Votes for Women!: Chapters 5–6

They wanted him to eliminate slavery all at once, but Lincoln preferred an incremental approach.

The notice read, in part: “At this hour the best word and work of every man and woman are imperatively demanded....Woman is equally interested and responsible with man in the settlement of this final problem of self-government; therefore let none stand idle spectators now.”

She said that she had spoken with African American women in the South who told her, “You give us a nominal freedom, but you leave us under the heel of our husbands, who are tyrants almost equal to our masters.”

He said that he objected to the “negro’s hour” strategy: “I repudiate the idea of expediency. All I ask for myself, I claim for my wife and sister. Let our action be based on everlasting principle. No class of citizens in this county can be deprived of the ballot without injuring every other class.”

He said that he objected to the “negro’s hour” strategy: “I repudiate the idea of expediency. All I ask for myself, I claim for my wife and sister. Let our action be based on everlasting principle. No class of citizens in this county can be deprived of the ballot without injuring every other class.”

Once the debate was framed as an issue of women’s rights versus African American rights, the arguments used by some female suffragists became increasingly elitist.

In an attempt to support their new position for educated women’s rights, both Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began to use divisive and racist arguments.

William Bright said that he had never been to school a day in his life, but he “venerated” his well-informed wife and willingly “submitted to her judgment and influence.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony refused to support the amendment. “Not for what it is, but for what it is not,” Stanton wrote. “Not because it enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise all women, black and white.”

“I cannot forgive nor forget the listless do nothingness of the men we had always believed our best friends,” Anthony wrote.

“But no matter. We will still work on, even with greater vigor than ever...Now is the accepted time.”

All wise women should oppose the Fifteenth Amendment for two reasons: 1st. Because it is invidious to their sex...it reflects the old idea of woman’s inferiority....2d. We should oppose the measure because men have no right to pass it without our consent....

Stanton backed the same point, but in bluntly racist language: “Shall American statesmen...make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers [and] boot-blacks...fresh from the slave plantations of the South[?]”

“If Mr. Douglass had noticed who applauded when he said ‘black men first and white women afterwards,”’ she said, “he would have seen that it was only the men. When he tells us that the case of black men is so perilous, I tell him that even outraged as they are by the hateful prejudice against color, he himself would not today exchange his sex and color with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

“It will change the nature of one thing very much,” she said, “[and] that is the pecuniary position of woman. It will place her in a position in which she can earn her own bread, so that she can go out into the world on equal competition in the struggle for life.”

“Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate the precedence for her sex,” she said, “and Mr. Douglass will strive for the first position for his....[We] are lost if we turn away from the middle principle and argue for one class....I thank God for the Fifteenth Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every State. I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit.”

Stanton did not share Anthony’s conscientiousness.

She attended school for only three years, from ages eight to eleven, but she was said to have a photographic memory and a great deal of innate intelligence.

Victoria’s mother concluded that Victoria must have been endowed with mystical powers.

Money was tight, so Victoria worked with her mother as a clairvoyant for several years.

In New York, the sisters arranged a magnetic healing session with multimillionaire financier and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.

As a result of the scam, Woodhull tricked the seventy-four-year-old tycoon into believing she and her sister had mystical powers.

Also in 1870, Victoria Woodhull moved to Washington, DC, and began working as a lobbyist for women’s suffrage.

Furthermore, she said that the Fifteenth Amendment bolstered her case.

He conceded the point, but did not change his interpretation of the amendment’s meaning.

“We mean treason,” Woodhull said. “We mean secession, and on a scale a thousand times greater than was that of the South. We are plotting a revolution.”

“Dr. Woodhull being sick, ailing and incapable of self-support, I felt it my duty to myself and to human nature that he should be cared for,” she said.

“Yes,” she responded. “I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may...to change that love every day if I please, and it is your duty not only to accord [me my right] but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.”

“Yes,” she responded. “I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may...to change that love every day if I please, and it is your duty not only to accord [me my right] but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.”

Rather than shunning Woodhull, Stanton respected her candor and courage.

“We have had women enough sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity,” she wrote to her friend Lucretia Mott.

“This is one of man’s most effective engines for our division and subjugation. He creates the public sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangman for our sex....If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns.”

“This is one of man’s most effective engines for our division and subjugation. He creates the public sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangman for our sex....If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns.”

The anti-Woodhull backlash also led to the formation of organizations dedicated to fighting female suffrage.

Bewildered, the delegates stumbled and groped their way out of the meeting.

Specifically, she had grown weary of having “free love” criticized by the pious Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, whom she knew to have been involved in extramarital affairs with several women in his congregation.

Woodhull’s article criticized Beecher’s hypocrisy, not his infidelity.

Woodhull and Claflin were never charged with libel, a charge that involves writing false information about a person that hurts his or her reputation.

For more than six months, newspapers across the country featured front-page articles describing the testimony from witnesses, recounting every shocking and scintillating detail.

Theodore Tilton was fired from the Independent, so he moved to Europe, where he was offered a job at the Golden Age, a new magazine funded by his nemesis Henry Ward Beecher.