The Improbable Victoria Woodhull
Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From the acclaimed author of What the Ermine Saw and Behaving Badly, a portrait of Victoria Woodhull, a celebrated and maligned 19th-century businesswoman and activist, and a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage and labor reforms.
In 1894, a remarkably self-possessed American woman, with no formal education to speak of, stood before a British court seeking damages for libel from the trustees of the British Museum. It was yet another stop along the unpredictable route that was Victoria Woodhull’s life. Born dirt-poor in an obscure Ohio settlement, Woodhull was the daughter of an illiterate mother entranced by the fad of Mesmerism—a therapeutic pseudoscience—and a swindler father whose cons exploited his two daughters. It was through her mother, though, that Woodhull familiarized herself with the supernatural realm, earning a degree of fame as a clairvoyant and her first taste of financial success. Woodhull’s life would continue to turn on its axis and then turn again.
Despite a deeply troubled first marriage at the age of fourteen, countless attempts by the press to discredit her, and a wrongful jail sentence, Woodhull thrived through sheer determination and the strength of her bond with her sister Tennie. She co-founded a successful stock brokerage on Wall Street, launched a newspaper, and became the first woman to run for president. Hers was a rags-to-riches story that saw her cross paths with Karl Marx, Henry Ward Beecher, and Frederick Douglass. In an era when women’s rights were circumscribed, and the idea of leaving a marriage was taboo, she broke the rules to carve out a path of her own.
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Collinsworth tells the story of a woman truly ahead of her time—a radical visionary who made defying mores a habit and brought to the fore societal and political issues still being addressed today. Neither a saint nor a villain, Woodhull emerges as an iconic, complex woman: an entrepreneur; lover of freedom; and a fiercely loyal family member whose political activism and suffragist legacy will cement her in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Collinsworth follows up What the Ermine Saw with a beguiling biography of Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), a groundbreaking and enigmatic figure in women's history. After opening with Woodhull's 1893 libel case against a British Museum Library archivist, Mr. Garnett, for "cataloging... material she insisted contained unflattering references to her," Collinsworth rewinds to Woodhull's humble beginnings, when she worked with her sister for their con artist father as "amazing child clairvoyants"—a trade they continued as adults, serving as spiritual consultants to Cornelius Vanderbilt. With Vanderbilt's backing, the sisters opened a Wall Street brokerage firm (at a time when women weren't allowed to trade stocks) and founded their own newspaper; Woodhull eventually ran for president (at a time when women couldn't vote). Much of the book follows Woodhull's ambitious trajectory through the eyes of Mr. Garnett, whom Collinsworth places in the role of researcher, studying the woman who sued him—a distracting and unnecessary conceit. Still, Collinsworth's Woodhull is captivating enough that this misstep is worth overlooking—the author excels at conveying the chameleon-like nature of a woman who was "in the business of reinventing her past," including through numerous self-published pamphlets (one so effusive that a critic remarked, "Such a book is a tomb from which no author again rises"). It's a transfixing character study.
