Ever Victoria!
Part 24
Victoria learns of these developments only later. While they are occurring she is a prisoner in the Ludlow Street jail. The exposé issue of the Weekly provides Anthony Comstock an opportunity to advance his career as America’s morals cop. Comstock is a Union veteran of the Civil War who took offense at the swearing of his fellow soldiers; after the war he dedicated himself to cleaning up American life, starting in New York, where he has fallen in with the Young Men’s Christian Association, which has similar views. The YMCA depends on cash contributions and accordingly benefits from the belief that the country is going rapidly to hell. Comstock and the YMCA launch a war on obscenity, which appeals to many elected officials. The large questions confronting the country—Reconstruction, race relations, political scandals, Indian policy—remain as intractable as ever; in consequence a vote for cleanliness in the national culture seems to Republicans and Democrats alike an easy and inexpensive way to demonstrate their support for the country’s well-being. Put otherwise, a vote against proposed anti-obscenity legislation seems political suicide; no incumbent wants to encounter the election campaign charge that he favors filth. So the New York legislature approves a law banning obscenity; several state legislatures and the federal Congress follow suit. Anthony Comstock gets himself appointed special enforcement agent and mobilizes to enforce the new standards.
Victoria Woodhull provides an irresistible target. The attack of this bride of Satan upon the most famous Christian minister in America is tantamount to an assault on Christianity itself. Comstock purchases and devours the scandal issue and concludes that it violates the recent federal obscenity law. The statute bans the use of the postal service to transmit obscene materials; some of the Weekly’s subscribers get their copies by mail. Comstock alerts the federal marshals, who swoop in and arrest Victoria and co-owner Tennie.
Word of the arrest rockets around New York, confirming Victoria’s reputation as the queen of darkness; it also drives the street price of the scandal issue higher than ever. The Weekly is making money again but not enough to pay Victoria and Tennie’s bail; they pass their days and nights in the Ludlow Street jail. Tennie treats the experience as she treats most of life: as a lark. She flirts with her jailers and with the reporters who come to assess the conditions in which the notorious pair are held. Her response gives the reporters their story line: she is portrayed as the flighty younger sister drawn into bad habits by Victoria, the evil genius one of the two.
The jailing evokes ambivalence in Victoria. The other members of her rambunctious family must fend for themselves for the time being, relieving her of the responsibility she has often felt for them. But jail is no vacation, and she knows that the longer she remains behind bars the more difficult will be the rescue of what little remains of her career.
She defends herself to the extent she can. She addresses the public through the pages of the Herald. “I have been written down as the most immoral of women, but no act of mine has been advanced in support of the charge,” she says. “My theories have been first misstated or misrepresented, and then denounced as ‘revolting.’ Thus I have been gratuitously misrepresented by the press to the public, whose interest it professes to watch over and protect. But has it ever occurred to this great public, which now holds up its hands in horror of me, that even in its estimation, manufactured by the press as it has been, I am no worse than thirty years ago were the prime movers in the anti-slavery movement in the estimation of the public of that time? Is it remembered how they were abused by the press, imprisoned by the authorities, and stoned and almost hanged by the people? And yet, strange as it is, on the great, broad earth, there are none more esteemed and respected today than are the veritable persons who so recently were generally condemned.”
She admits to one offense: trying to free women from the bondage under which they live. “The plain statement of what I desire to accomplish, and it is this at which the public howls, is this: I desire that woman shall be emancipated from the sexual slavery maintained over her by man.…Against it I long since declared war—relentless and unceasing war. I desire that woman shall, so far as her support is concerned, be made independent of man, so that all her sexual relations result from reasons other than for maintenance; in a word, shall be wholly and only for love.”
The obscenity charge is a sham, she says. It results from the powerful trying to shield their sins from public view. “The great public danger then is not in my exposure of the immoralities that are constantly being committed, but in the fear that their enactors will be shown up to the public they have so long deceived. The public is in no danger from me; but those who are distilling poisons and digging pitfalls for it are in danger, and will remain in danger so long as I live; and since this is known the danger must be removed, at whatever cost of public justice or private right.” Yet the truth will be heard. “They may succeed in crushing me out, even to the loss of my life; but let me warn them and you that from the ashes of my body a thousand Victorias will spring to avenge my death by seizing the work laid down by me and carrying it forward to victory.”
Eventually some eccentrics and First Amendment defenders come forward with cash to enable Victoria and Tennie to make bail. Victoria returns to the lecture circuit to generate income to pay for her legal defense. Major venues are closed to her, their owners opposed to Victoria’s message or fearful of a backlash from frowning patrons. The Beechers mobilize to block a speech in Boston. “Fully do I believe that wretched woman to be under the influence of Satanic spirits,” Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Henry Beecher. “I recognize that in this attack we wrestle not with flesh and blood.” When the city fathers deny Victoria a permit to speak, Harriet declares triumphantly: “I am delighted that Boston has fought the good fight with those obscene birds so manfully. There was a quiet uprising, not noisy but effective.”
Victoria takes to the hinterland. Springfield lets her speak; she repeats what she has said from jail and what she has been saying for years about the need for women to be emancipated. And she asserts that the desperation that provoked her jailing foreshadows the death rattle of the ancien regime. “The old, worn-out, rotten social system will be torn down, plank by plank, timber after timber, until place is given to a new, true and beautiful structure, based upon freedom, equality and justice to all—to women as well as men; the results of which can be nothing else than physical health, intellectual honesty and moral purity. Stop their press they may, but their tongues, never!”
Regaining her confidence, Victoria books another lecture at New York’s Cooper Institute. She titles it “The Naked Truth.” Whether the title offends Anthony Comstock or he is simply incensed that this purveyor of perdition remains free, he convinces a grand jury to hand down a new indictment against Victoria and Tennie. The marshals lie in wait at the Cooper Institute, intending to nab Victoria before she can speak. But she arrives disguised as an old Quaker woman, in gray shawl, bonnet and veil. The mistress of ceremonies for the evening is explaining to the patrons that the authorities are preventing the free exercise of speech, and therefore that Mrs. Woodhull will not appear, when Victoria throws off her disguise and takes center stage. The patrons block the aisles to prevent the approach of the marshals, who are forced to wait until she finishes before making the arrest.
For weeks Victoria and Tennie are in and out of jail; for months the lawyers wrangle. During one of her breaks from jail Victoria attends a summer camp of the spiritualists. A camper challenges her to defend her philosophy of free love and to answer charges that she has slept with various men for the assistance they could bring her cause. The tribulations of the previous year have worn her down, but as she rises and approaches the fire, the old color comes back to her cheeks.
“A man questioning my virtue?” she asks indignantly. “I hurl the intention back in your face, sir, and stand boldly before you and this convention and declare that I never had sexual intercourse with any man whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world with. I am not ashamed of any act of my life. At the time it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any desire that has been gratified, nor of any passion alluded to. Every one of them are a part of my own soul’s life, for which, thank God, I am not accountable to you.” She looks around at the group and says she will not apologize for her views any more than for her actions. “If I want sexual intercourse with one hundred men, I shall have it.”
She indicts the spiritualists for not providing her support when she most needed it. “When I came out of prison I came out a beggar. I appealed to the spiritualists, to the reformers of the country, to send in their money that I might send you my paper. But did you do it? No, you left me to starve in the streets.” The paper was her only salvation, she says—the only way to defend herself against her enemies. “I knew my paper had to live or I should assuredly be sent to Sing Sing.” She has found money where she could. “I went to your bankers, presidents of railroads, gamblers, prostitutes, and got the money that has sent you the paper you have been reading, and I do not think you are any the worse for handling it.”
Her spirit guides have given her a mission. “I have done and shall do everything and anything that is necessary to accomplish it. I used whatever influence I had to get the money. And that’s my own business and no of yours. And if I devoted my body to my work and my soul to God, that is my business and not yours.” The mission would have failed if left to the likes of those who accuse her. “Are there any of you would have come forward and put your bodies in the gap?” Silence greets her question. “If you will not,” she concludes, “don’t put me before you as needing to confess anything that in your self-sanctified spirits you may conceive to be prostitution.”