About six weeks later, these prosperous "lady brokers" had established 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]