Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly

WOODHULL AND CLAFLIN’S WEEKLY. The weekly newspaper appeared in New York City from 14 May 1870 until 10 June 1876 (with an interruption from 22 June to 28 December 1872), at first under the masthead “Upward and Onward,” which was later changed to the bolder “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammelled Lives!” Published and edited by two sisters, Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, with the active collaboration of the anarchist philosopher Stephen Pearl Andrews, it reflected their views and promoted Woodhull’s career. Inspired by socialist, libertarian, and Utopian ideas, the Weekly advocated a comprehensive program of universal justice, women’s rights, world government, and free love, tinged with spiritualism.

In 1870, the Woodhull sisters became the first women stockbrokers in the United States and operated a brokerage firm. Shortly after Woodhull’s stint on Wall Street, the Weekly launched a muckraking campaign and denounced speculation for “cheating, swindling rich, middle, and laboring classes....” At the same time, the Weekly orchestrated Woodhull’s political career based on her commitment to woman suffrage and to the International Workingmen’s Association, or First International. On 19 November 1870, the Weekly launched her candidacy for the presidency of the United States and published her “Memorial,” in which she argued that, as citizens of the United States, women were enfranchised according to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) welcomed this new strategy. Meanwhile, in 1871 the Weekly reported Woodhull’s triumph at the NWSA convention in Washington, followed by her call to revolution, the “Great Secession Speech.”

In April 1872, the Weekly published a manifesto, endorsed by the NWSA leaders, calling a convention to form the new People’s Party “based on human rights,” with Woodhull for president. But Susan B. Anthony refused this association, thus terminating their collaboration and Woodhull’s political venture. The Weekly supported women in other ways by attacking the current impractical fashions, deploring the harassment of prostitutes, and advocating employment and higher wages for women.

On 30 December 1871, the Weekly published The Communist Manifesto for the first time in English. Thereafter it promoted the views of the American sections of the First International, announced meetings, and reported events such as the celebration of the Paris Commune on 30 March 1872. When Section 12 (a faction within the American movement) came under fire by the International for not toeing the party line on the class-struggle issue and promoting women’s rights and “social freedom,” the Weekly published discussions, resolutions, and William West’s report of the Congress in The Hague in September 1872 confirming the expulsion of Section 12.

Free love was a dominant theme in the Weekly. Woodhull and Andrews criticized marriage as enslaving women and constraining individual feeling and freedom. The Weekly reported Woodhull’s sensational speech on social (read “sexual”) freedom (21 November 1871) and the mounting insinuations against the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. The special issue of 2 November 1872 contained two explosive articles: the first revealed Beecher’s sexual affair with the wife of Theodore Tilton, a religious and political associate of Beecher; the second described the debauches of a broker, Luther C. Challis, and led to the Claflin sisters’ arrest under the Comstock laws, which prohibited sending obscenity through the mail. Nevertheless, the Weekly continued discussing free love, reporting the Beecher-Tilton trial, Woodhull’s lectures, and spiritualist meetings. Leaning more and more toward conservatism and mysticism, in 1875, the Weekly prophesied the advent of the Apocalypse and proclaimed its allegiance to the Bible. The new message preached the sanctity of the human body, the holiness of the family, and the redeeming mission of women. In 1877, the Woodhull sisters moved to England and remained their for the remainders of their lives.

Basch, Françoise. Rebelles américaines au dix-neuvième siècle. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990.

Frisken, Amanda. Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Gabriel, Mary. Notorious Victoria: The Uncensored Life of Victoria Woodhull - Visionary, Suffragist, and First Woman to Run for President. Chapel Hill, N.C.:Algonquin Books, 2016.

Woodhull, Victoria C.; Harris, Sharon; Weinstein, Cindy, Carpenter, Cari M. (ed.). Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.