Ever Victoria!
Part 21
Victoria’s forthright assertion that she is a free lover shocks the audience and stuns the city. The two thousand men and women pour into the street, asking themselves if they have really heard what they think they have heard. A few affirm agreement with Victoria; most shake their heads in disapproval; many register outrage at this scandalous assault on the temple of matrimony and social order. Victoria’s irregular living arrangements have been no secret; she has widely been thought a free lover. But for her to assert her views so boldly is more than the community can stand.
The papers have already turned against her; now the whole city does the same. Thomas Nast, the celebrated cartoonist, portrays Victoria as “Mrs. Satan.” A Bowery wax museum shows her seductive figure suffering the torments of hell. Her landlord cancels the lease on the house the family has been occupying; the presence of “the Woodhull,” as she is derisively called these days, is pulling down property values, he says.
The turn of opinion ruins her businesses. Customers shun the brokerage; advertisers and subscribers abandon the Weekly. The brokerage closes its doors; the paper suspends publication. Victoria tries to cover the costs of her household by lecturing. She travels to Boston to give an address on social justice. She cites scripture in her introduction. “St. Paul said: ‘Faith, Hope and Charity—these three, but the greatest of these is Charity.’” But the Apostle to the Gentiles was wrong. “Beautiful as this triplet may appear to be to the casualist, it cannot bear the test of analysis. It will be replaced in the vocabulary of the future by the more perfect one: Knowledge, Wisdom and Justice—these three, but the greatest of these is Justice. Charity, with its long cloak of justice escaped, has long enough covered a multitude of sins. Justice will in the future demand perfect compensation in all things, whether material, mental or spiritual.”
She speaks this evening of justice not between the sexes but between classes. Having once made a fortune in the capitalist world, she proceeds to excoriate that world. “A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks, or make dividends by which, in a few years, he amasses fifty millions dollars from the industries of the country, and he is one of the remarkable men of the age. But if a poor, half-starved child were to take a loaf of bread from his cupboard, to prevent starvation, she would be sent first to the Tombs and thence to Blackwell’s Island. An Astor may sit in his sumptuous apartments and watch the property bequeathed him by his father rise in value from one to fifty millions, and everybody bows before his immense power and worships his business capacity. But if a tenant of his, whose employer had discharged him because he did not vote the Republican ticket, and thereby fails to pay his month’s rent to Mr. Astor, the law sets him and his family into the street in midwinter; and whether he dies of cold or starvation neither Mr. Astor nor anybody else stops to ask, since that is nobody’s business but the man’s.”
Others have noted the injustice of this state of affairs, but most contend that nothing can be done about it. Victoria rejects such fatalism. “Is it asked, how is this to be remedied? I answer, very easily! Since those who possess the accumulated wealth of the country have filched it by legal means from those to whom it justly belongs, the people, it must be returned to them—by legal means if possible, but it must be returned to them in any event. When a person worth millions dies, instead of leaving it to his children, who have no more title to it than anyone else’s children have, it must revert to the people, who really produced it.” Faint-hearted reformers and apologists for the rich will say that such a policy does injustice to the children of the rich. But this is far less injustice than has been done for millennia to the children of the poor. Critics will say this impinges on personal freedom. Perhaps. But there is more to life than freedom. “We have had simple freedom quite long enough. By setting all our hopes on freedom, we have been robbed of our rights. What we want now is more than freedom; we want equality! And by the heaven above us, the earth’s growing children are going to have it!”
She has called her speech “The Impending Revolution,” and by mounting the ramparts of class warfare Victoria alienates nearly everyone who hasn’t abandoned her already. Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton have defended her as long as she has confined herself to women’s issues; her assault on capitalism makes her finally too radical for the suffragists, who justify their distancing on grounds that whatever the merits of a class revolution, its advocacy will distract from their central concern: women’s political rights. They don’t discredit or embarrass Victoria; they simply turn away, leaving her alone to suffer the blows of her enemies.
But she refuses to yield without exhausting every resource and opportunity at her command. She seeks assistance from an unlikely direction. “My dear sir,” she writes Henry Beecher in the summer of 1872, “The social fight against me, being now waged in this city, is becoming rather hotter than I can well endure longer, standing unsupported and alone as I have until now. Within the past two weeks I have been shut out of hotel after hotel, and am now, after having obtained a place in one, hunted down by a set of males and females who are determined that I shall not be permitted to live, even, if they can prevent it.” A short while earlier she would have been content for Beecher’s moral support; a nod from the great preacher would have silenced many of those who now beset her. But moral support will not suffice any longer. She needs money. “I want your assistance. I want to be sustained in my position in the Gilsey House”—her current residence—“from which I am ordered out, and from which I do not wish to go, and all this simply because I am Victoria C. Woodhull, the advocate of social freedom. I have submitted to this persecution just so long as I can endure to. My business, my projects, in fact everything for which I live, suffers from it, and it must cease. Will you lend me your aid in this?”