Victoria Claflin Woodhull—Con Artist, Feminist, Broker, Presidential Candidate Too Hot to Handle

Victoria Claflin Woodhull at the height of her fame.

Note—In the 147 years since Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman nominated for president only one woman—Hillary Clinton—earned the nomination of a major political party and despite her fame, long political resume, and declared status as a prohibitive favorite but lost—albeit by Electoral College smoke and mirrors—to a grafter and transparent idiot.  This year there is raising expectations that the Democrats might give the nod to another woman, most likely Elizabeth Warren.  But some semi-respectable pundits still cluck their tongues and warn that it is still not time for a woman President.  Looking back the platform that Woodhull ran on seems strikingly modern and even a preview of current intersessional theory.  

Victoria Claflin Woodhull was nominated for President of the United States on April 10, 1872 almost 50 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in all of the United States.  Woodhull stood apart from other leaders of the Suffrage movement by her audacity, frank embrace of the most radical social causes, her shocking open challenge to Victorian sexual mores, and her mesmerizing effect on the public and press. 

As early as 1870 Woodhull used the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Herald to announce her candidacy for President in the 1872 election.  It was a bold move.  Not only were women barred from the vote, but she would not even reach the constitutionally mandated age of 35 until months after the March 1873 inauguration of the next President.  She maintained that while the law forbad women from voting, there was not a statutory ban on women running for, or being elected to office.  In the hubbub created by her announcement over the unprecedented distaff candidacy, her age never became an issue.

She used the pages of her own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly which was founded the same year, and the lecture platform to keep her name and promised candidacy before the public.  Able to command press attention, which then as now liked a sexy and sensational show, she attracted the support of not only the most daring womanists and suffrage supporters, but of radical trade unionists, early socialists, prison and death sentence reformers, some former abolitionists, and free thinkers.  She took on a broad range of social issues and took a consistently radical and progressive stance.

On May 10, 1872 a meeting was held at Apollo Hall in New York City where the new Equal Rights Party was formed and announced its intentions to nominate Woodhull.  The meeting consisted almost entirely of Woodhull’s friends and inner circle of supporters.   A formal convention was called and held on June 8 with broader participation.  A platform was announced drafted by Woodhull, and her personal friend, the great Black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass was nominated for vice president.  Douglas, however, was not present at the Convention and never acknowledged or accepted the nomination although he never officially renounced it.  In fact that fall he would be elected as a Republican New York Presidential Elector. 

Woodhall printed a campaign poster on her own press.

The issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly dated the same day as the Convention announced the ticket and platform:

The Equal Rights Party has selected Victoria C. Woodhull for the office of President, because it deems that the demand for the personal, social, legal, and political liberties of woman have been better advocated by her actions and in her speeches and writings than by any other woman. Religious liberty is not mentioned above, because it is held that, in the case of woman, it has not been specially infringed.  It is claimed as a right pertaining to all the people; one which the Equal Rights Party hold itself pledged to maintain against any national or State interference with (or infringement of) in any way whatever.

The Equal Rights Party has selected Frederick Douglass for the office of Vice President, because though born a slave, he has himself achieved both his education and his liberty; because he has waged a life-long, manful battle for the rights of his race, in which those of mankind were included; because he has proved that he knows how to assert the liberties of the people, and consequently it is assumed that he knows how to maintain them.

This announcement and its tone of radical defiance were picked up by the press across the country.  And all hell soon broke loose.  The candidate was in for a very bumpy ride. 

Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio on September 23 1838, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well con artist and patent medicine peddler who may have passed on some of his persuasive flair to his beautiful older daughter. 

At the age of 15 she married a 28 year old doctor—and perhaps a quack—Canning Woodhull.  The couple had two children including a boy with an “intellectual disability.” Victoria soon discovered that her husband was an alcoholic, a chronic womanizer, and was abusive.  Unable, or unwilling, to support the family, he relied on his wife to provide income.    In San Francisco she worked as a cigar girl in rough and tumble saloons, and likely at least occasionally as a prostitute. 

Later in New York she began her long collaboration with her younger sister Tennessee Claflin presenting themselves as clairvoyants and spiritual healers.  When her husband essentially abandoned the family, the sisters successfully took their act to Cincinnati and Chicago and began touring as spiritualist lecturers.  After 11 years Victoria obtained a divorce from her husband.

Husband Number 2, Col. James Blood.

Her experience would inform her public rejection of conventional marriage as a form of chattel slavery for women.  She became attracted to the Free Love movement that percolated on the very most advanced frontiers of Free Thinking.  Around 1866 she either married or took up a common law relationship with Col. James Blood, a kind and cultured gentleman who subscribed to Free Love. 

They settled back in New York with sister Tennessee and her extended family.  Living in relative comfort and respectability, the sisters established a popular salon where advanced thinkers and practical politicians rubbed shoulders.  Among her admirers was Benjamin Butler, the Radical Republican politician and former Civil War general who espoused both suffrage for women and free love. 

Virginia proved a brilliant and daring conversationalist and advocated by turns and in combinations anarchism, socialism, Spiritualism, and racial equality. 

Victoria's younger sister and partner, Tennessee Claflin.

Sister Tennessee caught the fancy of 76 year old Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who took her for a lover, consulted with her for spiritual advice and returned the favor by offering inside stock tips.  Armed with such information, the sisters invested and reaped fabulous profits.  Vanderbilt helped set them up in the first woman owned brokerage firm on Wall Street, Woodhull, Claflin & Company.  The press hailed them as Queens of Finance. Susan B. Anthony regarded the venture as “a new phase of the woman’s rights question.”  Victoria, with typical blunt frankness noted that, “Woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.”

A popular men's sporting and gossip newspaper--a competitor of the Police Gazzette--found the Woodhull and Claflin Brokerage house a topic of amusement.

In 1870 the sisters took advantage of their fame by launching their own weekly newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.  Victoria was the principle editor and writer.  The paper took on and advanced all of the most progressive causes of its day.  But it also pioneered in muckraking and investigative journalism, exposing fraudulent stock schemes, insurance frauds, and shady Congressional land deals.  The newspaper, which was often sold under the counter and was sometimes banned from the mails, had a very respectable circulation of more than 20,000 copies weekly for most of its seven year run.  

In January 1871 Woodhull personally petitioned Congress on behalf of women’s suffrage.  She argued that the recently enacted 13th and 14th Amendments extended to women the same rights as newly freed slaves. Her argument attracted wide attention and admiration.  Although a majority report rejected her assertions, Benjamin Butler filed a minority report in her favor.  Leaders of the Suffrage movement including Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton invited her to address a meeting of the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) the next day. 

Woodhull presented a women's suffrage petition to the House Judiciary Committee.  Benjamin Butler with the balding head and mustache is seen at the top of the table and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is seated directly behind Woodhull.

But the spotlight of the Presidential campaign was thrown soon thrown on Woodhull’s most unusual household, which included not only her present husband, but also her first who had shown up penniless and addicted to morphine and was taken in out of charity; her sisters and their liaisons; and her parents including the father who still was running patent medicine scams.  When her mother tried to blackmail Vanderbilt posing as Tennessee, he naturally withdrew his support and advice and turned his significant power against the sisters, who were soon forced out of their mansion ending their Salon. 

Woodhull simply replaced the money lost from her business with speaking fees. 

Taking on the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the most influential and popular minister in America, and two of three of his powerful sisters, ultimately took down Woodhull even as it tarred his reputation.

The powerful Beecher family, evangelist Henry Ward Beecher and his sisters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine began a concerted campaign against Woodhull for her advocacy of Free Love.  A third sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, a leader in the NWSA, supported her. 

Woodhull became aware that Henry Ward was carrying on an adulterous affair with the wife of an associate.  She attempted to use that knowledge to get the Reverend not only to back off his attacks, but to introduce her at a major public lecture at Steinway Hall.  Despite the thinly veiled blackmail attempt, Beecher backed out at the last moment and Woodhull was introduced by Theodore Tilton, the cuckolded husband of Beecher’s lover. 

The speech itself went well until Woodhull’s younger sister Utica, bitter over Victoria’s fame and notoriety stood up in a box and directly challenged her sister to publicly proclaim her support of free love.  “Yes, I am a free lover!” Woodhull defiantly retorted, “I have an unalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! And with the right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.” 

Woodhull was depicted as Satan for her advocacy of Free Love.

The subsequent scandal rocked the country and split the suffrage movement.  None-the-less the NWSA stood by her and even recommended nominated her for President with Fredrick Douglas for Vice President in January of 1872. 

Woodhull ran against Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and the Democratic nominee, famed maverick editor and publisher Horace Greeley, a former liberal Republican and erstwhile ally.  Victoria attempted to concentrate her campaign on the highly progressive Woodhull Platform.  But her now considerable enemies beset her at every turn. 

Susan B. Anthony broke with other NWSA leaders to support Grant in an attempt to distance the movement from the increasingly scandalous Woodhull.  After the family was evicted from their home, they could not even find a house to rent and for a while had to sleep on the floor of their newspaper offices.  Business deals fell through and speaking engagements were cancelled.  The paper had to suspend publication for four months.  When it returned it ran a full expose of the Beecher/Tilton affair and another on a prominent broker with a predilection for young girls.  While circulation soared, the sisters were sued for libel and prosecuted for pornography. 

Woodhull spent Election Day in jail.  No votes were recorded for her, but it is assumed that some of the 4000 or so rejected ballots in the election were for her. 

Her legal difficulties dragged on.  In 1874 both sisters were finally cleared of criminal charges.  But they had to pay fines and court costs amounting to an astonishing half a million dollars.  All of the sisters’ assets, including their brokerage accounts, printing press, personal papers, and even their clothing were seized to pay the fines.  By 1876 she was divorced from Col. Blood and her beloved newspaper was silenced. 

She turned to the comforts of religion while continuing to eke out a living as a lecturer.  After Cornelius Vanderbilt died unhappy heirs attempted to subpoena the sisters for testimony that he was not of sound mind.  Somehow—and speculation runs heavily to the Vanderbilt estate—money was found to send the sisters to England with a comfortable stipend on which to live.  Victoria lectured there, but her message was subdued. 

Both sisters married well and prospered.  

Tennessee married Francis Cook, chairman of Cook, Son & Co., drapers, and also Viscount of Monserrate in Sintra on the Portuguese Riviera. Within months of their marriage, Queen Victoria made Cook a Baronet created a Cook Baronetcy and Tennessee was Lady Cook.  in Portugal was known as the Viscountess of Monserrate. The couple lived at Doughty House in Richmond Hill, Surrey, now part of Greater London and at Monserrate Palace.

Although she never abandoned her radical viewpoints, Claflin lived the remainder of her life out of the public eye. She died in England on January 18, 1923.

Victoria in her later years as Mrs. John Biddulph Martin as a respectable English lady and humanitarian.

Victoria met a wealthy and conservative banker, John Biddulph Martin and married him in 1882 and settled into a life of respectability and sponsorship of various humanitarian causes.  On a trip back to the U.S. she joined the tiny Humanitarian Party and was nominated as their candidate for President in 1892.  It was a last hurrah in the United States. 

Back in England Victoria divided her husband’s estates after his death and backed a scheme to rent small plots to impoverished women so that they could become self-sufficient, founded an experimental school, and sponsored an annual agricultural fair.  She was active in World War I relief work.  She died in her sleep on June 9, 1927 at the age of 88 at her estate in Bredon, Worcestershire.

Ellen Church—Nurse, Flyer, First Stewardess, and War Hero

Ellen Church on her first trip as a nurse/hostess for Boing Air Transport, 1930.

Sitting interminably in the crammed boarding lounge of a major airport for an overbooked flight mysteriously delayed, you can almost inevitably overhear a nostalgic conversation between older executives or retired men.  These frequent flyers will lament the passing of the days when stewardesses where hot babes in heels and tight skirts, who lavished them with pillows, cocktails, and TLC.  And if you knew just the right hotels and cocktail lounges you could hook up with the fun loving swingers and the wives need never know.  Those girls were virtually the Bunnies of the air.

This image, whether true or wishful thinking, was constantly reinforced in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s by popular culture in books like Coffee, Tea, or Me and in innumerable films line Boing, Boing.

The old men's fantasy.

All of that ended, the geezers will lament, when the damn Federal Government made rules tossing out the traditional airline requirements--women only, single status, mandatory retirement in their early 30s, and weight restrictions.  Now, the old men complain, the cabins are staffed by squat, middle aged, homely women, and Gay men.  They work over crowded planes and do have not time or patience to lavish individual attention, barely pausing to pour overpriced sodas or tiny bottles of hooch and a bag of exactly seven peanuts.  

Your heart practically breaks for the old duffers, doesn’t it?

Of course, even in the days they wax nostalgic about, Stewardess also were portrayed as loyal and brave in air disaster films from No Highway in the Sky, the High and the Mighty, Doris Day in Julie, the Airport movies, to the spoof Airplane!

But female flight crew or flight attendants, to use the preferred terms of today, were much more than either stereotype in the beginning.  And we owe it to one woman—Ellen Church who led a quite remarkable life.

Church was born on September 22, 1904 in Cresco, Iowa in the northeastern part of the state, just south of the Minnesota border.  That was less than a year after the Wright Brothers first took flight at Kitty Hawk.  The Midwestern girl with an interest in science literally grew up along with aviation.  

Church as a young nurse.

She wanted to be a doctor, but that seemed unattainable to a young woman and she was discouraged by skeptical parents.  Instead, she studied nursing after graduating from Cresco High School.  Then, like many restless and ambitious young women in the post World War I era, she escaped small town life and went to vibrant and exciting San Francisco where she worked as a registered nurse in a modern hospital.  

In her spare time, Church pursued another dream.  She took flying lessons and obtained a pilot’s license.  She quickly made a name for herself among west coast flyers and became one of the few women to qualify in multi-engine aircraft.  

Church as a pilot--she was one of the first women on the West Coast to be certified on multiple engine aircraft.

Then she dared ask Steve Stimpson, the manager of the San Francisco office of Boeing Air Transport (BAT)—the predecessor to United Air Lines—for a job as a pilot with the fledgling airline.  When Stimpson turned down the proposal as impossible and ludicrous, Church suggested that the airline put nurses on board their airplanes as a way of reassuring a nervous public that flying was safe.  She shrewdly pitched it as a public relations ploy.  BAT was struggling to attract passengers other than adventurers and they desperately needed the revenue to supplement their main income, carrying the mail.  But clumsy and lumbering early airliners were still falling out of the sky with some regularity and schedules were at the mercy of unpredictable weather.  

The airline decided it was worth a try and gave Church the go-ahead to recruit and train seven nurses to join her in a three month experiment.  Applicants, in addition to being registered nurses, were required to be “single, younger than 25 years old; weigh less than 115 pounds; and stand less than 5 feet, 4 inches tall.”

The women’s diminutive size was not just a whim or even the preference of company executives for lithe females, although general attractiveness was an unstated requirement.  The airline literally counted ounces.  Every additional pound on a cabin attendant had to be subtracted from a profitable payload of mail, passengers, luggage and freight.  They also had to be able to stand up and maneuver in the very limited space of airline passenger compartments.

Despite being small, the young women had to be strong.  As a bonus to the public relations benefits, Church promised that women could also relieve the co-pilot of many menial tasks that had previously been assigned to them.  That including loading and unloading luggage, fueling, and helping push the planes in and out of hangers.  In fact taking over those duties helped smooth over the opposition of many pilots to having women crew members.  It elevated the status of co-pilots to be relieved of menial tasks.

Despite the hiring restrictions, the rigor of the short but intense training devised by Church, and the physical demands of the job, there was stiff completion for the jobs.  Not only did the positions seem to offer excitement and adventure, but the pay was $125 a month, a small fortune for a young woman in Depression ravaged America where a shop girl often made less than $10 a week.

Church and her first seven Sky Girls.

Church and her Sky Girls, as BAT advertising called them, first flew on May 12, 1930.  They were divided into two groups.  The first worked flights from San Francisco to Cheyenne, Wyoming and the rest from there to Chicago.  Church, however, in a tri-motor Boeing 80A airliner piloted by aviation legend Elrey Jeppesen, worked both legs of the grueling 20 hour flight serving 14 passengers.  The plane made 13 scheduled stops along the way.

In Chicago Church was greeted by newspaper photographers and newsreel cameras.  She was an instant celebrity and the Sky Girls did boost passenger traffic as predicted.  The experiment was declared a success and all eight women were hired permanently with Church as their chief.  Scores more were hired on other routs as quickly as the newly reorganized United Airlines could add them.  Competing airlines were quick to follow suit.

In just three years the first movie featuring a romance between a pilot and an attendant, Air Hostess starring Evalyn Knapp and James Murray hit the screen.  It was a B-movie but set the pattern form many more.

By1933 Hollywood was romanticizing stewardesses with popcorn fare like Air Hostess.

By that time Church’s career as a stewardess, as the job became known, was already over.  After just 18 month in the air she was grounded by injuries incurred in an automobile accident. 

Church returned to school and earned a B.A. in nursing—a level of training only a small minority of working R.N.s then had—from the University of Minnesota.  By 1936 she was supervisor of pediatrics at Milwaukee County Hospital.

Ellen Church was the Chief Nurse for the 52nd Troop Carrier Command  and oversaw the activities of the Medical Air Evacuation Squadrons.  Seen here being decorated for her service. 

With America’s entrance into World War II, the flying nurses of the airlines were called to duty by the armed forces.  They were replaced by women without the medical training.  Church volunteered and with her experience flying, as nurse, and as an administrator, she became a Captain in the Army Nurse Corps.  She worked as an air evacuation nurse in the North African and Italian campaigns and then trained the many evacuation nurses that would be needed for the D-Day invasion and subsequent campaigns.  For her service she was awarded the Air Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with seven bronze service stars, the American Theatre Campaign Medal, and the Victory Medal.

After the war, Church became the Director of Nursing and later administrator of Union Hospital in Terre Haute, Indiana.  She continued flying as a private pilot and led a full, active, and athletic life.  At the age of 60 in 1964 she married for the first and only time to Leonard Briggs Marshall, President of the Terre Haute First National Bank.  

A plaque at the small Cresco, Iowa airport memorializes the town's home grown heroine.

On August 22, 1965, less than a year later, Ellen Church died of injuries in a horseback riding fall.

She left no children but is the spiritual mother of flight attendants everywhere.

Calendar Coincidence Verse—International Day of Peace-Autumnal Equinox

Calendar coincidence--Peace and Autumnal Equinox.

This is another one of the calendar poems inspired by random, or not so random, coincidences of dates, usually discovered as I am in a mad scramble for a blog entry topic.  It first appeared in 2013 but the calendar serendipity is annual.

Tomorrow will be the first day of Autumn but here in McHenry County we will be soaked by the remnants of Tropical Storm Imelda, the same monsoon that has drowned Houston in more than 40 inches of rain so conditions are not just as they were described in the doggerel below. 

Today is the International Day of Peace, so proclaimed by the United Nations every year since 1982.  Since 2001 the date has been fixed to September 21 instead of the original third Tuesday of the month, which was also when the UN General Assembly begins its annual session. 

This year it is also the day after the International Climate Strike which was timed to both reflect the precarious balance which is now tipping us all to ecological destruction just as the Autumnal Equinox tips us irrevocably toward winter and to get the attention of the United Nations Emergency Climate Change Summit.  The rapid deterioration of the environment—melting ice caps, rising seas, hurricanes, heat waves, fires, droughts, and famine—also displaces millions creating international migration crisis, destabilizing governments, and creating conflict over scarce and vanishing resources—the perfect recipe for war and more war.

Those conflicts smolder across the globe and we are also now on the cusp of a possible war with Iran carrying water for both the Saudis and Israel 

Among its grander visions which must have seemed distant even to the founders of the Day of Peace, was at a call for an annual one day cease fire of on-going hostilities.  I can recall no armies ever standing down, but perhaps I missed something.

International Day of Peace/Autumnal Equinox Eve

September 21, 2013

The immanent equinox advertises itself

            this morning with crack crisp air,

            elderly maples beginning to rust at the crown,

            a touch of gold on borer doomed ashes,

            mums and marigolds,

            hoodies up on dog walkers in shorts,

            all under a prefect azure sky—

                        you know the one from the Sunday song 

reminding “skies everywhere as blue as mine.”

The globe teeters on the edge of equanimity,

            ready to balance for an instant between night and day,

            seasons, yesterday and tomorrow,

            a perilous, promising, moment.

The poor creatures swarming over its surface,

            fancying ourselves somehow its masters,

            alas, bereft of any balance….

From the Wishful Thinking File,

            institutional division—

Festooned with doves and olive branches

            brave words on blue banners,

            a speech here, a lovely little vigil there,

            an earnest strumming of guitars,

            litanies sung, mantras chanted,

            kind hearts and gentle people…

The creatures go about our brutal business,

            blithely ignoring it all—

                        proclamation and equinox alike.

—Patrick Murfin