocating as well woman suffrage and women's advancement,
spiritualism, radical views on marriage, love, and sex, and the
nomination of Victoria C. Woodhull for President of the United States.
Now in a committee room of the House of Representatives, Susan
listened carefully as the dynamic beautiful Victoria Woodhull read her
Memorial and her arguments to support it, in a clear well-modulated
voice. Simply dressed in a dark blue gown, with a jaunty Alpine hat
perched on her curls, she gave the impression of innocent earnest
youth, and she captivated not only the members of the judiciary
committee, but the more critical suffragists as well. For the moment
at least she seemed an appropriate colleague of the forthright
crusader, Susan B. Anthony, and her fashionable friends, Isabella
Beecher Hooker and Paulina Wright Davis. They invited Victoria and her
sister, Tennessee Claflin, to their convention, and asked her to
repeat her speech for them.
At this convention Susan, encouraged by the favorable reception among
politicians of the Woodhull Memorial, mapped out a new and militant
campaign, based on her growing conviction that under the Fourteenth
Amendment women's rights as citizens were guaranteed. She urged women
to claim their rights as citizens and persons under the Fourteenth
Amendment, to register and prepare to vote at the next election, and
to bring suit in the courts if they were refused.
* * * * *
So enthusiastic had been the reception of this new approach to woman
suffrage, so favorable had been the news from those close to leading
Republicans, that Susan was unprepared for the adverse report of the
judiciary committee on the Woodhull Memorial. She now studied the
favorable minority report issued by Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts
and William Loughridge of Iowa. Their arguments seemed to her
unanswerable; and hurriedly and impulsively in the midst of her
western lecture tour, she dashed off a few lines to Victoria Woodhull,
to whom she willingly gave credit for bringing out this report.
"Glorious old Ben!" she wrote. "He surely is going to pronounce the
word that will settle the woman question, just as he did the word
'contraband' that so summarily settled the Negro question....
Everybody here chimes in with the new conclusion that we are already
free."[264]
Far from New York where Victoria's activities were being aired by the
press, Susan thought of her at this time only in connection with the
Memorial and its impact on the judiciary committee. To be sure, she
heard stories crediting Benjamin Butler with the authorship of the
Woodhull Memorial, and rumors reached her of Victoria's unorthodox
views on love and marriage and of her girlhood as a fortune teller,
traveling about like a gypsy and living by her wits. Even so, Susan
was ready to give Victoria the benefit of the doubt until she herself
found her harmful to the cause, for long ago she had learned to
discount attacks on the reputations of progressive women. In fact,
Victoria Woodhull provided Susan and her associates with a spectacular
opportunity to prove the sincerity of their contention that there
should not be a double standard of morals--one for men and another for
women.
Returning to New York in May 1871, to a convention of the National
Woman Suffrage Association, Susan found that Mrs. Hooker, Mrs.
Stanton, and Mrs. Davis had invited Victoria Woodhull to address that
convention and to sit on the platform between Lucretia Mott and Mrs.
Stanton.
Through them and others more critical, Susan was brought up to date on
the sensational story of Victoria Woodhull, who had been drawing
record crowds to her lectures and whose unconventional life
continuously provided reporters with interesting copy. Victoria's home
at 15 East Thirty-eighth Street, resplendent and ornate with gilded
furniture and bric-a-brac, housed not only her husband, Colonel Blood,
and herself but her divorced husband and their children as well, and
also all of her quarrelsome relatives. Here many radicals, social
reformers, and spiritualists gathered, among them Stephen Pearl
Andrews, who soon made use of Victoria and her _Weekly_ to publicize
his dream of a new world order, the Pantarchy, as he called it.
Victoria, herself, was an ardent spiritualist, controlled by
Demosthenes of the spirit world to whom she believed she owed her most
brilliant utterances and by whom she was guided to announce herself as
a presidential candidate in 1872. Needless to say, with such a
background, Victoria Woodhull became a very controversial figure among
the suffragists.
In New York only a few days, it was hard for Susan to separate fact
from fiction, truth from rumor and animosity. Even Demosthenes did not
seem too ridiculous to her, for many of her most respected friends
were spiritualists. Nor did Victoria's presidential aspirations
trouble her greatly. Presidential candidates had been nothing to brag
of, and willingly would she support the right woman for President. If
Victoria lived up to the high standard of the Woodhull Memorial, then
even she might be that woman. After all, it was an era of radical
theories and Utopian dreams, of extravagances of every sort. Almost
anything could happen.
Whatever doubts the suffragists may have had when they saw Victoria
Woodhull on the platform at the New York meeting of the National
Association, she swept them all along with her when, as one inspired,
she made her "Great Secession" speech. "If the very next Congress
refuses women all the legitimate results of citizenship," she
declared, "we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to
frame a new constitution and to erect a new government.... We mean
treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than
was that of the South. We are plotting revolution; we will overthrow
this bogus Republic and plant a government of righteousness in its
stead...."[265]
Susan, who felt deeply her right to full citizenship, who herself had
talked revolution, and who had so often listened to the extravagant
antislavery declarations of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips,
and Parker Pillsbury, was not offended by these statements. She was,
however, troubled by the attitude of the press, particularly of the
_Tribune_ which labeled this gathering the "Woodhull Convention" and
accused the suffragists of adopting Mrs. Woodhull's free-love
theories.
Having experienced so recently the animosity stirred up by her
alliance with George Francis Train, Susan resolved to be cautious
regarding Victoria Woodhull and was beginning to wonder if Victoria
was not using the suffragists to further her own ambitions. Yet many
trusted friends, who had talked with Mrs. Woodhull far more than she
had the opportunity to do, were convinced that she was a genius and a
prophet who had risen above the sordid environment of her youth to do
a great work for women and who had the courage to handle subjects
which others feared to touch.
Free love, for example, Susan well knew was an epithet hurled
indiscriminately at anyone indiscreet enough to argue for less
stringent divorce laws or for an intelligent frank appraisal of
marriage and sex. Was it for this reason, Susan asked herself, that
Mrs. Woodhull was called a "free-lover," or did she actually advocate
promiscuity?
With these questions puzzling her, she left for Rochester and the
West. Almost immediately the papers were full of Victoria Woodhull and
her family quarrels which brought her into court. This was a
disillusioning experience for the National Woman Suffrage Association
which had so recently featured Victoria Woodhull as a speaker, and
Susan began seriously to question the wisdom of further association
with this strange controversial character. Nevertheless, Victoria
still had her ardent defenders among the suffragists, particularly
Isabella Beecher Hooker and Paulina Wright Davis. Even the thoughtful
judicious Martha C. Wright wrote Mrs. Hooker at this time, "It is not
always 'the wise and prudent' to whom the truth is revealed; tho' far
be it from me to imply aught derogatory to Mrs. Woodhull. No one can
be with her, see her gentle and modest bearing and her spiritual face,
without feeling sure that she is a true woman, whatever unhappy
surroundings may have compromised her. I have never met a stranger
toward whom I felt more tenderly drawn, in sympathy and love."[266]
Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke her mind in Theodore Tilton's new paper,
_The Golden Age_: "Victoria C. Woodhull stands before us today a
grand, brave woman, radical alike in political, religious and social
principles. Her face and form indicate the complete triumph in her
nature of the spiritual over the sensuous. The processes of her
education are little to us; the grand result everything."[267]
Victoria was in dire need of defenders, for the press was venomous,
goading her on to revenge. Susan, now traveling westward, lecturing in
one state after another, thinking of ways to interest the people in
woman suffrage, was too busy and too far away to follow Victoria
Woodhull's court battles.
* * * * *
Mrs. Stanton met Susan in Chicago late in May 1871, to join her on a
lecture tour of the far West. Together they headed for Wyoming and
Utah, eager to set foot in the states which had been the first to
extend suffrage to women. The long leisurely days on the train gave
these two old friends, Susan now fifty-one and Mrs. Stanton,
fifty-six, ample time to talk and philosophize, to appraise their past
efforts for women, and plan their speeches for the days ahead. While
their main theme would always be votes for women, they decided that
from now on they must also arouse women to rebel against their legal
bondage under the "man marriage," as they called it, and to face
frankly the facts about sex, prostitution, and the double standard of
morals. In Utah, in the midst of polygamy fostered by the Mormon
Church, they would encounter still another sex problem.
After an enthusiastic welcome in Denver, they moved on to Laramie,
Wyoming, where one hundred women greeted them as the train pulled in.
From this first woman suffrage state, Susan exultingly wrote, "We have
been moving over the soil, that is really the land of the free and the
home of the brave.... Women here can say, 'What a magnificent country
is ours, where every class and caste, color and sex, may find
freedom....'"[268]
They reached Salt Lake City just after the Godbe secession by which a
group of liberal Mormons abandoned polygamy. As guests of the Godbes
for a week, they had every opportunity to become acquainted with the
Mormons, to observe women under polygamy, and to speak in long all-day
sessions to women alone.
Susan tried to show her audiences in Utah that her point of attack
under both monogamy and polygamy was the subjection of women, and that
to remedy this the self-support of women was essential. In Utah she
found little opportunity for women to earn a living for themselves and
their children, as there was no manufacturing and there were no free
schools in need of teachers. "Women here, as everywhere," she
declared, "must be able to live honestly and honorably without the aid
of men, before it can be possible to save the masses of them from
entering into polygamy or prostitution, legal or illegal."[269]
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony, 1871]
Some of Susan's' critics at home felt she was again besmirching the
suffrage cause by setting foot in polygamous Utah, but this was of no
moment to her, for she saw the crying need of the right kind of
missionary work among Mormon women, "no Phariseeism, no shudders of
Puritanic horror, ... but a simple, loving fraternal clasp of hands
with these struggling women" to encourage them and point the way.
Hearing that Susan and Mrs. Stanton were in the West en route to
California, Leland Stanford, Governor of California and president of
the recently completed Central Pacific Railway, sent them passes for
their journey. They reached San Francisco with high hopes that they
could win the support of western men for their demand for woman
suffrage under the Fourteenth Amendment. Their welcome was warm and
the press friendly. An audience of over 1,200 listened with real
interest to Mrs. Stanton. Then the two crusaders made a misstep. Eager
to learn the woman's side of the case in the recent widely publicized
murder of the wealthy attorney, Alexander P. Crittenden, by Laura
Fair, they visited Laura Fair in prison. Immediately the newspapers
reported this move in a most critical vein, with the result that an
uneasy audience crowded into the hall where Susan was to speak on "The
Power of the Ballot." As she proceeded to prove that women needed the
ballot to protect themselves and their work and could not count on the
support and protection of men, she cited case after case of men's
betrayal of women. Then bringing home her point, she declared with
vigor, "If all men had protected all women as they would have their
own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in
your jail tonight."[270]
Boos and hisses from every part of the hall greeted this statement;
but Susan, trained on the antislavery platform to hold her ground
whatever the tumult, waited patiently until this protest subsided,
standing before the defiant audience, poised and unafraid. Then, in a
clear steady voice, she repeated her challenging words. This time,
above the hisses, she heard a few cheers, and for the third time she
repeated, "If all men had protected all women as they would have their
own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in
your jail tonight."
Now the audience, admiring her courage, roared its applause. "I
declare to you," she concluded, "that woman must not depend upon the
protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and here I
take my stand."
Reading the newspapers the next morning, she found herself accused not
only of defending Laura Fair, but of condoning the murder of
Crittenden. This story was republished throughout the state and
eagerly picked up by New York newspapers.
As it was now impossible for her or for Mrs. Stanton to draw a
friendly audience anywhere in California, they took refuge in the
Yosemite Valley for the next few weeks. Susan was inconsolable. These
slanders on top of the loss of _The Revolution_ and the split in the
suffrage ranks seemed more than she could bear. "Never in all my hard
experience have I been under such fire," she confided to her diary.
"The clouds are so heavy over me.... I never before was so cut
down."[271]
Not until she had spent several days riding horseback in the Yosemite
Valley on "men's saddles" in "linen bloomers," over long perilous
exhausting trails, did the clouds begin to lift. Gradually the beauty
and grandeur of the mountains and the giant redwoods brought her peace
and refreshment, putting to flight "all the old six-days story and the
6,000 jeers."
Bearing the brunt of the censure in California, Susan expected Mrs.
Stanton to come to her defense in letters to the newspapers. When she
did not do so, Susan was deeply hurt, for in the past she had so many
times smoothed the way for her friend. Even now, on their return to
San Francisco, where she herself did not yet dare lecture, she did her
best to build up audiences for Mrs. Stanton and to get correct
transcripts of her lectures to the papers. Disillusioned and
heartsick, she was for the first time sadly disappointed in her
dearest friend.
Moving on to Oregon to lecture at the request of the pioneer
suffragist, Abigail Scott Duniway, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, who had
left for the East, "As I rolled on the ocean last week feeling that
the very next strain might swamp the ship, and thinking over all my
sins of omission and commission, there was nothing undone which
haunted me like the failure to speak the word at San Francisco again
and more fully. I would rather today have the satisfaction of having
said the true and needful thing on Laura Fair and the social evil,
with the hisses and hoots of San Francisco and the entire nation
around me, than all that you or I could possibly experience from their
united eulogies with that one word unsaid."[272]
* * * * *
So far Susan's western trip had netted her only $350. This was
disappointing in so far as she had counted upon it to reduce
substantially her _Revolution_ debt. She now hoped to build her
earnings up to $1,000 in Oregon and Washington. Everywhere in these
two states people took her to their hearts and the press with a few
exceptions was complimentary. The beauty of the rugged mountainous
country compensated her somewhat for the long tiring stage rides over
rough roads and for the cold uncomfortable lonely nights in poor
hotels. Only occasionally did she enjoy the luxury of a good cup of
coffee or a clean bed in a warm friendly home.
At first in Oregon she was apprehensive about facing an audience
because of her San Francisco experience, and she wrote Mrs. Stanton,
"But to the rack I must go, though another San Francisco torture be in
store for me."[273] She spoke on "The Power of the Ballot," on women's
right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, on the need of women to
be self-supporting, and clearly and logically she marshaled her facts
and her arguments. Occasionally she obliged with a temperance speech,
or gathered women together to talk to them about the social evil,
relieved when they responded to this delicate subject with earnestness
and gratitude. Practice soon made her an easy, extemporaneous speaker.
Yet she was only now and then satisfied with her efforts, recording in
her diary, "Was happy in a real Patrick Henry speech."[274]
The proceeds from her lectures were disappointing, as money was scarce
in the West that winter, and she had just decided to return to the
East to spend Christmas with her mother and sisters when she was urged
to accept lecture engagements in California. Putting her own personal
longings behind her, she took the stage to California, sitting outside
with the driver so that she could better enjoy the scenery and learn
more about the people who had settled this new lonely overpowering
country. "Horrible indeed are the roads," she wrote her mother, "miles
and miles of corduroy and then twenty miles ... of black mud.... How
my thought does turn homeward, mother."[275]
This time she was warmly received in San Francisco. The prejudice, so
vocal six months before, had disappeared. "Made my Fourteenth
Amendment argument splendidly," she wrote in her diary. "All delighted
with it and me--and it is such a comfort to have the friends feel that
I help the good work on."[276]
She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family, "I miss
Mrs. Stanton. Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people
call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits
a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, instead of
merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant
scintillations as they emanate from her never-exhausted magazine.
There is no alternative--whoever goes into a parlor or before an
audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing,
a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully,
because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and
heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her."[277]
Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada where she also had
lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1, 1872, "6
months of constant travel, full 8000 miles, 108 lectures. The year's
work full 13,000 miles travel--170 meetings." On the train she met the
new California Senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their
children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey during
which the train was stalled in deep snow drifts. "This is indeed a
fearful ordeal, fastened here ... midway of the continent at the top
of the Rocky mountains," she recorded. "The railroad has supplied the
passengers with soda crackers and dried fish.... Mrs. Sargent and I
have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing
mothers."[278] The Sargents had brought their own food for the journey
and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the
ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent believed
heartily in woman's rights, and Senator Sargent in his campaign for
the Senate had boldly announced his endorsement of woman suffrage.
This friendly attitude among western men toward votes for women was
the most encouraging development in Susan's long uphill fight. These
men, looking upon women as partners who had shared with them the
dangers and hardships of the frontier, recognized at once the justice
of woman suffrage and its benefit to the country.
* * * * *
Susan traveled directly from Nevada to Washington instead of breaking
her journey by a visit with her brothers in Kansas, as she had hoped
to do. She even omitted Rochester so that she might be in time for the
national woman suffrage convention in Washington in January 1872, for
which Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Stanton were preparing. She
found Victoria Woodhull with them, her presence provoking criticism
and dissension.
Impulsively she came to Victoria's defense at the convention: "I have
been asked by many, 'Why did you drag Victoria Woodhull to the front?'
Now, bless your souls, she was not dragged to the front. She came to
Washington with a powerful argument. She presented her Memorial to
Congress and it was a power.... She had an interview with the
judiciary committee. We could never secure that privilege. She was
young, handsome, and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to
capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after."[279]
"I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew Mrs.
Woodhull's antecedents," she continued. "I said I didn't and that I
did not care any more for them than I do about those of the members of
Congress.... I have been asked along the Pacific coast, 'What about
Woodhull? You make her your leader?' Now we don't make leaders; they
make themselves."
Victoria, however, did not prove to be the leading light of this
convention, although she made one of her stirring fiery speeches
calling upon her audience to form an Equal Rights party and nominate
her for President of the United States. By this time, Susan had
concluded that Victoria Woodhull for President did not ring true and
she would have nothing to do with her self-inspired candidacy. Quickly
she steered the convention away from Victoria Woodhull for President
toward the consideration of the more practical matter of woman's right
to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
This time it was Susan, not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before
the Senate judiciary committee. "At the close of the war," Susan
reminded the Senators, "Congress lifted the question of suffrage for
men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the
deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State. When the
Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed ... we rushed to you with
petitions praying you not to insert the word 'male' in the second
clause. Our best friends ... said to us: 'The insertion of that word
puts no new barrier against women; therefore do not embarrass us but
wait until we get the Negro question settled.' So the Fourteenth
Amendment with the word 'male' was adopted.[280]
"When the Fifteenth was presented without the word 'sex,'" she
continued, "we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends
declared that the absence of the word was no hindrance to us, and
again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war,
saying, 'After we have enfranchised the Negro, we will take up your
case.'