She was the first woman to run for president. The first female stockbroker to open a brokerage house on Wall Street. The first person to publish Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto in the United States. And the first woman to address Congress and drive a motorcar through Hyde Park. She was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. A champion of the International Workingmen’s Association. The founder of a feminist newspaper read by tens of thousands. An enthusiast of both free love and eugenics-adjacent stirpiculture, she was also a “magnetic healer” who earned a living, and glimpsed a freer, more equal realm, through the doctrines of spiritualism. She was the singular Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927), “one of the few women”, writes second-wave feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem, “to live out in public the principles of female emancipation and sexual freedom that were not only unusual in her day but illegal.”

Born in Homer, Ohio, in 1838, as the seventh child of an itinerant family, Victoria was named after the English Queen, who had acceded to the throne that previous year. Her father, a part-time confidence man named Buck Claflin, trained Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee (Tennie) — when he wasn’t abusing them with hand saws, claimed the biographer Theodore Tilton — to work the spiritualist-medium circuit from an early age. Victoria was married off at fourteen to Dr. Channing Woodhull, who delivered their mentally disabled son, Byron, at home in a state of alcoholic intoxication. (Victoria would subsequently blame their unhappy marriage for her son’s disability, and develop her eugenicist theories off the back of his suffering.) After her remarriage — to a Civil War veteran known as Colonel Blood — Victoria and Tennie sought, in 1871, a different form of speculation, on Wall Street, backed by the younger sister’s suitor, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The sisters said their edge in the stock market came from telepathic powers; newspapers across the country labeled them “Bewitching Brokers” (less for their clairvoyance than as a demeaning intimation that their brokerage operated like a brothel). With their earnings, they launched Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which claimed to be the “only Paper in the World conducted, absolutely, upon the Principles of a Free Press”. (The sisters were arrested for obscenity charges shortly thereafter.) Woodhull’s polemics on suffrage, which appeared with frequency in their Weekly and other periodicals, buoyed her reputation on the speaking circuit. By 1872, she came to depend on income from her lectures and commanded audiences unparalleled by any peer. Her unwavering defense of free love — “Yes, I am a Free Lover”, she says in her speech “The Principles of Social Freedom”, I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere” — made her enemies among suffragettes and beyond. At the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1872, Susan B. Anthony cut the lights to prevent Woodhull from speaking. That same year, she ran for president of the United States as a member of the Equal Rights Party, with Frederick Douglass chosen by the party as her running mate (he rejected the appointment and suppressed the incident from his autobiography). As a result of her political ambition, writes the scholar Amanda Frisken, Woodhull “lost her home, her paper, her means of earning a living and Vanderbilt’s backing.”

The lecture above, The Impending Revolution, was delivered in February 1872 to audiences in Boston and New York. The latter venue, New York’s Academy of Music, saw an audience of six thousand, composed of various sections of the International Workingmen’s Association — the only national labor organization, at the time, not specialized to a single industry — with many more eager listeners turned away at the door. The New York Times was not impressed: “Her periodical exhibitions of bitter language upon the platform attract numbers of idle people, among whom are some whose ignorance and envy fit them to receive her folly as though it were words of wisdom.” But others had found a leader. A month after this lecture, 1500 workers began spontaneously chanting Woodhull’s name during a rally in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park.

The Impending Revolution envisions a Christian socialist uprising in which all divisions between citizens will be dissolved into the common good:

The impending revolution, then, will be the strife for the mastery between the authority, despotism, inequalities and injustices of the present, and freedom, equality and justice in their broad and perfect sense, based on the proposition that humanity is one, having a common origin, common interests and purposes, and inheriting a common destiny, which is the complete statement of the religion of Jesus Christ, unadulterated by his professed followers.

To a modern-day reader, the speech’s rhetoric of liberation is eye-catching for Woodhull’s use of a regressive rhetoric of miscegenation — deployed the same year that Douglass was named her running mate. “The new race will combine all these different qualities in one grand character, and shall ultimately gather in all people of all races. Observe the merging of the black and white races. The white does not descend to the black, but the black gradually approaches the white.” Elsewhere, she takes aim at the moneymen, and by doing so, made herself a pariah to the Wall Street set, in general, and to one patron in particular: “A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks. . . . 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 [a New York jail], and thence to Blackwell’s Island [a penitentiary].” With equal gravitas, Woodhull proceeds to critique New York real estate on terms that hold true for both Gilded Age moguls and twenty-first century developers: “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. . . . But if a tenant . . . fails to pay his month’s rent to Mr. Astor, the law sets him and his family into the street in midwinter”. Her speech ends with a call that rings with perhaps as much urgency today as it did in 1872: “Let all reformers rally, and, with a grand impulse and a generous enthusiasm, join in a common effort for the great political revolution, after the accomplishment of which the nations shall have cause to learn war no more.”