If you were a voter in the election of 1872 — the first presidential election in which some formerly enslaved people could vote — you would have had a surprising opportunity when you cast your ballot. For the first time, you would have had the chance to vote for a woman for President of the United States. Her name was Victoria Woodhull, and while her candidacy was controversial, she was used to it; her life leading up to her run for the presidency had been anything but conventional, and her presidential run may have been one of the least interesting things about her. Among other things, Victoria was an adherent of the Free Love movement, which today we understand as a form of ethical non-monogamy.
Victoria Woodhull’s early experiences with sex, love, marriage, and relationships were anything but positive, which likely influenced her all her life.
Not only was her parents’ marriage volatile to the point of violence, her own first marriage, to Canning Woodhull, who had been her doctor, took place when she was only fifteen, and he was twenty-eight. Beyond the obvious age and power imbalance, Canning Woodhull was an alcoholic and abusive, prompting Victoria to leave him after twelve years of marriage, at the age of twenty-seven, and take their two children, Byron and Zula Maude, who were both under ten years old at the time. While she kept her first husband’s name, the traumatic experience of her first marriage, as well as her childhood, likely influenced her embrace of unconventional ideas about marriage, love, and sexuality. In the nineteenth century, being a member of the Free Love movement, which had existed in one form or another since the second century, but whose best-known variation was promoted by Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and other controversial aristocrats in the 1820s, was almost universally shocking.
The principle behind Free Love, which Victoria Woodhull and her second husband, Civil War veteran Captain James Blood, practiced and advocated for, was that people should be free to fall in love, and be physically intimate with, any other consenting adult they choose – and that this freedom should continue even within a marriage. Free Love supporters also believed in the right to divorce, as they felt that the freedom of love included the freedom for love to end. Mary Wollstonecraft, the English feminist philosopher, was also an advocate of free love, and wrote a novel, Mary: A Fiction, in the late eighteenth century, about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage finds romantic fulfillment with two partners, a man and a woman.
Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, would go on to be a Free Love advocate herself, along with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. The two of them met up with Lord Byron and John William Polidori in Switzerland during Byron’s self-imposed exile hoping to escape the social scandal caused by his association with Free Love when they had the famous storytelling contest that resulted in the first draft of Frankenstein. Polidori’s entry into the contest, The Vampyre, was an expression of his anger at Lord Byron, and how he felt Byron used Free Love as an excuse to treat his romantic partners (including Polidori) unkindly. Polidori, like Mary Shelley, eventually had his story published, making it the first English-language vampire novel.
By the time Victoria Woodhull had become a self-described “free lover” in her late twenties, she had cultivated a substantial amount of influence to share her views. As a member of the spiritualist religious movement, Woodhull had worked professionally as a medium, which was not only how she met Captain Blood, but also Cornelius Vanderbilt, who would take her on as a “spiritual and financial advisor,” and Woodhull’s sister Tennessee Claflin as a mistress. While Vanderbilt was not a member of the Free Love movement, his relationship with Tennessee was long-lasting and affectionate. Even after his family refused their blessing for a potential marriage between the two, Vanderbilt gave up his romantic relationship with Claflin, but their friendship lasted until his death.
Victoria would give Vanderbilt stock tips she claimed to have channeled from “the spirits,” although her friendships and information-sharing agreements with New York’s sex workers were also a likely source. In fact, Victoria, while concerned about potential exploitation in sex work, was in favor of its legalization. Woodhull did not judge the sex workers she was personally friendly with, but instead took care to put blame for any abuses firmly on the abusers, rather than the sex workers themselves.
Woodhull was also a publisher. The most controversial topics she addressed in the newspaper Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which she founded with Claflin, were not matters of race or political ambitions — Woodhull stated that she wanted Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass to serve as Vice President —but of gender, and interpersonal relationships. While non-monogamy has existed throughout human history, in nineteenth-century New York, “respectable” women were expected to marry a man, have multiple children, and never divorce. Sexual relationships outside this model were so taboo that, when Woodhull came out about her own non-monogamy, the press (outside her own paper) nicknamed her “Mrs. Satan,” and published comics depicting her as a winged demon tempting women away from their families.
Woodhull defended her non-monogamy, and the rights of individuals, regardless of gender, to pursue the relationships they wanted, fiercely. In 1871, she delivered a speech entitled “And the Truth Shall Make You Free,” where she quoted the Declaration of Independence and stated that “every person who comes into the world of outward existence is of equal right as an individual, and is free as an individual, and that he or she is entitled to pursue happiness in whatever direction he or she may choose,” where she stated with pride, “I am… a Free Lover.”
It was a testament to her strength of conviction (and keen sense of publicity) that “Mrs. Satan” didn’t back down—she took her critics on headfirst.
In Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, she published a lengthy description of Free Love as a belief she’d come to adopt via spiritualism, and that as a spiritualist medium, she believed her philosophies were sacred, and had been delivered to her from the Holy Spirit and the ancient philosopher Demosthenes. Many spiritualist mediums, largely women, would say that they had received messages like this, but in Woodhull’s case, it was not just a statement of her religious beliefs, but an argument against anyone who said that she was Satanic, or lacking in a moral or spiritual sense.
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly would have its biggest scandal when Woodhull called out hypocrisy. Woodhull wrote an editorial exposing an affair between a prominent minister, Henry Ward Beecher, and Phoebe Tilton, the wife of a congregant. Woodhull herself had been romantically involved with Phoebe Tilton’s husband, which is how she came to learn that these well-known figures were “against free love publicly, but practice it in private,” as she wrote in a letter to the New York World in 1871. Victoria Woodhull and Phoebe Tilton would develop a surprising friendship, especially as Woodhull made it clear that she objected to the hypocrisy of Beecher’s career as a minister, but did not think that he and Tilton’s relationship was wrong.
Victoria Woodhull would eventually leave James Blood—something she had, in speeches supporting free love, promised to do if the relationship ever ceased to be a loving one. Her Presidential bid failed, but caught enough attention that she ran again, twice, once bankrolled by her aristocratic British third husband, John Biddulph Martin. Martin was a partner in a longstanding family bank in London, and despite his family’s objections to his marriage with Woodhull and his financial support of her ambitions, he financed her political career throughout their fourteen-year marriage, which ended with his passing.
Woodhull never let her losses get her down, nor did she simply rest on her third husband’s wealth. She put her time and energy into all three of her Presidential runs, holding campaign events and even producing her own campaign merchandise, even though women like Woodhull and Tilton wouldn’t have been able to vote in these elections.
While Victoria Woodhull’s pledged beliefs evolved radically over the course of her life, her outspokenness was a constant.
In an age that is now remembered for repression, she fought hard to hold onto the friends and romantic partners she wanted, without bowing to those who wanted to shame her. And as she had written to the World in 1871, she was always aware that the controversy she created was not out of any harm done, but: “Because I am a woman, and because I conscientiously hold opinions somewhat different from the self-elected orthodoxy which men find their profit in supporting, and because I think it my bounden duty and my absolute right to put forward my opinions and to advocate them with my whole strength.”