S2 – INTERVIEW 5: Mary Gabriel

the past, though. She also wrote a dual biography on Carl and Jenny Marks, and when researcher Carl Nellis talked with Mary, they explored beyond the life of Victoria Woodhall's radical comrades to discuss how Mrs Satan's political career fits into the bigger picture. It's a fascinating interview and I can't wait to share it with you. So without further ado, here's Mary Gabriel. This is the Unobscured Interview series for

season two. I'm Aaron Mankey as spiritualist. You know, I think from our point of view, you think of someone raising tables and sitting in a darkened room with a group of people communing with the dead, and that was

part of it. But really interestingly, spiritualism in the nineteenth century was away for people who didn't have a political or a social voice i e. Women to have one and um, so that's in the case of Victoria Woodhall, that that's what spiritual spiritualism was for her, and what that meant was that she could almost act as a therapist or any of the spiritualist healers who were traveling around the country almost acted as spiritualists I mean sorry,

as as therapists to the word working class or the poor, or the the itinerant farm farm worker who they would roll up in a caravan and say, you know, would you like to speak to your dead mother? Well, everyone wants to talk to their dead mother about the problems

they're currently having. In so in the course of that dialogue, someone like Victoria would hear the concerns of these people and then not necessarily having tapped into the dead mother's ideas or the dead mother's advice, but she herself with an offer her own advice, which would be um based on her own experience which was troubled, um, but also based on the people she she'd met along the way.

So so basically spiritualism was a big communications network, not necessarily with people from the beyond, but very much among a desperate crowd within the United States at that time. And it's really it was probably one of the colonels or one of those seeds for the entire US women's rights movement because these women started talking among themselves about themselves and discovered that they all sort of had similar problems and that those similar problems were all based in

in repressive or oppressive social situations i e. Marriage. So you've already touched on this a little bit, but um, when people were coming to a science, what kinds of questions were they asking? What were they looking for to get out of it? There are all kinds of varieties there, But what are the things that you really picked up on is you read these documents and the periodicals and the things that were recording spiritualist experiences. Yeah, it was

really you know, there were two kinds. There were the seances and in spiritualism had the literally the Barnum and Bailey kind of aspect where you know, you had a woman or a woman with a group of people in a room and they'd hear tappings and um and the tappings would indicate um um, a communication with a spirit, you know, a spirit with a bizarre name like Mr. Split Foot was one, and and he would offer advice on you know, our our dead family members happy? Now

are they? Are they still with you? Do they approve of what you're doing? But the kind of spiritualism that a woman like Victoria Woodholl would practice as she traveled around the country um hearing people's troubles was a much more basic kind of almost like a advice columnists that you might have in a newspaper today. Um. You know. She she would set up in a hotel and she

didn't have seances per se. She had one and one one on one encounters with people who would come in with maybe physical maladies or um problems in their marriage, problems with their children's financial problems, you know, just the basic things that that a person would go to a priest or a a therapist or uh, you know, a politician if they so dared and and and you know,

describe their situation and ask for help. These people knew Victoria wasn't equipped to provide them with actual help, but in many cases it was just enough for just to have someone to listen to what they had to say, and that in itself was empowering both for them and

for her. And uh for spiritualists, Um, that kind of conversation, you can imagine the the the experience that they would after a few years, the experience they would build, you know, and the kind of advice that they could then offer, and how it became very social and very political because they knew so many people were suffering from the same problems and so um, it was very much the kind of thing that you see in films where people, you know,

go in and expect miracles and have apparitions and appear and you know, a lot of kind of smoke and mirrors literally was crystal balls, etcetera. But but there was also a very basic and very human and of very warm and generous spirit um behind the kind of spirituals and that would haul practice and that was one person

helping another person. Now, the reason it was called spiritualism, and the reason why a woman would have to resort to something as as kind of outlandish as that rather than just say tell me what your problems are and I'll tell you what I think, was because women weren't supposed to have a political voice or a social voice.

They weren't supposed to extend themselves to that extent. And for a woman to set up a shop in a darkened room in a hotel and have strangers come in and give her a dollar and then she would offer advice, if she said that that advice was coming from her without the guidance of a spirit, it would really be um it would be outrageous, it would be it would be it would be more than society could bear, because

that was not the role of a woman. But if she said, I'm hearing the voices you know, from your mother, and she's telling me to tell you, you know, your husband is a drunk, you have to leave him. It's good for the children, it's good for you, then society could could have a sanction that and the woman who was hearing the advice could then say, you know, okay, and act on it if she wished to. So it's

really interesting, isn't it that it was. It was kind of a charade that was allowed to play out that a woman like Victoria could give advice who just about everybody knew was giving advice based on her own experience.

Um As woman to woman, but they but people would pretend that this voice was that this that this advice was coming from you know, another world, another another kind of um, a spirit world beyond one that we could see, and that this charade was allowed to play, was allowed to play out so that she could have a voice and that women could hear it. So it was a

fascinating period. And one of the other you mentioned the priesthood and some of the roles that a traditional religious figures would would play in this kind of almost a therapeutic kind of mode for for people who would come. But one of the other kind of movements that was happening at the time and leading up to the eighteen

forties was the practice of animal magnetism mesmerism. Uh, some of those um discourses that were considered to be kind of horizons of science about the mind and the person that also were practiced and often demonstrated publicly in a kind of a therapeutic mode. Can you talk a little bit about how those practices set up a foundation for

what became spiritualism. Yeah, that's very interesting because it was It's one of the fascinating, fascinating aspects of what you're talking about and also the spiritualism I was speaking of with Victoria is that this all occurred in an in

a climate of technological and industrial advancement and change. You know, suddenly, you know, trains were speeding through virgin countryside at unheard of speeds, and a telegraph could be sent from one place to another, you know, without anyone actually physically carrying it.

And it was it was a time when um people didn't quite understand what was happening to them, that the society and the the the industry and the manufacturing and the way of life was changing so radically that people sought explanations for that through either through either spiritualism or through the sort of laying on of hands and things

that you describe. And and so one actually was a physical manifestation of these these social and industrial changes and the technological changes that were occurring, which was the lilying out of hands the mesmerism, and the other was just actually helping people cope with the changes that the massive

changes in their lives. And one of the reasons why both of those were more readily accepted than perhaps they would have been thirty y years, you know, thirty years previously, was because people could see in their everyday lives changes, massive changes that that amountages speed and ways of communication

that had never existed before. And and and so if that could happen, then maybe it was actually possible for for people to heal by just touching you, or for someone to give advice from a figure who existed outside a realm you could see. M hmm. And one of the technologies that was so crucial to the spread of all these ideas was, um, the explosion of cheap fast printing, and there's all these periodicals that just kind of burst onto the scene, and they were crucial to mesmerism, to

those sciences, but also to spiritualism. Can you talk a little bit about the role that periodicals played kind of in American life, um in the in the middle of the nineteenth century, but kind of across that period. Yeah, it was really fascinating, and um, it wasn't just in the United States, it was in Europe as well. Suddenly, you know, trains would could carry periodicals from one place

to another end so you and carry news. So you could you could assemble a periodical and Dayton Ohio that would have news from New York City or news from London. Or news from Cologne, Germany, and it wouldn't be that old, you know, it might be two weeks old. And um, people were learning. Their horizons were literally expanding. And every organization, every political party, um, every group, the farmers groups, the coal group, you know, coal miners, everyone had a periodical

So it was almost, I guess a little bit. I mean, I suppose it's a little bit like our blogosphere now that there were new there was this new way of communicating through technology and through the printed page that allowed people to speak to each other and learn about each other and learn about what was happening in the world

much more quickly, um than they ever had before. And it was during the Civil War in fact, in the United States, the the newspapers were an absolutely crucial way for you know, the country to stay as the country was splitting physically, you know, through war. It was actually kind of the thread that was keeping it together was

the exchange of newspapers and that information. And also um into the seventies, when when into the seventies, when the kind of later industrialization occurred, when there were more serious class divisions, and when the labor market and the labor

union movement was heating up. The role of newspapers and those in the radicalization of workers was immense, and um, you know, people would joke Europeans would come to the United States and joke that if you were a prisoner in being held in a jail in New York City, you may not have anything. You may not have food, you may not have water, you may not have proper clothing,

but every morning you'll have your newspaper. It was considered an absolutely essential tool to being alive in the in the nineteenth century, which is, you know, kind of fun considering that newspapers in our world are are going the way of well the normal telephone, the dial telephone. Right.

You know, as I've been as I've been spending time making this podcast, i haven't been able to avoid making these connections between periodicals then kind of podcasts now with the way that they're growing in and like you said, everyone is starting one, every interest group, every political party

are yeah. Um, so as you have have researched and written, You've worked in journalism for for a long long time, you've at times turned two books, and you've written a book on Victoria Woodhol which I'm so glad We're gonna be talking about today. You've also written books on the Cones Sisters, on Karl Marx and his wife Jenny, which was a finalist from the Politicer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book a Circle Award. UM, and you recently

published a book on the Ninth Street Women. Before we really dive into Victoria's story, UM, I'd love to hear is there a kind of a common thread between the kinds of people that you take as the subjects of your books. I think what I try to do is, UM, I take periods of history UM, that most people would say have been written about to death. You know. For example, UM, with Karl Marks. You know, I remember when I said

I wanted to do a book on him. A neighbor I was living in Italy at the time, in an old, older British woman said to me, you know who on earth? You know, why on earth do we need another book on Karl Marks. The point is that the parts of history that have been told so far, that have been told and retold actually are usually only half the story. It's sort of the man's point of view, that's the

it's been the man's story. So what I try to do is I go into areas where um and luckily, you know, for a writer or researcher today, the numbers of neglected women out there in history are vast, and so there are many, many stories to be told. And so with Victoria, I tried to look at the nineteenth century through her perspective. I mean, how many people know growing up in the United States, how many people learn that a woman actually ran for president in eighteen seventy two.

You know, she was written out of history. So I tried to resurrect her, you know, place her where she belonged. With the Cones Sisters. They were among the most important modern art collectors in the world at the turn of the century, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, I'm sorry, at the beginning of the twentieth century. And their story was written out of history because of a personal peak

when Alice Toklas wrote the story of Gertrude Stein. I'm sorry when Gergis John wrote the story of L. S. B. Toklis. But um, the Cone Sisters were written out of history because collecting became something that men did. Women shopped for paintings, but men collected them. And so I wanted to show what the Cones had done, which was build one of the major materi eston h collections in the world, not just in the United States. Um. They were these two

eccentric Victorian sisters. Um. And then with Marx, you know, the Marks story has been told primarily as a story of a man from his neck up, in other words, the brain of Marks. And I wanted to describe the man Marks, and to do that, I thought it was best to put him in the environment of his family, with his wife and children. And so I started by thinking I would tell just their story. But you know, Marx was the elephant in the room, and I needed to tell his story if I could describe their story.

And so and then with the Ninth Street Women, it's the story of five abstract expressionists women painters. And and again you know that the biggest revolution in American art history occurred in the forties and fifties in New York, and that has been the story of a handful of men, when in fact it was a teeming group of people, and among them were some really important women who with

out without home, the movement would wouldn't have occurred. So what I try to do is go back into history and and kind of if if we've seen, you know, fill the cup, We've got half the cup so far. Let's get the rest of the coup. Let's fill it up. And that's usually the story of women. So that's kind of the thread that runs through all of these books. So let's on that note, let's dive in to Victoria Woodhole story and just start with, how would you answer

the question who was Victoria Woodhall? M Victoria Woodhall was really one of the bravest American women to surface UM in the nineteenth century, and one of the women who we know least about who we've studied the least. She was the product of a Ohio family fairly dirt poor. Her father was a h petty criminal, her mother was probably certifiably insane and had had children every two years for a twenty year period. In Victoria was her sixth daughter.

And the story was one you know, sort of that's been It could have been repeated throughout the country, UM by hundreds, if not thousands of families, UM struggling to make ends meet, UM, no true prospects, no property, they didn't own any property, they had no future. And this child, Victoria, through a vivid imagination and an incredible drive created one. She created her own opportunity, and she carried this family with her. And so what she did was um go

from absolutely zero. And I talked about the where she was born, which was a shack on the side of a hill and a small town in Ohio. She went from there to to a series of first that were truly remarkable. She was the first woman to have a Wall Street brokerage firm. She was the first woman to address a congressional committee in Washington. She was the first woman to run for president, and she was completely neglected historically because she was literally too hot to handle. She

was so far advanced of her time. She would still be considered radical today. She would have kind of fit more comfortably in the nineteen seventies feminist period than she did in the nineteenth century. So Victoria Woodhall is quite quite simply someone we should all know about because the issue she spoke to and about in those days were ones we're still dealing with today. M hm. So in that early life that you've started to touch on, what kind of a religious background or upbringing did she have

in this struggling family. Yeah, her mother was a religious Zealot and um, I would imagine based on where they were in Ohio. I could never pin down what exactly congregation they were part of, but it would have been some sort of um no doubt Protestant, probably loose and tradition, and but it was bordered, but it bordered always on the always on spiritualism. Not that her mother ever practiced spiritualism, where she did later in life, but not when when

Victoria was growing up. Although the mother always thought she could commune with spirits, and so that's where Victoria got that idea. Basically, the mother would go out and kind of have hallucinations, um and you know, shout to the skies her problems about her husband and called her, you know, said what she was doing was speaking to to to spirits from another world of her dead relatives or her dead children. And Victoria absorbed that idea. But uh so

that so the family was not traditionally religious. It was a very eccentric clan as far as that goes. But but Victoria absorbed those ideas and and built on them. And she had a real flair for drama. So she would regale the local children in the town with with her ability to speak to spirits and orate on profound matters. And then uh, as I described the book, when she when her her crowd started getting restless, she would change

the subject and start talking about cowboys and Indians. But in other way she she always knew how to play to the crowd. Um. But the family was mainly Buckland. Her father was a notorious thief arsonist. Uh He called himself a lawyer, but his main his main connection to the law was breaking it. And they were always they from the time she was a little girl. They would have to escape the law for various reasons, and usually buck was behind whatever scheme was illegal, and whatever scheme

Um forced them to leave. So I wouldn't say that Victoria was ever a religious person in the traditional sense as impious, but she had a great respect for surprisingly. Growing up with the father she did and in the household she did, she had a very great respect for morality, which is also very ironic because later in life what did her in was charges of immorality. But she had this real um from the time she was a young girl. She had a very strong sense of justice, and that's

what actually was the start of her political life. Some of your work has been kind of on transatlantic connections between radical groups. And when Victoria's ten, we come to the year eight which historians of spiritualism, uh look at for what happened in Hydesville, New York with the Fox Sisters, but it's a year of ferment across nations, borders, oceans. Um, can you talk a little bit about transatlantic context for what was going on in Europe in that year? What

else was going on in the United States? M hmm. Yeah. Eighteen forty was one of those years in history where it would be difficult to find a place on the planet, Uh, that that something major wasn't happening. Europe was on fire. It was the only eighteen forty It was a movement called Springtime of the People, and the people in Europe actually revolted against their kings, their governments, and uh, it was the first and only European wide revolt of the

people against their rulers. And this was the result um of again this idea that society was changing fundamentally under people's feet, and yet the rulers, the kings, couldn't see that, They couldn't or didn't want to see see it, chose not to see it. They were happy enough to fill their coffers with the proceeds of industrialization, but they didn't

want to make the social changes that were required. They didn't want to allow business people into government, for example, in order to legislate UM what the terms industrialists needed to to to expand, to do cross border trade UM and and in the United States, part of the background to this what would become the Civil War UM in about twelve years after was was this notion that the tensions between the agrarian south and the industrial north, and

that the the inability to reconcile what was the old way of living in a new way of living, you know, the obvious path of the future. And so the people who were caught in the middle of this UM the everyday folks, you know, the the farmers, the small trades people, the people who were forced off their lands and moved into cities, were being buffeted by forces that were so much greater than them. UM. In Europe, they fled to the cities and started filling you know, tenements and factories

with their work. But in the United States, that sort of development hadn't really occurred yet, and so UM we didn't have that kind of mass movement. But but definitely there was an earthquake happening under people's feet, a societal change that was was so profound that people sought relief and answers and shelter literally in large tense um at the front of which was usually a preacher shouting about, you know, don't worry about this life. The next one

is going to be better. And so that was a very top down that was a very patriarchal kind of response to the changes in society through through more traditional religion and through these itinerant preachers. Where the spiritualists came in was uh, this sort of one on one, woman to woman, much more domestic kind of response to the changes.

And in a way, I think, you know, there was the show, there was the weekly show in the tense with the preachers and the songs and the you know, uh fall going down and thrashing around, but the the actual what spiritualists could offer was it was a much deeper and much more immediate sort of help, you know, and an actual earthly help, whereas the preachers could promise, you know something a high in the sky and the Fox Sisters in New York were a phenomenon that um.

They were part of the Barnum and Bailey tradition, you know that I described earlier. Um they were they were able to hear a spirit in a house. They lived in a house where I think it was a traveling salesman had been murdered, and so they could they they said that they could hear spirits and that the spirit

would tap on the table, and this started. They got the publicity around them was so widespread that they started sort of a phenomenon that appeared in every state in the country, was multiple so called fox sisters hearing tappings. And it was really just a way for poor families to make money. They charged it allar visit, which was a huge amount of money in those days, and it was also a way to um to eventually um uh. It was also a way for this sort of spiritualism

to develop, this the kind of therapeutic spiritualism. And so there was the Barnman Bailey Fox Sisters tapping um, the very kind of dramatic um communication with you know, dazzling spirits. And then the offshoot of that, the much more practical um, the much more practical development that a rose out of

that was the spiritualism that Victoria would hall practice. Her father was thrilled about the when he had learned about the Fox Sisters because he had two daughters, Victoria and her younger sister Tenny who tennessee who um Buck Clafland decided, great, you know they can both commune with spirits. There's no problem about that. UM. I can set up up a hotel and charge a dollar a dollar a visit and

they can, you know, make miracles. And his his advice to Victoria was be a good listener child, and which is what she did. She started when she was I think thirteen and UM and started entertaining adults, listening to adults problems, and by the time she was fifteen she was an expert on what ailed UM mostly women who came to hear her and and so so that's really UM.

There were sort of two levels of UH, two levels of religious experience and the revival movement and spiritualism that was available and widespread through mostly the middle of the United States through the middle of that century. But eight UM was really the pivotal year because it was when

the Fox Sisters emerged. It was also when the women's rights movement emerged in Seneca Falls, New York, also Upstate New York, and that was where women again started talking to each other and deciding that it wasn't just a matter of getting the vote, that there needed to be a fundamental declaration of rights for women UM drawn up and and hopefully decimated, and all hopefully brought to the attention of Congress, so that women could once and for

all have the rights equal to men in this country. So it was a year that of profound change and um and fascinating and revolutionary. And you can see exactly why it happened, because the plates under society were shifting and the fallout was going to be enormous, both socially and politically, and people had to go somewhere to look for answers. And so as they always did, as Carl Mark said, religion is the opium of the people, and

so they sought solace and religion. And as you just said, Victoria kind of took part in both aspects of spiritualism. There were times when she was working, especially under Buck, in the kind of spectacle of spiritualism. UM. But she so over the course of her life recorded that she heard from the spirits and they guided her, and they directed her. Can you talk a little bit about that more private side of Victoria's belief in spirit communication? Um,

was it real? Was it true? Did she really believe she was hearing from spirits? And how did that influence her decision? Who were they? What did they say to her? Those kinds of things. I think she really did believe it, you know. I I've thought about that, and she was a very smart woman, but she also had I guess it was I mean, who knows, maybe she did, you know, I I you know, my instinct is that she didn't,

but she really believed she did. And I think it stemmed from, as I said, her mother's, you know, experiences with speaking to this spirit world. But also I think it was just a way of retreating her home life was so utterly dysfunctional. I mean, her father was violent, her mother was in saying, you know, there were children crawling out of every cupboard. Um, they had no money, and I think when she was a young girl, to escape, she would sometimes try to have conversations with two of

her sisters who had died as children. And you can see where that would happen. I mean, she had nowhere to go and no one to talk to so she sawt solace in what she thought was a conversation with dead people. Um. And then when she at different times of her life, she spoke to different kinds of spirits.

And one time she was in San Francisco, she eventually married a fellow who I'll describe later, but she needed to decide whether she should go back to Ohio or stay in San Francisco, which was a very difficult place to her to live in. Her situation was extremely dangerous and trying, and Victoria felt that she heard her sister Tenny call her across those miles and speak to her in spirit for him and say come home. And so

she followed that advice. And then the most famous case was when Victoria was at her wits end, you know, she would she had been traveling around after the Civil War through the United States, giving advice, seeing the horrors, you know, the absolute devastation of what was left in its wake, and she knew she needed to do something

because by this time she was completely politicized. And she thought she heard the spirit of the Greek order DeMatha scenes and she said that he spoke to her and gave her not just the the idea go to New York, but an address where she should go to in New York as specific house on Great Jones Street. And so Victoria did. And she said when she arrived, you know,

the house was ready waiting for her. So at various points in her life, you know, really crucial points, some some might say points of breakdown, she thought she was speaking to the spirit world. You know, maybe she thought she was. Whatever happened helped her get to the next place and helped her survive. And and she never found herself despite and you know, a life that was difficult

in the extreme, that lasted a long time. Um, she never got to the point that she gave up, you know, she lost her her strength or she gave into some kind of collapse. And so it could be that she believed that these spirits helped her through. Can I say

one thing. I want to go back to um. The whole idea of the purpose of religion and kind of a greater, greater people's lives at the beginning of the nineteenth century, okay, Um, the idea that religion was a was a safe place for people to have difficult consideration or difficult discussions is a really fascinating one. At this period at the beginning of the nineteenth century, because it wasn't just that it was a place where you could confess,

you know, confess your sins or confess your troubles. It was a place where people like Carl Marx, even you know, politicians and great thinkers would would couch their political discussions because at this time, the things they were saying, the changes they knew that had to occur in societies in order to make the step to a fully industrialized or

a fully capitalist world. Um they couldn't say publicly because they would be against the law, you know, they would be treason ass um uh to the king, to be considered treason as to the king. So Marks, for example, had a had a newspaper in Cologne in mid late thirties, early forties, eighteen forties that was supposedly ostensibly a discussion

of theological subjects. But anyone who knew the words that he was using, or knew the language, or knew who he was, could scratch the surface just a little bit and see that what he was talking about was rebel solution, political revolution, having nothing to do with religion, in fact,

quite a contrary. So it's fascinating that people from all levels of society used used religion as kind of an umbrella to either hide under to seek solace from, or to use as a mask to just to um to cover what they were actually going after, which was massive

political change. And the two kinds of modes of spiritualism that you talked about almost have that dual nature where there are people who are coming to it for the private the kind of the solace, and then there are those who use it as a vehicle for a show to make some cash. Um. That kind of thing too, that's really fascinating. Um jumping. Can we jump back into this story of Victoria after her years into her teen years living under Buck Laughland's thumb making money for the

family in the way that he demanded. Um, she meets Canning wood Hall, right. Can you talk about who he was and how they met and what came of it. Yeah. By by the time Victoria was fifteen, she had three years of education, so she was she was not illiterate, which is interesting. I'm not quite sure who taught her how to read, but she had had no formal education. She had been living in the household that I've described with a father and abusive father and insane mother, and

she was looking for a way out. Well. Traditionally, in many societies to this day, the easiest ticket out of a dysfunctional family as marriage, and that's what happened. Keening Woodhall was supposedly a medical doctor who rolled into um Mount Guillet, Ohio, where Victoria was living with her family,

and set up a practice. And Victoria was ill and went to see him, and um, that's Kenny Woodhole was in his early thirties and Victoria was fifteen, and he started wooing her and told her that he was related to the mayor of New York City and was a relative of a judge in New York, and that he was a practicing doctor, and in other words, he was everything Victoria Woodhall wasn't. In fact, everything Victoria Woodhall had dreamed of. He was and he was an escape hatch

from the life she lived. And so when she was fifteen and she was just had just turned fifteen, he was and I think he was thirty two at the time they married, and Victoria soon discovered that the bill of goods he sold her was a web of lies. She he was not practicing or in any way qualified doctor. He didn't had never met the mayor of New York. He wasn't a relative of a judge. What he was was a philandering drunk, and she was saddled to him because law at the time said that when a woman

married a man, she became his property. And so Victoria had no way out. And so she went from the household of buck Claflin, which she had been supporting she and Tennie by their spiritualist endeavors, to the household of a of a thirty year old drunk who was now her husband, who would be her master for life. And at the age of fifteen, that must have been quite a cruel awakening. It will only got worse because within a year she was pregnant and gave birth to a

son who was mentally retarded. And Victoria that was the moment, that was the seed of the Victoria wood Hall who ran for president in eighteen seventy two. Um That marriage and that birth taught that young girl, that uneducated young girl, that there was something drastically wrong with the system that would sanction that marriage, and that would not teach her what she needed to know about taking care of her body and ensuring in order to ensure that the child

she gave birth to was a healthy one. So Victoria's story with Canning sort of went downhill from there, and she, as she had with her family, and in fact with her family in tol largely the two of them set out on the road, um uh, continuing her her spiritualist counseling. And you can imagine with that experience how much richer the advice she would have given the women she met on the road would have been. I mean, Victoria came became an expert at many things, and she was tremendous

at many things. But I think probably if we had had a tape of the conversation she had with the clients she who were consulted her as a spiritualist, it would have been fascinating. You know. She would have been, um, you know, a therapist of you know, of the highest caliber.

She She was empathetic in the extreme, she was loving, she was warm, she was exceedingly intelligent, and and I think it would have been I wish I had always hoped that there would have been at least one transcript somewhere that existed of a conversation between Victoria Woodhall and one of the people she who consulted her m hmm. Now after she marries Kenny, uh, they she's separated from

her family. Two that she they moved to Chicago, she and Kenning and that's where she has Byron, that that child, that first child, and then from Chicago to go to San Francisco. And you describe that so evocatively in your book. Can you talk about and you mentioned this earlier, why San Francisco was such a dangerous place for someone like Victoria at the time. What was going on in that city which wasn't even the quite a city yet um that made it a place first the Victoria would go,

and then that the place that she would leave. You know, it's amazing. San Francisco was another eight Um moment. Gold was discovered in San Francisco in California, and people flocked from all over the world. They rushed to California to get in on it. And the first wave of people who went, because it was such an unknown were men, largely men um. But Victoria soon joined them and her

decision was based simply it was very pragmatic. She couldn't continue as a ritualists and make the kind of money she needed to support Caning Byron and her entire family, and in fact, by this point she wanted to get rid of her family because Buck had had some more run ins with the law, and Victoria was old enough now to realize that he was a scoundrel and always

would be. So she broke away and went to the one place that promised possibly the hope that Caning could in fact resurrect some kind of medical career in a in a town like San Francisco, which was barely discernible as a town. I mean it was it was just beginning to have um cobblestone streets. It was a place where, um, I think that the ratio of men was ten to one, ten men to one woman. It was lawless. It was the main motivation for people there was in a self enrichment.

That was the only thing that drove them. That and pleasure, and so into this was into this came six senior old Victoria Woodhall, her child, her one year old child, and this drunken loud she carried around with her called a husband. And she once again, you know, she did the best she could. She went door to door trying to find employment because Caning, with so many bars in town, there was one area called the Barbary Coast, which is where uh It's most notorious, early early claim to fame

was where the topless waitress was born. So caning, you know, this was irresistible to him. He had bars and he had women, and so he was a happy man. Victoria got to work in order to support them, and so she went door to door. Um. First, she worked as a cigar girl for a little while, and the story is that the proprietor told her she was too fine to do that kind of work, which is essentially, no doubt, probably some kind of form of prostitution and so um.

Victoria then found a job sewing for an actress, and the actress said, you know, why don't you go on the stage, which is what what Victoria did. Now, she was a dramatist, but I don't know if she would have been a very good actress because I don't think she could have memorized other people's lines. I think she was too much of her own personality, and so at a certain point, though she was in several productions and said she made money, that was when she heard the

call from Tenny to come back home. And it could have just been that San Francisco in the life there was overwhelming, you know it was. She was a small town girl from Ohio, and though she had lived in Chicago, which was one of the major cities in the United States. Um, she still was I don't think prepared at that age. I mean what sixteen year old could have been for what she encountered there, given the responsibility she had for

her for her husband and child. And so she heard Tenny speaking to her, and in Victoria's telling, she dropped everything on the stage, left in her costume, grabbed canningwood Hall and Byron, and took off back to Ohio to be with her family and resume her career as a spiritualist. And during the Civil War years, uh so this is late eighteen if he's in then during the Civil War years, she and Tenny are are doing this work as they

travel around the border States and the Midwest. So, after a few years of traveling with the family and sometimes stepping away from them, when she says that Tenny's um talents are being prostituted, and you know, she's still committing crimes for buck Um. There's a point where Victoria ends up in St. Louis and she meets James Harvey Blood. Can you describe who James Harvey Blood was and how his relationship with Victoria became so important for both of them.

So in the years after the Civil Or, Victoria was found herself in in St. Louis at one period, which was a really interesting place for her to be because it was kind of a hub of um. It was a hub of spiritualism, but it was also a hub of radicalism. There were a lot of German immigrants, and one of the things that happened after that a lot of the people who fled the conflicts in Europe landed in the United States, and a lot of the German

article surprisingly went to St. Louis. So Victoria found herself in this kind of stew of of people who were engaged in spiritualism but also political reform, and she got her first kind of introduction to revolutionary politics there. But one one afternoon she was yet in a hotel um in a room where she rented to work as a spiritualist, and a Civil War veteran named James Harvey Blood walked in and he had had some He was a decorated soldier.

He was a important spiritualist in St. Louis. He was also a very radical reformer, though he was part of city government. He was elected city auditor of St. Louis, and he sat down because he was having personal problems with his wife, no doubt, and started confiding in Victoria. And I think Victoria saw in this man who physically and intellectually was so superior to any of the men who were involved in her life as as either her in her husband, or her family or her brothers in law,

who are all just absolute cads um. She saw in Colonel Harvey Blood, someone who was a wounded veteran who had suffered through that war, who had come out of it and continued to make something of himself, and also was questioning, questioning in the way she did the basis of society and the fairness of society, and the fairness of marital relations, and the fairness of of the class system in the United States, which you know, really is something that Americans always deny, but was part of the

actual problems that were arising in the mid eighteenth century and really came to to the forefront in the late nineteenth century. And James Harvey Blood, in his discussion with Victoria, must have absolutely won her over with whatever he said, because by the end of the session she heard from one of her spirit friends, and this time the spirit told her to tell James Harvey Blood that she saw that the two of them, that their future was connected,

and that they would that they would marry. Now, this was quite an interesting thing to say, because he was married and had a child, and she was married and had a child, and in mid century America, saying that kind of thing to a strange man in a darkened room would only lead to one conclusion, which would be that you were some kind of prostitute. But in fact,

Victoria was sincere. She saw that she could actually do with this man something she wanted to do, which at this point was actually starting to kind of a colonel was forming in her mind that she wanted to be somehow involved in a social movement that that tried to reform the marital relations, which she thought was the actual

fundamental problem in society. She thought that all of all social problems were rooted in bad marriages, and so Blood, Luckily for Victoria, who probably Blood was probably as a kind of swept away by her as she was by him, left the room and agreed and was in a very short time. They had each left their their respective spouses um and went traveling together in a caravan, which was basically kind of a getting to know each other trip um.

She worked as a spiritualist, but it was it was a completely different environment from anything she had experienced before. There was a freedom to their relationship and an intellectual exchange that she had never had with anyone. And I think that this was the moment when Victoria Woodhall as we came to know her, as as the world came to know her, was born. And actually Blood was her

first teacher. She had several teachers through her her through her life, but he was probably the most important because he gave her the history, the historical knowledge, and the the political sort of lessons, the political science lessons she needed to give words to the sorts of things that she was feeling, the inkling she had. She knew something was wrong, but Victoria didn't have a means of expressing it,

and Blood gave her a way of doing them. And it's that Victoria wood Halt now in conversation with James blood Um taking a you know, building up a critical vocabulary for the world around her, who ends up going to New York. As you mentioned earlier, Demosthenes speaks to her, gives her an address, and she and Tenny and then the Clafland clan following along arrive in New York. And it's not very long before they meet Cornelius Vanderbilt, which

is a wild turn of events for them. Can you talk about, uh, their life in New York and how they ended up getting in with Vanderbilt When they arrived in New York, you know, they had no connections there and so and it was, as you say, the entire Clafland clan followed, um and uh So Victoria and Tenny got to work doing what they did best. They're they're only sure way of making money, which was working as spiritualists, and Tenny was an expert of laying out of hands,

and Victoria was the spiritualist advisor. And h. Buck Claflin did what he did, which would go out and try to recruit clients. Now, it's it's difficult to imagine someone like Cornelia's Vanderbilt actually being accessible to someone like buck Claflin. But in those days, Um, the world was so much smaller. New York was so small and and and actually a guy like Vanderbilt. Though he was financially, you know, fabulously wealthy, socially, he wasn't that much farther up the social scale than

than the Claflands. You know. Kind of the robber barons of the of the late nineteenth century in America, we're pretty much, um, how can I say this politely? They were pretty much con men and and and really they weren't. They weren't the kind of um uh, they didn't have a sort of noble they were. They weren't. They weren't an aristocracy. Let me say that the the the the robber barons of America were the product of Jacksonian America.

Actually they were. They were men all men who literally picked themselves us, whether bootstrapped, found a way to make some money, and by hook or crook, legal or illegal, um a master of fortune. And so Buck found Cornelius Vanderbilt knew somehow, through whatever spiritual is grapevine, that he believed in spirits, and he went to see them because he also knew that Vanderbilt had just lost his wife, and so he was he was chagrined and lonely, and

he was in his seventies. And Buck could offer him the services of his daughters, Victoria to soothe his mind, to calm his mind, and talk to his dead wife, who could then communicate with Vanderbilt and Tenny to take care of the old man's physical loneliness, which is what she did. And it's it's absolutely um hilarious when you

think about. You know, Vanderbilt would have been in his in his seventies, Tenny was in her early twenties, and she was this rambunctious, you know, vivacious, wonderful creature, completely mad, full of life, up for any adventure, and she revived his spirits. Probably just by laying eyes on her was

enough for him. And and Victoria then spoke to her from this vast experience she had, and what she shared with him was not only a belief in spiritualism, but he too had a son who he believed was um not well as a result of of the fact that

he married his first cousin. And so Vanderbilt had always blamed himself for his son, his son's uh problems, and and so Victoria could counsel him from the position of her own experience with that in that regard, and so they became confidence of Cornelius Vanderbilt one of the most important and wealthiest man in America, And you know, it's one of these incredible American stories that you know, they went literally overnight from being no One in New York

to being within the circle where all of the powerful decisions are made. And Vanderbilt began to give them financial advice, which led to one of Victoria's first first you know that this Wall Strip brokerage from that she Antennie opened. Yeah, can you describe what the steps were for them getting to that point and and maybe how the Gold Ring and Black Friday of eighteen sixty nine played a role in them becoming successful. Stock broke the the whole cowboy

atmosphere of Wall Street. It was an entirely male universe.

The idea of a woman being a Wall Street trainer was unthinkable, and I think sometimes I in researching this and in writing about it and reading, you know, going back and reading this book again, I think for Vanderbilt may have been just having a good laugh, you know, sending the likes of Tenny and Victoria Uh into that atmosphere, you know, to Delmonico's, which was the restaurant where they all the traders eight and where there was a stock ticker, you know, going at all at all hours, and and

to have them sitting in a carriage outside the stock exchange, you know, exchanging tips with the brokers. It was all great theater. But Victoria took it very seriously because she knew this was a way, I mean, this was a paradise for her, because this was a way she could make a lot of money in a very short time. And so Vanderbilt Um started giving them tips which they couldn't go into the stock exchange to actually make the transactions. They would have to have a man go in and

make it for them. Um. In one particular Friday, which was uh in eight sixty nine, there was a scheme cot Ulyssius S. Grant was the President of the United States at the time, and he was his administration was exceedingly corrupt, and two of the traders, two of the big traders on Wall Street, Gym Fiskin and Jay Gould had Um knew that every week Grant sold a lot of gold on the market to try to keep kind of keep the coffers, the Unit States coffers, government coffers full,

and it was a weekly sort of release of precious metals to enrich the government. Through a an acquaintance, they decided to try to convince Grant not to sell, and so that would drive up the price of gold and it would become even more precious than it normally was. And so Jay Gold and gem Fisk, knowing that this was going to happen, could buy up a lot of the gold and have it at a lower price. When this picket was turned off, when when Grant would stop selling,

well that happened. But then Grant learned of the scheme, and so in a counter move, he opened the flood again and the gold started pouring out onto the market. Branderbilt had been privy to all of this, and so he told Kent Tenny and in Victoria that this was going to happen. And so on the day this Black Friday in eighteen sixty nine occurred, Victoria was there buying up gold. It was dropping in price, dropping like a stone.

And in that day she amassed a sizeable fortune, in fact, such a fortune that she could use it to finance not only her crazy family and her life in New York, but she could start a newspaper, she could start a brokerage, firm she could. She basically set herself up for for what would become a political career two years later, three years later. And there's also I didn't put this in my questions to you, but I realized after I'd send them to you that we should talk about this UM

eight sixty nine. There's also the Women's Rights Convention in Washington, d C. And Victoria goes, can you describe that a

little bit? Victoria was basically a communicator, and she she knew the message that the most important message that she had learned through her own experiences in life, through her relationship with Blood, through all of the women and men that she met as a spiritualist, through the many years she traveled throughout the United States, was the need for fundamental social reform, personal personal reform at a personal level between a husband and a wife that could only occur

through legislation if women had equal rights. And so Victoria was scheming with Blood. They needed to have some kind of political platform. They needed to have possibly a newspaper, you know, to disseminate this information. They needed to be aligned with the political party. But none of the parties that were available at that time or had any power at that time would have been radical enough for them.

And so Victoria knew of the women's rights movement, but she had had actually no exchange with them at that point. In the eighteen sixty nine, and so there was a convention of women in Washington, d C. An annual convention, and she went there just to get a lay of

the land, just to see what was happening. Um. She went purely as a spectator, and what she saw was a lot of earnest women aking to each other about each other, but having absolutely no impact on Capitol Hill, you know, on the US Congress, which was just a

few blocks away from where they were meeting. And so Victoria left that left that um that session, realizing that these women could talk to each other, you know until the until these women could continue talking to each other, but would never have any impact because no one was paying attention. And Victoria knew she was a great propagandist, and she knew that in order to get the attention of Congress, she would need to make a huge splash.

And so she left that meeting not having actually made any connections with the Women's The Women's movement leaders back to New York with blood and they decided to um to create a newspaper would hold on Clafland's weekly, because that would be her voice, and in in doing so, Victoria announced what could only be reckless, if not crazy,

that she was going to run for president. A woman was going to run for president, the woman who had been the first who by this point was the first broker on Wall Street, a woman who had the backing of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had her own newspaper in New York. Uh, this caught the attention, This was irresistible to the New York press, and the stories were carried all the way to Washington. At this point, nobody really paid attention to her,

but she was deadly earnest. And you know, whether she thought she was actually going to be president as another question. I don't think she ever really assumed that that would happen. But she just needed to make a statement that was bold enough and broad enough and loud enough that she could get the attention not only of people in New York,

but the women's movement and hopefully members of Congress. Can you say a little more about Now we're into the seventies, can you say a little more about the breath of the women's movement and its work kind of what was going on there and put it maybe in conversation with you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation growing labor radicalism and and how these forces were impacting and shaping each other, and what Victoria saw in the political landscape

when she looked at at what was going on in American life. Yeah. One of the interesting things that happened, you know, the evolution Victoria's own personal evolution from a spiritual is talking one on one two people um to a woman who's out on a platform declaring herself president candidate for president, actually mirrored what was happening more broadly socially.

And it's really fascinating because the kind of conversations that were murmured, you know, before the Civil War, um in the in the in the in the eighteen forties, and the kind of revolutions that occurred in eighty eight, and the discussions and the political arguments that began to heat up erupted of course in the Civil War in the United States, but afterwards they didn't die down, and in fact, groups coalesced and one of the most powerful groups, two

of the most powerful groups to coal US. We were labor unions, and this was something that was happening in Europe. And in fact, once again we can talk about Carl Marx because he had formed in eighteen sixty four something called the International working Men's Association, and the goal was trade had become cross border, and corporations and industrialists were working as kind of a party or almost a union among themselves to keep money and power consolidated across borders.

But at the level of industrialists and unions started forming. Marks was among the most vocal and prominent supporters of labor unions and that idea, their idea and his idea was if industrialists are going to form associations to protect one another across borders and across industry, then workers had to do the same. And so uh he started this International working Man's Association, which had UH sections throughout Europe and the United States, and Victoria became part of that.

And which is such a wonderful idea that the idea that Victoria Woodhall is teaming up with Carl Marx. Karl Marx knew nothing of Victoria woodhallum she was she was part of the New York section and in fact She was, of course head of the New York Sections Section twelve. But this was all unbeknownst to Mars. Marx had his own, you know, he had troubles of his own without dealing

with that Victoria Woodhall. But at the same time, the women's movement, that was another center of political and social power that was emerging, and there were factions within the women's movement. There was the veterans out of eighteen forty eight, out of the Seneca Falls meeting, who were pushing, you know, towards the vote. They thought that the path to women's liberation and to equality in society was through giving women

the right to vote. There was another section that thought that that was much too bold, that women shouldn't be in the political arena, that that was a dirty place, you know, for men, and that they should that women should more quietly, behind the scenes, try to influence their husband's toward equality. Well, Victoria, coming out of that eighteen sixty nine meeting, said neither would do the work, neither would be good enough or strong enough, or would actually

touch the core of the problems. She said that until women actually owned their own bodies, actually owned the right to their own bodies. Um, there could be no such thing as women right, women's rights. If they had the vote, it wouldn't make any difference as long as they were still the property of a man, whether it be their

father or their husband. And so she came in with an incredibly radical platform, um and talked about women in a way that really polite society had never heard and certainly had never been discussed by the women's rights movements. So she was sort of this meeting place, through her newspaper and through her work in New York, kind of the place where radical labor and radical women's rights came together. And and she was, you know, became, uh, the sort

of titular head of that. And right, she wasn't declaring herself a candidate for president on her own. She was a member of the Equal Rights Party. Can you talk about the Equal Rights Party and how it relates to the i w A and some of the other things that were going on. Yeah, the Equal Rights Party was uh, actually just formed out of the labor movement, the spiritualist It was a kind of an umbrella party for radical reformers.

And these were the people who, um would never fit comfortably in the in the parties as the political parties as he existed, and Victoria once again, they were sort of the there was the same constituency, constituency she would have talked to as a spiritualist in the earlier years. They were the working people. They were the they were the laborers. They were the people who you know, whose

bodies filled the tenements. They were the people who were at the losing end of this new industrial system and the very system that the industrialists and the religious leaders, the preachers like Henry Ward Beecher, who will talk about the people who are the politicians you know in Washington, who supposedly represented who supposedly we're looking out for, but in fact had absolute disdain for. And so Victorian's victorious party gave voice to these people and gave power to them.

And and she said, you know, I will be your leader. And where she thought she was actually going to lead them, or where they thought she was going to lead them, was never very clear, but it was just enough that someone was speaking for them and speaking so boldly. You know, she was a young woman still, she was in her thirties, early thirties, and she was out on a platform speaking in the kind of English that um that the working

classes could understand speaking of her own travails. So she she imparted to them the idea that she wasn't speaking at them, she was speaking with them and for them. And so she she became an extremely powerful figure. And in fact, some of the members of the women's movement, the Old Guard Elizabeth, Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who were very actually very radical in their own way, would never have gone as far as Victoria. But they

saw in her a generational shift. You know, she was she was about thirty years younger than Susan B. Anthony, and and so they saw in her the problems of the future. And in fact they saw that rightly because the women they spoke to were the wives of um um sort of gentleman farmers, you know, the wives of business small business owners, the wives of ministers, the wives of academics. The women Victoria spoke to were why were women who are actually working yet, you know, who had

been forced to join this industrial workforce. Who were the new telephone operators and telegraph operators and the type you know who manned the typewriters, And they were a new labor force who no one had had to deal with before, and no one quite knew what to do with and you know, so they had all new issues which we are talking about even today, you know, child care and maternity leave and all those kinds of things. I mean,

this was brand new. Victoria Saul saw all of those problems because she had lived them, and so it was just her. She She was a really wonderful kind of unifying figure that anyone with the foresight just to recognize it, could have seen that she was. She was where politics had to go, she was where the women's movement had to go. And yet she was very threatening, as you can imagine, to the powers that be because at this time Victoria's political career kind of began eighteen seventy eight

seventy one and really blossomed in eighteen seventy two. This was another time in Europe where the streets were exploding. Um. In eighteen seventy Paris had um had been under bombardment. There was a Franco Prussian war, which I won't get into, but it had left Paris besieged and the French government basically the europe the powers in Europe left the Parisians

to their own devices. They the pressure had won and the Prussian forces were surrounding Paris, and the Parisians had to decide, what do we do, you know, how do we survive? How do we keep literally the Prussians out of the city. And so they formed what was a commune, and within this city a rebellion occurred. Paris is often the home of revolution, and this was another case of that, where a seed among people who had absolutely nothing, who

had been starved, you know, we're eating rats. At this point, a seat of rebellion rose that actually threatened, was so threatening and so powerful and so violent, um that headlines around the world, including in the United States, were were full of fear and trembling over this new populist, this working class, this class associated with Marx and his International working Man's Association, who were who were rising up and taking control of this city and who threatened, you know,

the stability of France post Postpression War, post post Franco Pression War France. And they were wild rumors in the United States and throughout Europe about the spread of this revolution. And so against that backdrop, Victoria was actually preaching revolution. Now, some of this was coming from blood, some of it was coming from the International Workingman's Association that she was aligned with UM, and some of it was coming from

her own experience. And what she was saying was absolute cat nip to the audience she was speaking to, because they wanted nothing so much as a revolution, because they were suffering, and they were starving, and they were working, you know, seven days a week for for for wages that didn't feed them that quid with which they couldn't

feed their families. And so Victoria was exceedingly dangerous. Not only was she out there speaking to large audiences and accumulating greater and greater crowds, but she did so with flair and beauty and intelligence and and uh, and she started to become very threatening. Some of her significant, well known collaborators we were men, were Stephen Pearl Andrews and

Benjamin Butler. Can you talk about how those two guys played a role in her, her politics, her publishing, what they brought to their collaborations with Victoria, and and what she took from from them. Yeah, Yeah, it's throughout Victoria's life She's had she had several really important mentors. So one was blood, uh. The other in finance was Cornelius Vanderbilt. Stephen Pearl Andrews was her kind of genius for publishing

in the publishing sphere. She had. She had started the newspaper with blood and and it was open to all kinds of radical ideas, and it was really a clear it was it was kind of a what we know today and an aggregator, you know. She would allow anybody to print whatever they would publish whatever they wanted in her newspaper. She was all for all for press freedom and letting any kind of voice who wanted to be

published speak. And in fact she was the first. Her newspaper was the first in the United States to publish the Communist Manifesto. So she was not um, she was not afraid of of diverse and radical voices in her in her newspaper. Stephen Pearl Andrews had been kind of in semi retirement for a while. He was one of these fringe figures in the United States who would dabbled

in everything philosophy, journalism, academics, a bit of politics. And he saw in this newspaper but he had a lot to say, He had a lot to get off as chest, and he saw in this newspaper and in Victorious circle a place where he could do that. And so he came to her as a journalist and said, you know,

I can help you edit this paper. And in fact, she was so busy launching her political career um and juggling so many things, that she kind of handed it off to him with blood supervising, and Stephen Pearl Andrews under his Under his direction, the Woodhull and Kathleen's Clafland's Weekly became an incredible muckraking organ. He was afraid of no one. Of course, he had nothing to lose. It wasn't his newspaper. All he risked was being thrown in

jail for libel. But he went after corporations, he went after industrialists. He even went after the most important preacher in the country, Henry Ward Beecher, who was this sanctimonious powerhouse in Brooklyn. Uh, the head of the famous Beecher clan, who whoo, who were on the right side of all

issues and above reproach um. Stephen Pearl Andrews was the first one to kind of hint at in her newspaper that uh Beecher was not all he seemed, and so Victoria, through him Victoria learned kind of the art of unmasking these hypocrites, which which was also something she really understood, because she thought society was hypocritical to its core, that men were given liberties and rights that women could never exercise, and and she couldn't understand, you know, how that could

be allowed in what was called a democracy. So Stephen Pearl Andrews was her her man in publishing. Benjamin Butler was her mentor in all things Washington politics. He was a Massachusetts congressman who was kind of one of these figures. I often tried to think of who he would have been in contemporary terms. And when I was writing this, it was the heyday of the it was the Clinton, the Bill Clinton administration, and I kind of thought of as a left wing New Gingridge type figure. You know.

He was someone a real polemius pist who everyone knew about and nobody was that crazy about on any side

of the issues, but you couldn't ignore him. And so Benjamin Butler gave Victoria access to Congress, access to the House Judiciary Committee, where she delivered a speech demanding women's rights and became the first woman to ever do that in US history, and and he gave her um quick tutorial in in the in the in the workings of Washington, in lobbying, in the power structure, in who she had to read and who she had to reach in order

to make a difference. And and she in seventy one she went to Washington address the committee, unbeknownst to address the House Judicial Judiciary Committee with Butler's with Butler's help, and unbeknownst to the Women's Suffragettes who were the women's rights movement who were gathered in Washington at that same time to once again have their convention, to once again speak to each other. Victoria out of nowhere, had gained access to Congress, something that they hadn't been able to

do since. And so this was another way of her making a huge, dramatic move that thrust her into the limelight and in fact to the top of the She went from being no one in the women's rights movement to being, you know, one of the most important players. And so Butler helped put her there. Can you say a little more about the relationship between the women's rights movements and spiritualism at this point in the in the seventies especially, I'm thinking about the advocacy from some spiritualists

like Victoria for what they were calling free love. Can you talk about what free love meant and how it you know, either created friends or enemies in the women's rights movement. Yeah, so one of one of the one of the the third rail of American politics, um of actually American social life for social dis course was something called free love at that time, and Victoria Um was accused of being the high priestess of free love. And

spiritualism had sort of evolved. Spiritualism became by the eighteen seventies became a huge tent that accepted all manner of reformers, and Victoria was one of them. And Victoria's specialty was, of course social reform, and the social reform she preached was was one in which she said, you know, every individual should have the right to love who they want, when they want, for however long they want, without society having the right to pass judgment on her or her

or him or in any way make that illegal. In other words, there should be divorce laws. You know, women should be able to get a divorce, women should have property rights, um, Men should be able to leave abusive relationships as well without any kind of uh, without any kind of stain. Victoria spoke the kind of language that

we speak today. You know, the society she envisioned was pretty much the one we have where well, to a certain extent, whereas where governments stay as much as possible out of out of a person's personal life, or which she would call out of a person's bedroom. Her critics, who by now we're growing because they were so terrified of her for political reasons, we're quick to label that free love. And in fact, the Spiritualists were often denounced

as being free lovers. Now you know that phrase free love, you can imagine what Middle America would have thought of that. You know, America was still a very pious country, a very Christian country, and a very supposedly moral country, even though you know, prostitution was rife. Um, you know, marriages were full of abuse, sexual and physical. You know, it's it's the same old story where there's a surface narrative

and then there's what actually happens behind closed doors. And so the free love handle was someone that was given Victoria in order to discredit her, and she never really shied away from that. In fact, in one of her most famous speeches, she said, because of the hypocrisy of that, you know, because of the hypocrisy of the people who were calling her a free lover who she knew, you know, were men who were engaged in extramarital affairs, you know,

who frequented prostitutes, who were drunks or or leeches. And she declared, in one of her most famous New York speeches, you know, yes, I'm a free lover, you know, and and no one has the right to tell me that I can't be. And when you think about it, it's such a basic claim. It's such a basic human right, you know, that you should be able to love whom you choose. And she wasn't even talking in those days

about gay rights. She was just talking about the actual, the actual ability of a woman to declare herself, um to be the to be, to be in a relationship when she wanted, without any regard for the legal legal

limit limitations or strictures. And so Victoria, um ah, Victoria and the spiritualists, because the Spiritualists were also becoming part of the political reform movement, the labor movement, although albeit at kind of the nutcase side of it, you know, the Marxist of this world were appalled by the idea of spiritualist embracing um the tenants of the International Workingman's Association, because they were so Marks was so afraid of being discredited by this group um, which he of course had

no truck with, because he was much too much a materialist to think that he was. Anyone could get any kind of message from someone beyond the grave, but whether it be a dead spouse or a god, and so um. The the spiritualists, though to the normal mainstream politician in the United States, were a dangerous group. They were an outlying group, but they were growing group and a growing

political force. And so to tire them with the label free lovers and to te Toria with that label um went a long way to discredit them among people who might have been listening. You know. But we're taken aback by that, and certainly wouldn't want to be associated. When we come to Victoria and Claplands or woodhul on Claughland's weekly publishing, The Beach or Tilton Affair, can you talk about, uh, maybe in the life of the publication you talked about how it was kind of an aggregator, a grab bag.

All kinds of things were going into it. Can you talk about what hit those pages that was such a big deal and why? Yeah, Um, Victoria in the in the eight seven, in the early eighteen seventies, eighteen seventy one. Um, she was under so much pressure, um and under and

being so criticized from so many quarters. Because as soon as she became a radical radical politically, all of the people who tolerated her, the wall streets, the Vanderbilts of this world, Um, the kind of up across New York society who thought of her as a novelty, you know, a lovely novelty with a you know, with an engaging personality and a curious message of women's rights, started to

abandon her because she became politically dangerous. Um and and it infuriated her because she knew all of their secrets and she knew, um that she was going to go down because she had no she had no backer, she had no supporters within the establishment to help her or defend her. And and she had come across um Henry Beecher's uh sorry, Henry Ward Beecher, who was the probably the most he was kind of the Billy Graham of his time. He was the most prominent preacher in America,

absolutely untouchable figure. And she knew from the women's rights grape Brian and from the Grapevine in New York that not only had he been having affairs with his parishioners for decades, but that he had actually had enough fair by his closest associate, had an affair with the with the wife of his closest associate, Theater Tilton, and had impregnated her, and the wife either had a miscarriage or

an abortion. Now that kind of a scandal in that period of America, when not only was the power structure kind of under siege with the you know, with the threat of the Commune, but it was also the period of the Grant Ulysses Grant administration, which you know, was rife with corruption and um, and so the stability that might have come from Washington wasn't there. So all all

aspects of American life were under threat. The idea that the top religious figure in the country was also fallible, in fact, not just fallible, you know, but but um but a liar and allege was would be would be a powerful statement for her to make. But she hung back she didn't. She didn't use that information against him until it got to the point that Victoria was absolutely desperate, and so she didn't expose Beecher. What she did was she wrote a letter in the New York Times to

describe the hypocrisy of American culture. And she said that you know, she knows personally of a powerful preacher who practices free love, but is too timid to preach it, to to declare it, and that she wishes that the people who believed as she did that men and women should be free um in the in the domestic and social and personal arena um, that they should come forward. If they did that, then then you know her position

would be more secure. Um. Of course, that threats, so called, that very veiled threat was met by Beecher and his group um with with absolute terror. Beacher's sisters were Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Kavin, and a woman named Catherine Beecher, who had written, although she was unmarried and childless, had written was which was considered the kind of ATR. Spock's manual on child rearing at that point in American history. And so these were women with

exceedingly powerful voices. So the three of them got together to destroy Victoria and Victoria. Harry Beacher still ran a serial in a magazine called um uh god care anyway. There was a character and a Harriet Beacher still ran a ran a serial in a magazine with a character called Audacia Dang your eyes and the and the person was absolutely recognizable as Victoria. And it was mocking, and it was cruel and Victoria, um there were There was

a lot of Victoria what would swallow? But that went too far, and so Victoria decided that she would challenge Henry Ward Beecher. She was going to give a speech on free love, the one I mentioned earlier where she declared herself a free lover. And she said to Henry Ward Beecher, if you present me in this speech, if you come out on the stage with me, I won't. I'll keep your secret. I want you to declare who

you are by presenting me. And Henry ward Beacher and his sniveling, according to Victoria's sniveling on his couch, said I can't do that, but I'll pay for the I'll pay for the evening. I'll give you two hundred thousand dollars or or no, sorry, I'll give you twenty dollars to pay for the evening, um for you to rent Apollo Hall for the event, but I can't be there myself. So she said, I'll I'll assume you're going to come.

She didn't take no for answer. I'll assume you're going to come, and if you don't come, then I'm not responsible for the consequences and so um. Henry Ward Beacher proved himself not to be courageous enough to do with. Then she proceeded to do, which was declare herself a free lover. And uh. The wrath that fell upon Victoria after that was sensational, and so in her newspaper and

November and I'm sorry. In October two she decided to tell the story of the Beach your Tilton affair, and in black and white in this newspaper um she went into all the gory details and exposed him for who he was and brought down this house of cards, which was, you know, the Beecher family, the Congregational Church in Brooklyn, the religious pillar upon which so much of the moral American myth was built. She brought it down in that article, and the the issue flew off the stands. They couldn't

keep it. Uh, everyone wanted to read it. No one wanted to report it, but everyone wanted to repeat it. And so Victoria, in taking that rash step, basically um

ended her political career. Ironically, it was the month before she was on the ballot as a presidential candidate that she that she wrote this piece, or that she allowed this piece to be published in her in her newspaper, And on the morning of the election day, she was in jail for having distributed that newspaper through the mail, thereby breaking US violating US obscenity laws by mailing obscene material. Obscene material being the story of the Beach your Tilton affair,

which everyone was trying to cover up. So it was a bold and reckless move on her part. But she did what she set out to do, which was exposed the hypocrisy in American society. No, it's it's a seven. A couple of years later that Victoria leaves the United States, can you talk about what her life was like an intervening years those couple of years before she finally goes Yeah,

Victoria was fairly discredited politically among the society. She had come to know, in her early years in New York, and the women's rights movement really wanted nothing to do with her because with exposing the Tilton Beach your scandal, she she had she had gone too far, and she was a liability, of political liability for the women's movement. And so Victoria was on her own, and she retreated where she knew she would still be welcome, which would be to the Spiritualist And so she became one of

the great speakers on the Spiritualist circuit. And and she was more bold than she ever had been. And she basically had nothing to lose because she had lost just about everything. And she told it as she saw it, um, and her speeches um were um, you know, filled to capacity wherever she went. But by eye she was really exhausted.

And so um Cornelius Vanderbilt had died and his son's his family was so afraid that Victoria or that Tenney, who had been the old man's lover, was going to try to claim some kind of of money from him, or that they would then go and expose Vanderbilt for what he was um that they paid, literally paid Victoria and Tenny to leave town. And so Victoria decided to take that whole crazy Clafland client with her to England, UM,

and there she went to re establish herself. Victoria sought to leave the United States to go as far as England because she needed to escape the the Tilton m beat Your scandal. She had emerged from it, you know, wounded, devastated, she had lost everything. Henry Ward Beacher had not. He was still as powerful as he ever had been. In fact, he had been working on a book on the life of Christ, so he was still um, the figure, the moral authority in the United States. So Victoria in retreat.

It was one of the few times she actually ever retreated, but it was just exhaustion on her part. She she went to England and tried to re establish herself there among the spiritualists UM and as a as a as a speaker in that country and in the audience, I mean,

as happened to her time and again. She was such a such a um, such a magnetic figure that in the audience there was a gentleman, a banker from an old, well established British banking family, UM, a man named John Biddolf Martin, who heard her and was so moved by what she said that he began to court her, and this was exactly the kind of um sanctuary that Victoria needed. Luckily for her, John Martin was not your average banker.

His closest relative had been a sister who had just died, and she had been a spiritualist, and she had been a women's rights advocate. And John Martin himself was a was a social reformer. So Victoria literally fell into this man's arms, and and they they were married, and she became not I wouldn't say a pillar of British society, of British kind of upper class society. But she became one of those American women who appear out of nowhere,

out of New York. Usually they came with a bundle of cash to try to to in order to save a dying aristocratic family or to save them from ruin. Victoria came to save a lonely banker from his solitude. And so she lived in England, uh for for many years until her death in and Um. Yes, and and she lived a retired existence in comparison to how she lived in the United States, but one that was actually

befitting a woman of her age in those times. But she was in no way less radical and in fact, UH she was part of the spiritualist movement UM and she was also part of the eugenics movement, which was very interesting and it makes sense why she would be because when you think about what motivated her when she was a fifteen year old girl, her first political lesson was that women should women should be instructed how to take care of themselves physically so they can make sure

that they have a child who is healthy. And that that little Colonel was something that followed Victoria all her life, that life lesson, that was her mission. Even as an older woman when she was in London UM in the in the beginning of the twentieth century, she she was an advocate of eugenics because she thought that until people understood the actually the mechanics of their bodies UM and still they understood health, UH and well being, that society

would always produce an underclass that was poor. And it wasn't that she was trying to create a master race by any means. What she did was she just used that information she had gotten all those years as a spiritualist, and and and the tales of woe that parents told her parents who had no money and and came and you know, described their children who were dying young, who were dying at birth, or who lived with um physical or or or mental ailments. And that and in Victoria

and her own self education had come to learn. And also when she got to England, she she studied more the idea that if people understood health, physical health, then and if poorer women could be told and given health care and could be told how to take care of themselves and given proper nutritional information, that this group of people, this under class, might not be condemned to generation after

generation of poverty. And so that's what what what drew Victoria to that movement, and it's absolutely understandable is the thread throughout her political life, throughout her spiritual life, and into her and into her old age. Now, that year when Victoria does leave the United States, h it's also a critical year for for the movements in America that

I wanted to build the world Victoria and Vision. Can you talk a little more about what happened in that year when Victoria had felt like she lost and was leaving, what else happened in her radical circles that that shaped how much of that world they imagined they would achieve in the evolution of the labor movement and UM the radical political movements UM in Europe and the United States by the late eighteen seventies, the second generation of labor

radicals who would have been kind of Victoria's age, UM. You know, she's a second generation UM feminists. They didn't call themselves feminists of the second generation women's rights advocate. The second generation labor activists in Europe and the United States were much more radical UM than the first generation were then then let's say Karl Marxist generation. They were the second generation who were operating in the eighteen seventies,

were taking their fight to the street. And part of it were lessons that they had and from the commune, from the communities in the early seventies in Paris. But part of it was just UM the frustration of the working the labor movement, which saw its efforts to combine and to grow as a political force being stifled by this powerful beast which was called capitalism, which interestingly enough, had only actually begun being called capitalism UM in the

in the mid century. So this was an entirely new phenomenon that people only were beginning to grapple with this this mammoth force that was controlling people's lives and chewing workers up and spitting them out without you know, shedding a tear. And so the labor movement became very radical in the seventies. In the years between eighteen seventy seven and eighteen when Victoria was in England, she had lost touch with what was happening in the United States and

she had been off the stage. She had been off the off the kind of political radar and the women's rights radar um and had actually taken refuge in this kind of bourgeois existence she had in London with her new husband. And she went back to the United States.

She decided that she wanted to get back on the circuit because she had revived herself and she there's certain things happened, and she uh had had a a brush with the with the British Museum, a libel suit where she um she had sued the British Museum because it contained several several pamphlets pertaining to the Beecher Tilton scandal, and and Victoria wanted that out of her life. You know, she had moved to England to get rid of that, and so she she she sued the British Museum for

a libel because they had these pamphlets. And so the result of that lawsuit was mixed a judge rule that yes, Victoria had been libeled by these pamphlets, that she was not this free lover and this wanton woman described in these brochures of these documents that came out of New York Um that were in the British Museum's possession, but that the museum itself was not guilty of liabel. Well, Victoria, in her way declared it a victory entirely for her for herself, and so she felt now that she had

finally put that scandal behind her. She felt that that was kind of the bookmark um at the end of the Batriot Tilton scandal, she could go back to the United States and maybe revived not a political career, but at least a speaking career, become a relevant voice again. But she arrived in the United States to an entirely different scene. It had moved beyond her argument. The women's rights movement was now focused entirely on getting the vote

for women. The political movement was the the was radical and looked at her as a kind of a middle aged, wealthy woman. You know, that's how she appeared, and in fact that's who she was. You know, her spirit was still Victoria Woodhall, but people had also forgotten her. So the audience she had previs Lee was not there. And it was kind of a sad coda to her to her career because her one and only lecture there fell flat,

and so she canceled. She made some excuses and canceled her tour and retreated to England and John Martin, her husband, had a family property in the in Gloucestershire and the west of England, and she she literally would move there and live in this grand house up on a hill and wage for the rest of her life, wage very small battles for education, for UM, driving for drives, for women's rights to drive, of all things UM. She got

involved in UM in minor scuffles with local authorities. She was still that fighter, is still Victoria Woodhall, but her days of trying to change basically America and by and and the world were were well passed her. So in kind of thinking from the end of her life back can summing it up, do you do you see any peers for Victoria in kind of the sweep of American history. I mean, with all these firsts with you mentioned her courage, with her sensitivity, with being so far ahead of her time. Um,

she's a remarkable person. Um. Are there any others people kind of stand with her? Or does she kind of stand alone? To you? In my mind, she stands alone. You know. When I was writing about her, whenever you write history, you know, you refer to your own experiences and people you you know, contemporary and so at this time when I was writing, it was during the Clinton administration and Hillary Clinton was out there, and I'd sometimes think, you know, is she a Hillary Clinton type of figure?

But no, I mean Victoria was really there are there are and and as I said you know before, there is a there's a wealth of history that hasn't been told, and most of it is you know, minorities and women's stories. But um, and so no doubt there are other Victoria Woodhalls out there. Um. But in my mind, she's unique in that she was such a singular figure that was

powerful on her own. I mean, when you think about it, she had people who educated her along the way, but the energy that propelled her for decades was her own based on nothing but her own will, her own spirit, her own sense of justice, her own sense of righting, you know, wrongs wrongs on a massive scale, and and the fact that she was able to do that and and to have the courage and um and to make such an impact at a time when women didn't even have a voice. So it's not just that she was

about breaking barriers, she actually broke the barriers. Now, you know, she was reckless, she wasn't shrewd politically, and so she was easily dismissed by you know, because she went too far and she wasn't a very good chess player. But I think as a historical figure in American an American feminist history, I think that she stands alone, and and I think that she's someone who deserves even more more

research than I did. I think that to look at her, you know, kind of as you're kind of talking about it across disciplines, you know, it's not just as a spiritualist, not just as a politician, it's not just as women's right. Yet to really embed her in what was going on at the time makes you appreciate her even more. And and I think that for what we're going through today. Um you know, we're at a place now where we're going through another revolution that's really comparable to the Industrial

Revolution in scale and profound impact on society. And and one of the interesting things is, you know that historically, when people are scared because of changes they have no control over or they don't understand, they seek solace and spiritualism or religion or something. I don't really see that happening now, and I maybe you do. I was racking my brain to think that if there's that kind of a revival now, but it's interestingly, I don't think it's happening.

But um ah, but Victoria kind of speaks to us again because unbelievably, the very rights she was talking about, you know, while women can vote, and while women do have rights to property ownership and they're not the property of their husbands, you know, we're still talking about abortion rights, and we're still talking about you know, gay rights, and

we're still talking about government interference in personal lives. And so the the war she was waging then she could be waging today, you know, basically almost using the same language, which is really both sad and kind of interesting. Uh, you know, and so I think that she's a very

pertinent figure for us to study at this moment. And that period of history is a fascinating one for us to look at because of the because of the changes that were occurring, and the fact that you know, where society was at eighteen no one could have predicted where it would have been even in eighteen seventy, and so where we are today. You know, we sometimes think is this over? You know, is the mayhem, the kind of

the social mayhem, the technological breakthroughs? Is it over? You know, it's far from over, and we've got a long way ahead. And so um, it's it's interesting to see who the Victoria wood Halls might be today and who what are they saying, and and how and where who should we listen to and what directions are they pointing pointing in um, And you know, she came out of nowhere, and and maybe the next Victoria wood Hall is just out there

writing a blog somewhere. Hey, folks, it's Aaron here. I hope today's interview helped you deep in your understanding of everything involved in the world of spiritualism. But we're not done yet. We have more interviews to share with you, So stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear a preview of next week's interview. Next time on un Obscured. I think I've always been I don't know if you'd say gifted, but at least fascinated by outliers. These are

the wildest of the wild folks. I think I've always been able to, I don't know, walk along the beach sand and find some odd thing that other people don't notice, or some piece of glass that looks shiny. Uh. And these are definitely those kinds of people, you know, within the wide range of the spiritualist movement, I seem to be able to find, you know, the toad and the hole or the serpent in the garden, if you might say.

And I think by looking at those outliers, you can see stuff that's true within the movement, but maybe harder to see if that's true in potential, and that leads you into questioning main narrative about what spiritualism was and trying to follow its logic. A Lot Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,

and Josh Thayne in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to are other shows over at history unobscured dot com and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a production of I Heart

Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit i heeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.