Woodhull, Victoris Claflin, (23 September 1838 - 10 June 1927), reformer, was
born in Homer, Ohio, the daughter of Reuben Buckman and Roxanna (Hummel)
Claflin. She was one of ten children, of whom another daughter, Tennessee
Celeste (1846-1923), also became well known. Their parents were poor and
eccentirc. The father was compelled to leave Homer under suspicion of arson
while Victoria was yet a child, and the citizens gave a benefit to help the
rest of the family out of town. The mother became a fanatic on the subject of
spiritualism and mesmerism. Victoria asserted in after years that she herself
had begun to have visions at the age of three, and that Demosthenes, whom she
claimed as a familiar spirit, had first appeared to her when she was ten. The
family moved about from town to town in Ohio, and presently Victoria and
Tennessee began giving spiritualistic exhibitions. In 1853, before she was
sixteen, Victoria married Dr. Canning Woodhull (by whom she had two children),
but did not cease her career as a charlatan. The Claflin family travelled for
a time as a medicine and fortune-telling show, selling an Elixir of Life, with
Tennessee's portrait on the bottle, while her brother Hebern posed as a cancer
doctor. Victoria and Tennessee thereafter worked together as clairvoyants,
making long strays in Cincinnati, Chicago, and elsewhere. In 1864 Victoria
divorced Woodhull and began traveling with a Colonel James H. Blood, whom she
was supposed to have married in 1866.
In 1868 the two sisters went to New York, taking several members of the Claflin
family with them. Tennessee had married one John Bartels, but never used his
name, preferring to sign herself as "Tennie C. Claflin." The two reached the
ear of the elder Cornelius Vasnderbilt throguh his interest in spiritualism;
they opened a stock brokerage office in the financial district, and through
Vanderbilt's advice made considerable profits in the stock market. Victoria
became interested in a socialistic cult, the Pantarchy, one of whose tenets was
free love, which was headed by Stephen Pearl Andrews. In 1870 the sisters
launched Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, which advocated equal rights for women,
a single standard of morality and free love, and campaigned against prostitution
and abortion. Blood and Andrews wrote most of the material, though a great deal
of it voiced Mrs. Woodhull's own views. The Weekly also proposed her as
president of the United States. In January 1871 she appeared before the
judiciary committee of the national House of Representatives and pleased for
woman's suffrage. She began giving lectures on that and other subjects, and
proved to be a magnetic and compelling speaker. The Equal Rights party
nominated her for the presidency in 1872, and she went to the polls and made a
futile attempt to vote. Among her published lectures and pamphlets are Origin,
Tendencires and Priciples of Government (1871), Stirpiculture, or the Scientific
Propagation of the Human Race (1888), Humanitarian Money (1892), and with her
sister, The Human Body and the Temple of God (1890). Theodore Tilton, a young
reporter on the Independent, became interested in Mrs. Woodhull, and she later
described publically a liason with him lasting, as she said, six months.
Angered by the attacks of the sisters of Henry Ward Beecher upon them, the
Claflin sisteres precipitated the greatest sensation of the period by publishing
in the Weekly, 2 November 1872, the story of the alleged intimacy of the
eminent clergyman with the wife of Tilton. They were arrested for uttering an
obscene publication and spent two periods in jail, but were acquitted. In 1876
Victoria obtained a divorce from Blood. When in January 1877 Cornelius
Vanderbilt died, some of his children brought suit to annul his will; during the
trial the sisters sailed for England, and it was whispered that Vanderbilt money
had paid them to go.
In the following December, after a lecture by Mrs. Woodhull at St. James's Hall,
London, one of her hearers, John Biddulph Martin, one of a wealthy English
banking family, offered her marriage and was accepted, but his family objected
so strongly that it was six years before the wedding took place (31 October
1883). In 1885 Tennessee married Francis Cook, later a baronet and also owner
of a Portuguese estate which brought him the title of Viscount de Montserrat.
Both sisters became noted for charitable work, and in their latter years were
received by not a few of the socially elect in England. Victoria continued
lecturing and writing. In July 1892 she began issuing a magazine, the
Humanitarian, and her daughter, Zulu Maud Woodhull, as associate editor. She
and her sister made several trips to America, stirring up a sensation on almost
every occassion. Lady Cook died in 1923, and Mrs. Martin four years later.
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