December 2, 1871
[Page 14]
WOMAN ITEMS.
Long absence makes the heart grow fonder—of some one else.
Detroit ladies are going to give up corsets. They will stay no longer.
Rouge has been accurately defined as the extreme unction of departed beauty….
The Marriage, Divorce and Prostitution topic excites attention everywhere. Some two years ago the city of St. Louis adopted, as an experiment, a system of legal and police supervision of the social evil, including registration, inspection, etc. There was and still is a great deal of opposition to this mode of treating the great moral cancer of the world, and the principal object urged is that law should never countenance any acknowledged evil by any attempt to regulate or lessen it. While there has been much said in favor of either system, St. Louis has boldly tried the experiment based upon the idea that until there is a radical change in human nature, prostitution cannot be entirely removed, and that it is better to adopt mitigating and reformatory measures and open the door through which fallen humanity may be restored to virtue and happiness. It has been said many times, that the experiment was resulting badly, but at the National Police Convention, held in that city, Mayor Brown, who presided, stated that he was at first strongly opposed to the St. Louis law, but observations of its working and its effects upon the cause of morality had radically changed his views and he now supports it. The St. Louis authorities testify that since its adoption there has been a marked decline of social vice. Mayor Brown stated that a reformatory institution would soon be built, designed to aid and benefit those women who may desire to return to better lives. It must be remembered, says a Boston paper commenting upon the subject, “that this represents the police view. It is not necessarily the moral, humanitarian or Christian view.” It is a deeply important subject and is still open for discussion. Its importance demands all the light that can be brought to bear upon it, and yet there are those who would stifle inquiry.
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[From the Hartford Times.]
LETTER FROM VICTORIA C. WOODHULL.
HER STATEMENT OF DOCTRINES—”FREE LOVE” AND THE FREE LOVERS—THE ” PROGRESS OF THE AGE.”
44 BROAD STREET, N. Y., Saturday, }
Nov. 4, 1871. }
To the Editors of the Hartford Times:
GENTLEMEN—Trusting to your liberality and respect for fair play, I transmit to you, with this, a letter in reply to the late attack of the Hartford Courant upon me-respectfully asking for it a place in your columns, for the following reasons: My reply was forwarded to the Courant office, and after two or three days’ delay, is returned to me accompanied by a note from the Editor, in which the offer is made to “extract fairly such parts” of my letter as give my views on the suffrage question, the marriage question, and any editorial responsibility ; and, publish such “extracts”—or to give me space for a reply one-half as long as that which I
have thought best to make. This is all perhaps which the Courant can afford to do. (I do not know its circumstances.) At any rate I do confess that is a quite fair offer to proceed from a source which does not hesitate to vilify and traduce others from differences of opinion with it.
I would not charge that the Courant’s “fair offer” is only a piece of ” gallant diplomacy ” to practically forbid me the hearing which is my right under its attack-but as I have expressed myself in my reply as I desire to be understood, in as short a manner as possible, to cover the whole ground, and preferring my own manner to any condensations of my reply by the Courant—I am obliged to decline its “fair offer;” and I write to ask of you the courtesy of publishing in an un-garbled form my reply to that paper, in order that it may be read by the immediate community into whose midst the Courant launched its late bitter and unwarranted attack upon me.
Very respectfully yours,
VICTORIA C. WOODHULL.
To the Editor of the Hartford Courant:
I seldom depart from the even tenor of my way to notice, or to attempt to answer or refute the abuse with which so many newspaper columns have been loaded since my advent as an exponent of the principles of Social Freedom. To abuse, I am indifferent. For all honest criticism, I am thankful. For all ignorant misstatement, I hope to be charitable. For wilful misrepresentation alone, do I care to render justice. A person who, out of pure malice or to injure a cause with which he does not agree, willfully, deliberately and intentionally lies, deserves the worst of all fates. Such a crime as that is as much worse than physical murder as the loss of that which is murdered by it, is more than the loss of life. A person who will publish to the world that a brother or sister is morally an abandoned person, when he can by no possibility know but celibacy itself is lived instead, is, to my mind, as much below the murderer in the scale of being as he is below the angel. The Hartford Courant regularly receives the paper which I edit, and you have no possible excuse for ignorance of what has appeared in its columns. If you are really ignorant of what has been said, time and again, you are still more culpable for your late attack upon me. But having stated my opinion of the various phases of tirade which it has pleased my most honorable brothers of the press to level at me, I do not propose to repay the Courant in its own coin, nor by any mere passage of words. But I do propose to place recorded facts side by side with your assertions, and then let the public decide which is the more “disreputable ” journal—the WEEKLY or the Courant.
We challenge you to produce a single editorial article from the columns of the WEEKLY that is immoral in its teaching; that is false and wicked in its social theories; that is ” blasphemy of religion and the exaltation of impiety;” or one to show that our “columns are open to anything, without regard to decency;” and I deny that the “editor practically or theoretically repudiates marriage.” These are the points of your impeachment, and upon their maintenance you must stand and prove us guilty, or fall and be condemned as set forth above.
To support your allegations you make a quotation from a correspondent, and hold me responsible for her statements. How disingenuous this is becomes palpable when I call to your mind that I have again and again stated editorially that I am only responsible for the sentiments and principles of articles appearing as editorial or without signature. I have often invited the most adverse opinions that I might the more pointedly compare the higher with the lower truth, And I now say, to make my position impossible of misconception, that the columns of the WEEKLY are open to the communications of even a Madam Restell [the abortionist] to advocate the beneficence of her institution, of which so many of my self-constituted judges have occasion to make use, and of which, if they were to tell the truth, as they feel it, they would be obliged to say it has been a blessing to them.
I should not, however, feel called upon to follow such communication with a lengthy editorial, lest I might be held as advocating the practice of abortion; since whoever has read the WEEKLY knows I hold abortion (except to save the lite of the mother) to be just as much murder as the killing of a person after birth is murder. This was made the subject of a special editorial in the number of date August 8, 1870, entitled, “When is it Not Murder to Take Life ?”
Neither should I feel especially called upon to give editorial dissent should a mistress of one of the fashionable houses of prostitution frequented by Doctors of Divinity, Medicine and Law, present the beauties of a life of prostitution in its columns, since I have too frequently endeavored to show that “prostitution is anarchy” to leave any doubt as to my position upon that question.
Therefore, when the Courant makes this single quotation, and bases its sweeping denunciations upon it, I am compelled to think it dishonest and desirous of unjustly prejudicing its readers against me. And with the more apparent candor and fairness the attempt is made, the more dishonest do I hold the intent; since you know you must make use of them the more completely to mislead your readers.
Lest it should be said that I shrink from the point you attempt to make against me by this quotation, I reproduce it entire :
“As far as any accusations of rebellion against the ordinances of society can be brought against me, I will wrench from my accusers their own weapons by acknowledging them all. If my ideas are to-day abominated and execrated, I must, as did my patron saint, Madame Roland, unflinchingly work on and appeal to posterity.
“How grandly you are laboring in the cause ! Angels are directing your every step. Have courage, sister ! The true women who are to come in the true age will call you blessed. What we have to suffer to-day is the natural lot of those who are before their age.
“From one imputation I desire to defend myself. I am aware that a certain lady said of me to you that I was a sensualist—attaching the low meaning to the word which is common to ordinary minds who see not the deeper and more spiritual significance of words. I am a sensualist in no other sense than that I worship the senses, as the only outward means by which the soul reaches perception ; but I am more sensuous than sensual. I love, like every poetic spirit, whatever is grateful to the senses and exquisite to the taste, the aromatous and luxurious deliciousness which nature offers to every appreciative consciousness.
“The gentleman to whom Miss McDowell refers in one of her notices of me I have known tor some time. I love and esteem him. He is one of the noblest and most cultivated persons it has been my good fortune to meet. If all men were as good as he, this world would be peopled by gods. The statement in regard to him is, to my knowledge, a tissue of libelous falsehoods, as the lady may learn by asking any one who knows the truth of the story. He never deserted his wife. She refused positively to live with him
on account of his belief in Spiritualism and his friendship for a lady, which never exceeded the limits of the purest Platonism. So much did he, from a pure sense of honor, obey the conventionalism of continence, that he was true to it up to the age of thirty-seven, when his guardian spirit taught him its absurdity. In parting from his wife, he gave her every cent of money he possessed in the world, about two thousand dollars, and the income she now has was a deliberate gift from him, and not a legacy from his mother.
“For my part, I would rather be a true-hearted Magdalen of the most despised type, than a woman chaste as ice, but with so little charity, the only real virtue, as to defame by false statements in a public print. This chastity which Miss McDowell considers “the best gift of God’s Providence,” I consider the greatest curse of the Devil, Ignorance. Chastity is not a virtue. It is rather a crime against nature—
—feeding life’s flame will self-consuming fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies.
It is peevish, proud and made of self-love, the most inhibited sin in the canon. It is either want of capacity or opportunity, want of a heart or a bigoted prejudice, or else a mere sham and pretence, a cover for the grossest crimes against the body.”
The first paragraph is an exact statement of my own feeling. I do rebel against all the social ordinances by which society seeks a seeming it has not, and which would compel me to conform to ceremonies which I deprecate. But the desire evinced by the writer in the third paragraph to defend herself against the charge of being a sensualist, is evidence complete that the rebellion against ordinances does not in her mind, any more than it does in mine, cover justification for sensuality, or an acknowledgment of any charge of that character. And I join with her in her worship of the senses. They are our God-given means of happiness ; and
he or she who cannot or will not discriminate between a high and low development of them is not fitted to sit in public
judgment over those who have risen into their spiritual appreciation, in contradistinction to the merely animal….
You repeat, in substance, what the Springfield Republican some time since said : “The time came when the woman suffrage movement could not afford to carry this woman and her load of vicious thieves.” I am inclined to the opinion that this assumption was rebutted rather severely by a simple array of facts, taken from the public journals, a copy of which I shall take pleasure in handing you.
But your discretion passes all limit when you assert that the time came when the suffrage movement could not carry me. I pray you tell me when the suffrage movement ever carried me. But since you are as ignorant of facts as you are incapable of principles of freedom, I would take the trouble to inform you upon this subject.
The original Suffrage or Woman Rights movement has been in existence for about twenty years. Up to one year ago I was not known to the movement. It did not recognize me as belonging to it; and with the exception of Miss Anthony I was never even honored with the acquaintance of its leaders. Certainly the suffrage movement was not carrying me then. It became a duty that I owed to humanity, however, to go before Congress last winter with a demand for my rights as a citizen under the Constitution, guaranteed by the amendments. To that position thus first brought to the attention of Congress and the country the more intelligent part of the woman suffragists, in fact all except “the Boston exclusives,” have come. It has received the support of many of the best informed members of Congress, as well as decision in its favor by a chief justice of the United States Court, and the unofficial opinion of Justice Underwood, of Virginia, of the United States District Court. And to-day the suffrage movement owes the rapid advance it has made during the past year, as well as its present promising attitude, to this movement thus inaugurated by me in Congress. If this is being cast overboard as dead-weight by the suffrage movement, we hope the operation will be repeated
frequently. A few times, with like results, will enfranchise women….
Of one thing, however, you may rest assured:
It my enunc[i]ation of the principles of Social Freedom are illogical and untrue to the common order of the universe, they will come to naught. If, however, they are derived from the immutable laws of God, your worst denunciations of them and me will only assist in making them apparent to the world. But I trust you may see the propriety of addressing yourself to rebutting my arguments, rather than to traducing me for entertaining the ideas upon which they are based, which are as honestly and conscientiously mine as any that you hold are yours. It is this spirit of slander of which I complain as ungenerous, unmanly and
cowardly. If I see propositions set forth which I feel conscious are erroneous and damaging to the public welfare, I do not denounce their holders as all that is bad, but fairly and squarely oppose argument to argument, quoting them and leaving my readers or hearers to decide for themselves which is truth and which error. I think the general press would make a better exhibition of the Cbrist-spirit which they so loudly profess to follow, were they to adhere a little more closely to the same rule. If a person lie, I do not hesitate to call his conduct by its right name, as I have in your case; but I will never descend to vile names to arouse prejudice, even if they are warranted. As much as in me lies, I desire to deal with others as I would be dealt by, and I have never made a personal attack upon anybody in the columns of my paper. I do not claim any credit—I only assert the power of principles—the power of the greater over the lesser truth—when I say that some of the most stubborn and bigoted opponents of the principles of Social Freedom have been converted into advocates, by my presentation of them; who were also men and women, the peers of the best people in the world. And I have not. the slightest doubt that even you would be compelled to admit their truth, if you would for once remove yourself from intolerance and examine them as you do other subjects. Truth is mighty and will prevail whenever admitted to consideration. And the greater the truth the later it comes for consideration. First was Religious Freedom;
next Political Freedom, now Social Freedom; and each evolves by like means; while all constitute one General Freedom, which forms the basis of my religion. For its advocacy I have been dragged to the stake by my self constituted judges. True, I have not been burned by literal fire; nevertheless by a fire from which people shrink with quite as much dread as from that. And you have added fuel to the flame to increase my torments, but the manner in which it was done was cowardly and unworthy of a man holding your responsible position. You cannot justify yourself; but I intend that you shall make the effort and fail, as you have
failed to damage the cause of a Common Equality, for which purpose you enlisted in this cause.
In conclusion, permit me to predict that you will be ashamed of this attack before the present decade is past, if indeed you are not so already.
Yours for the truth and right,
VICTORIA C. WOODHULL.
44 Broad street, New York, Oct. 31, 1871.
—Hartford Times, Nov. 7.
{Excerpts from a letter by Victoria C. Woodhull. Victoria’s letter was prompted by an October 1871 letter to the editor by “A Lady from Hartford,” believed to be Catherine Beecher. Catherine, a member of the famous Beecher family, was among the people in Hartford, CT, who attacked Victoria Woodhull’s character.}
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When this web site began in September 1999, there were no digitized copies of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly available online. Now you can find an almost complete run on the IAPSOP web site which has no affiliation with Victoria Woodhull & Company: