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WOODHULL, VICTORIA (CLAFLIN) (September 23, 1838-June 10, 1927), editor and propagandist, was born in Homer, Ohio, the daughter of Reuben Buckman Claflin and Roxanna (Hummel) Claflin. The family were" poor white trash” living on both the lunatic and criminal fringe; they were finally run out of Homer on suspicion of arson and moved from town to town in Ohio, the mother giving spiritualistic and mesmeric shows in which Victoria and her sister, Tennessee Celeste (born 1846), took part. The ten children had no regular educa
In 1853 she married Dr. Canning Woodhull; they had two children, but she kept on traveling, the family at one time running a medicine and fortune-telling show. Then she and her sister practiced in Cincinnati and Chicago as clairvoyants. In 1864 she divorced Dr. Woodhull and afterward met Col. James H. Blood, whom she was believed to have married in 1866. In 1868 the sisters went to New York. There Tennessee, who had married a man named Bartels but had separated from him, became connected with the older Cornelius Vanderbilt, who set them up as “lady brokers.” Thanks to his tips, they made a fortune. In 1870 they founded Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, most of which was written by Blood and by Stephen Pearl Andrews. It advocated Socialism, woman suffrage, free love, vegetarianism, and birth control; in 1872 it created a sensation by publishing the story of Henry Ward Beecher’s alleged affair with the wife of Theodore Tilton, which led to his longdrawn-out adultery trial. It also, strangely enough, published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. Meanwhile Victoria, who had beauty, charm, and, indubitably, brains, had several times almost captured the woman’s rights movement, had spoken before Congress, and in 1872 had run for president on the Equal Rights Party ticket, with the Negro orator Frederick Douglass as her running-mate. The sisters were tried for uttering an obscene publication, but after two months in jail were acquitted. In 1876 Victoria divorced Blood. On Vanderbilt’s death in 1877 both sisters moved to England—apparently at the expense of Vanderbilt’s heirs, to get them out of the way while they tried to break his will. There they both married wealthy Englishmen of good family—Tennessee, Sir Francis Cook, Viscount Montserrat; Victoria, John Biddulph Martin, a banker who died in 1897. In 1892 Victoria founded and edited, with her daughter Zula, a magazine called the Humanitarian. Her later years were devoted to charity and to a successful campaign for restoration of the birthplace of Washington’s ancestors, Sulgrave Manor. She died at the Martin estate, in Worcestershire, at nearly eighty-eight. Tennessee had died in 1923.
PRINCIPAL WORK: Origin, Tendencies, and Principles of Government, 1871; Stirpiculture: or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race, 1888; The Human Body the Temple of God (with T. C. Claflin) 1890; Humanitarian Money, 1892.
ABOUT: Darwin, G. S. Synopsis of the Lives of Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin; Legge, M. Two Noble Women; Rourke, C. M. Trumpets of Jubilee; Sachs, E. The Terrible Siren; Symes, L. & Clement, T. Rebel America; New York Times January 20, 1923; June 11, 1927.
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Reference:
Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. American
Authors, 1600–1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature. 5th
printing. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1960.
Note: Other sources state that the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto was by Helen Macfarlane and it was published in George Julian Harney’s Chartist newspaper The Red Republican in 1850.
