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By Root 8028 0

her manners certainly were. Woodhull was a feminist for the age of flash, as shrewd about publicity as Barnum, as brash in personal style as Jim Fisk. Her personal appearance violated gender proprieties: short hair, skirts that reached only her shoe tops, jackets of mannish cut, bright-colored neckties. Worse still, Woodhull argued that people might have more than one “natural mate,” which raised the theoretical possibility of extramarital pursuits (in Victoria’s case, apparently, not merely theoretical), and she took a positive view of sexual pleasure, even when not aimed at procreation, and indeed agitated openly for legalized prostitution and birth control. Mainstream feminists did not approve of contraceptive devices (though many used them) for fear their widespread adoption would increase male promiscuity. They were wary of abortion (though many had them) because they were associated with frivolous society women, demimondaines, and the poor and because they too could be used by men to escape the consequences of their cavortings.

Given her notoriety, when Woodhull plunged into the suffrage movement, many in the American Woman Suffrage Association and even some in the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (including Stanton) were dismayed. But Woodhull quickly earned some kudos. She presented a memorial to the House of Representatives arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s extension of suffrage to blacks provided ample constitutional grounds for granting it to women, and she proposed that women take direct action at polling places and assert their right to vote. Woodhull’s speech and battle plan met with tremendous acclaim and catapulted her to a leadership position in the suffrage movement. Objections by those scandalized by association with such a forward woman were brusquely dismissed by Stanton: “We have had women enough sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity,” she said scathingly. “If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns.”

In 1872 Stanton went so far as to back Woodhull’s proposal to use the May meeting of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in Steinway Hall to launch a third political party, of which Woodhull would be the presidential candidate. The new People’s Party platform, as leading feminists envisioned it, would merge their crusade for the enfranchisement of women with the movement that, for the past several years, had been pressing for the emancipation of labor.

56

Eight Hours for What We Will

Postwar prosperity revitalized the labor movement. German tradesmen (nearly a quarter of the city’s working population) were particularly energetic. Their individual unions—woodworkers, machinists, tailors, cigarmakers, waiters, sjlverplaters, and bookbinders—confederated in an umbrella organization, the Arbeiter Union. English-speaking workers, led by printers and building tradesmen, formed their own citywide central, the Workingmen’s Union. Irish organizations flourished too, both the Longshoremen’s Union and the Laborers United Benevolent Society, which, with its myriad divisions (brown-stone cutters and blue-stone cutters, marble cutters and marble-polishers, hod carriers and derrickmen, sawyers and quarrymen), was the largest labor organization in the city. Seventy thousand were involved in this union resurgence. A larger proportion of the metropolitan working population enrolled in trade unions between 1865 and 1873 than during any other period of the nineteenth century.

City unions launched 249 trade-wide strikes between 1863 and 1873, some of them, like the 1868 bricklayers’ walkout, involving several thousand workers. Some trades were particularly militant and persistent: Steinway’s pianomakers struck in 1863, 1864, twice in 1865, and again in 1869. From 1866 on the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor published yearly reports on “Labor Movements and Strikes.”

Many contests were for higher wages, as workers fought to keep ahead of rising costs. They also sought a fair share of the period’s tremendous