Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [782]
The Revolution’s editors also mobilized for action around the suffrage issue. At an 1869 meeting in the Woman’s Bureau, they and their supporters formed the National Woman’s Suffrage Association—an avowedly feminist-first body whose officers were all women—to press for passage of a Sixteenth Amendment to guarantee female access to the ballot. It was supplemented the following year by the New York City Woman Suffrage Association (1870), formed by Dr. Clemence Lozier and Charlotte Wilbour, president of Sorosis, beginning what would be a decades-long struggle to win the franchise locally.
The Revolution’s militant policies won significant support from New York City’s professional women. Many in Sorosis were quite prepared to take up daring subjects: club members discussed abortion and prostitution, and Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi lectured about the need to abolish female ignorance concerning sexual physiology. Dr. Anna Densmore, vice-president of the New York City Woman’s Club, gave scientific lectures for women on physiology and in 1868 got Board of Education approval to train female public school teachers to pass on such information to their students.
Other women were alarmed or repelled by material they considered far too controversial. In addition, former antislavery activists denounced Stanton and Anthony’s continuing resort to race (and class) bigotry. When the Fifteenth Amendment passed Congress in February 1869, making no provision for women, Stanton denounced it as an “open, deliberate insult to American womanhood to be cast down under the iron-heeled peasantry of the Old World and these slaves of the New.”
At the same moment they were being challenged by relatively conservative women, Stanton and Anthony found themselves confronting Victoria Woodhull, a feminist who was in some respects more radical—and certainly more flamboyant—than they were. Born poor in the frontier hamlet of Homer, Ohio, Woodhull had spent her youth roaming the Midwest with a traveling family medicine show—telling fortunes, communing with spirits, practicing faith healing and animal magnetism. With her sister Tennie C. (or Tennessee) Claflin she came to New York after the war and struck up an alliance with Cornelius Vanderbilt (Tennessee’s physical ministrations warmed the old man’s bones while Victoria’s seances consoled him over the loss of his wife). Vanderbilt’s remarriage suspended more intimate relations, but the grateful millionaire set them up on Wall Street. Woodhull, Claflin, and Co., the first woman’s brokerage firm in the all-male New York financial world, was a great success, its rise in no way impeded by the sisters’ well-known association with the Commodore, and the women made a small fortune.
They did not, however, rest on these professional laurels, but instead entered the world of radical politics. In 1870 they started their own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which took up the deeply scandalous (and deeply misunderstood) issue of Free Love. Widely seen as a commitment to unbridled lechery, it was, in fact, a feminist challenge to men’s sexual prerogatives under prevailing gender rules. Free Lovers attacked the double standard and insisted men be held to the same high levels of moral purity that were required of women. In some respects, Woodhull’s position was not far removed from that of those who had challenged the convention of marriage (“We are all free lovers at heart,” Stanton said). The Revolution, quite as often as Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, carried demands for a woman’s “control over her own person, independent of the desires of her husband.”
If some of Woodhull’s ideas weren’t shocking,