The "Victorian" Precedent for Kamala Harris's Defense of Sexual Freedom
The Democratic Party’s nomination of Kamala Harris for president has elicited comparisons to Hillary Clinton’s nomination in 2016 and Shirley Chisholm’s pursuit of the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1972. Yet Harris’s campaign is notably different. Clinton emphasized the historic nature of her quest to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” while Harris has downplayed the significance of her gender to the election’s outcome. Chisholm stood out as the first Black woman to seek a major party’s nomination, but her name was seldom uttered by the speakers at last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Instead, it is another woman, nominated for president in 1872, whose attention to women’s sexual autonomy echoes in Harris’s rhetoric. Victoria Woodhull, one of the most notorious women of the nineteenth century, never stood a chance of being elected president. (She was, for one thing, too young at 34 to hold the office.) But her controversial nomination can help us understand why, in 2024, we are paying relatively little attention to the historical significance of a female presidential nominee while focusing on issues of gender and sexual equality far more than in any prior election season. Woodhull campaigned on a platform of what she called “social freedom,” a combination of labor, women’s, and civil rights that challenged the very foundations of post-Civil War American politics. While Woodhull and Harris have dramatically different personal biographies, Woodhull’s ideals of “social freedom” resonate with Harris’s message of freedom today
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Woodhull’s beginnings were inauspicious, but she seemed to have a canny understanding of how to get and benefit from publicity. She was the child of itinerant Ohio Valley hucksters who married her off at age 14 to a much older man, whom she divorced fourteen years later in order to marry a man of her own choosing. Occasionally finding employment as a clairvoyant, Woodhull became a Spiritualist, part of a quasi-religious movement that promised direct communication with the dead. Spiritualism was not exactly mainstream, but far more controversial was Woodhull’s identification as a “free lover.” The free love movement was never cohesive (nor especially hedonistic by twenty-first-century standards); it encompassed reformers who supported no-fault divorce and sex radicals endorsing “varietism” (serial monogamy). A controversial allegiance for a man, free love was a scandalous affiliation for a woman. But Woodhull ran toward, not away from, notoriety. In 1870 she and one of her sisters opened the first woman-owned brokerage in the nation. They also ran an independent newspaper that exposed the moral hypocrisy of some of the country’s foremost men.
Woodhull’s plan to seek the presidency was her most outrageous gambit to date. As I wrote in my August 30 newsletter,
In the nineteenth century, the term “public woman” was a euphemism for sex worker. Any woman who spoke out about women’s equality or really any issue publicly was morally suspect. Satirical cartoons portrayed women casting ballots as either hatchet-faced monsters or harlots.
Although Woodhull belonged to a small faction of suffragists who argued that the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment granted women birthright citizenship and thus the franchise, the reality was that American women’s voting rights—let alone access to public office—existed only in the Wyoming and Utah territories. The small Equal Rights Party, a splinter organization of the National Woman Suffrage Association, nominated Woodhull for president in May 1872 to test that theory. The party then nominated the Black freedom leader Frederick Douglass as her vice-presidential running mate, an honor he declined. Woodhull used the publicity the nomination generated to explain her vision of “social freedom.” (The phrase mirrored Douglass’s own calls for “social equality,” or civil rights.) American women’s economic dependence on men, she argued, forced women into marriages that were little more than “legalized prostitution” and made these women complicit in the subjugation of lower-income women who turned to the sex trade for survival. Women must receive an education about their bodies and control their fertility, she argued, and neither religion nor law should control a woman’s sexual choices. Speaking publicly about anything related to sex was an outrageous thing for a woman to do in 1872. Newspapers across the United States ridiculed Woodhull. The spectacle of a white female president and a Black male vice president likewise stirred up violently racist caricatures of both Woodhull and Douglass, with a newspaper in Oregon asking “is Woodhull degraded to the level of a negro, or is Fred. Douglass sunk to that of a prostitute?” (Recent smears by the Trump team about Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton’s sexual behaviors, especially the allegation that Harris provided sexual favors to advance her career, are another, unfortunate, echo of Woodhull’s campaign.)
Today, it is no longer outrageous for a woman to speak in public about sexual exploitation, abortion, or contraception—all major themes of last week’s Democratic convention. Yet we are today confronting what happens when protections for women’s rights recede, a reality that Woodhull had experienced first-hand. Several months after her presidential nomination, as the prospects for her campaign fizzled, Woodhull published an exposé of the pastor Henry Ward Beecher. She had it on good intelligence that Beecher, no friend of the free lovers, was himself engaged in a passionate extramarital affair with a woman from his Brooklyn congregation whose own husband was a wealthy and politically well-connected city leader. The anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock took it upon himself to gin up a warrant for the arrest of Woodhull and her co-publisher sister, for the crime of sending “obscene” material through the U.S. mail. If Comstock’s name rings a bell today, that is because the federal anti-obscenity law he championed, commonly known as the Comstock Act, included bans on sending any materials related to contraception or abortion across state lines. Should Republicans regain control of the White House or both houses of Congress, a revival of those dormant clauses would outlaw medication abortions and threaten access to many common contraceptive methods.
The Harris campaign's attention to “freedom” links bodily autonomy to voting rights and economic opportunity in ways that resonate with Woodhull’s “social freedom” platform. The difference today is that we have lived now for decades in a world that more closely approximates the one Woodhull envisioned, one in which a woman who divorces or has nonmarital sex is not cast away by her neighbors, in which many women can support themselves on their own earnings, and in which women enjoy the right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy. The sudden evaporation of those rights in many states—and the reemergence of the world that Comstock pursued—casts in stark relief what is at stake in this year’s presidential election: not simply one woman’s victory but the very lives, health, and freedoms of millions of Americans.
For terrific reflections on Victoria Woodhull’s run for president, check out:
DeWolf, Rebecca. “The Threat of the Comstock Act to Abortion Rights if Kamala Harris Loses.” TIME, September 12, 2024.
Epstein, Kayla. “A woman who ran for president in 1872 was compared to Satan and locked up. It wasn’t for her emails.” Washington Post, September 11, 2019.
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s.” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (2000): 403–34.
BOOK NEWS!
We had a fabulous crowd at the Cuyahoga County Public Library’s South Euclid–Lyndhurst branch last night for a conversation about Fierce Desires. Thank you to everyone who’s come out to the events and supported the book! You’ll find links on the Norton webpage to all kinds of purchasing options. My thanks to Mac’s Books for selling copies of the book at the event.
NEW EVENT! Tuesday, October 8, 5:15 pm, I’ll be at the Independence Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, with books available for purchase and signing from Giovanni’s Room. 18 S. 7th Street, Philadelphia, PA.
Find the latest news about my events on my website, https://www.rebeccaldavis.com/events.htm.