Other Powers: the Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull
Barbara Goldsmith
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 0060953322
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Barbara Goldsmith's portrait of suffragette Victoria Woodhull and her times was hailed by George Plimpton as "a beautifully written biography of a remarkable woman" and by Gloria Steinem as "more memorable than a dozen histories."
A highly readable combination of history and biography, Other Powers interviews the stories of some of the most colorful social, political, and religious figures of America's Victorian era with the courageous and notorious life of Victoria Woodhull--psychic, suffragette, publisher, presidential candidate, and self-confessed practitioner of free love. It is set amid the battle for women's suffrage, the Spiritualist movement that swept across the nation in the age of Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the bitter fight that pitted black men against white women in the struggle for the right to vote.
Peter Gay found Other Powers "Irresistible...this is a biography guaranteed to keep the reader reading." And Gloria Steinem called it "A real-life novel of how one charismatic woman...turned women's suffrage, the church, New York City, and much of the country on its ear."
$1,000 a year and asked for an entire year in advance. They did not have the money. Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly was forced to suspend publication. With no money, no newspaper, and few supporters, Woodhull’s campaign was abandoned. From the beginning the powerful men behind Victoria Woodhull believed that this campaign was, as Blood put it, “purely educational.” Benjamin Butler and Stephen Pearl Andrews delighted in seeing their theories reach a large audience through this beautiful woman, and
read an interview with the political cartoonist Thomas Nast in the Hartford Times. When asked if he didn’t think it a great undertaking to attack Mr. Greeley, Nast answered, “The people were fooled with Greeley, as they are fooled with Beecher, and he will tumble further than Greeley yet.” Isabella took it as a sign. Dear Brother, I can endure no longer. I must see you and persuade you to write a paper which I will read, going alone to your pulpit, and taking sole charge of the services. I
Beecher was a child of three, he would later say his mother was the guiding influence and inspiration of his life. Because of her, he professed to see God not as a strict father but as a loving, nurturing, and forgiving mother. In Roxannas spirit, Henry Ward Beecher would conceive his Gospel of Love, which two decades later would make him the most popular preacher in the nation. This new Calvinism, with its revival ritual, the powers released by mesmerism, and puzzling unseen electrical forces,
her upstairs bedrooms, communing with those who had “passed over.” Frequently, Isabella sank into a trance, and the spirits spoke through her. On Sundays, she held meetings with Spiritualists, convinced that she was forming “the beginnings of the Church on Nook Farm which I have seen so distinctly in visions over and over again.” On sunny days Isabella would climb out onto the tin roof below her spirit room window, open her silk parasol, and sit in the sun, waiting for the popping sounds that she
election year of 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared herself an independent candidate from the Eighth District of New York. Although women could not vote, if elected by male voters, they could serve. Stanton found the campaign a “merciless duty,” for she also had the responsibility for a full domestic household. “I must buy butter and meat, hear youngsters spell and multiply, coax parted threads in stocking heels and toes to meet again … and smooth down the ruffled feathers of imperious men or