biography
| name: |
Woodhull, Victoria
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née Claflin
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1838–1927)
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| biography:
| Spiritualist, entrepreneur, and activist, born in Homer, Ohio, USA. With her sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin (1845–1923), they became one of the more outrageous ‘sister acts’ in American history. As young girls they travelled with their dubious father as part of a family medicine show, claiming cures for numerous ailments. In 1853 Victoria married Dr Canning Woodhull and had two children by him, but in 1866 she divorced him and took out a marriage licence with Colonel James Harvey Blood, a spiritualist and faddist. That same year, Tennessee, after having been charged with manslaughter for the death of one of her ‘patients’, married a gambler. In 1868 Victoria was ‘visited’ by a spirit who told her to go to New York City, and the whole family followed her there. The sisters, both physically attractive, gained the support of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and soon were running Woodhull, Claflin & Co, the first stock brokerage owned by women, and they prospered through their investments. Victoria then came under the influence of Stephen Pearl Andrews, a utopian intellectual, and in 1870 she announced she was a candidate for the president of the USA, the first woman to do so. She also started Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which for the next six years published a mixture of ‘muckraking’, fads, scandals, and surprises, including the first English translation in the US of Marx's Communist Manifesto. She delivered a statement to a Congressional committee on the right of women to vote (1871) and was briefly adopted by the women suffrage movement, but was dropped (1872) and so formed her own Equal Rights Party. Meanwhile, she had publicly charged the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with committing adultery with a parishioner, and by election time the sisters were in jail, accused of sending obscenity through the mail; they were acquitted in mid-1873. After somewhat tempering her radical views, Victoria went off to England (1877), accompanied by Tennessee, and began lecturing on ‘The Human Body The Temple of God’. By 1883 she had married an Englishman, John Martin; Tennessee married a prosperous merchant (1885), and when he was made a baronet, she became Lady Cook. They continued their crusading, both in England and on visits to the USA. Victoria published (1892–1901) a periodical promoting eugenics, Humanitarian, and the sisters lived out their years as notorious relics of an unorthodox past. |
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