Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull

by Barbara Goldsmith

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."

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Feminism, American History, Womens, Spiritualism

560 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 1998

About the author

an American author, journalist, and philanthropist. She received critical and popular acclaim for her best selling books, essays, articles, and her philanthropic work. She was awarded four honoris causa doctorates, and numerous awards; been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Presidential Commissions, and the New York State Council on the Arts; and honored by The New York Public Library Literary Lions as well as the Literacy Volunteers, the American Academy in Rome, The Authors Guild, and the Guild Hall Academy of Arts for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal from the Republic of Poland. In November 2008, Goldsmith was elected a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. She has three children and six grandchildren. The Financial Times declared that "Goldsmith is leaving a legacy—one of art, literature, friends, family and philanthropy."

Reviews

[Lora Shouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just wow.

This book is the story of what is just one knot of the tangled web of the history of America in the mid-nineteenth century. Its main focus is on Victoria Woodhull, a self-proclaimed spiritualist (and so much more) who was the first woman to run for President of the United States, long before women even had the right to vote.

But Victoria Woodhull was involved in so much stuff during her life that it also picks up at least half a dozen other stories involving many of the most famous and infamous characters in the history of that period including three presidents, several preachers, newspapermen (both publishers and editors – Victoria Woodhull published her own newspaper for a while), railroad tycoons, and leaders of the women’s suffrage movement.

Victoria’s parents were quacks and swindlers of the most persistent kind. Her father, while probably not the inventor of patent medicines, appears to have been one of their most devoted salesmen. His specialty was a combination of alcohol and laudanum brewed by her mother and one of her sisters in their back yard (except they were constantly on the move). At a fairly early age Victoria began having visions and seeing spirits, even before talking with spirits became all the rage, which it did about that time. Her parents quickly moved to cash in on this ability, taking her around the country to tell fortunes.

Apparently the parents were pretty abusive, and Victoria married early in an attempt to get away from them. But her husband also turned out to be a drunk and was abusive as well. After a while, she divorced him and married another man. But the experience of her first marriage left her with great sympathy for the women of her time and the legal disabilities they suffered under. Not being able to vote was almost the least of the problems of these women.

Over the course of years her spiritualist contacts led her into contact also with the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, and after she successfully predicted the moves of stock prices for Commodore Vanderbilt for a period and was rewarded by him with a modest fortune (so that they saw her as being able to contribute financially to the movement) she sort of took it upon herself to run for President. For a number of reasons, she didn’t actually get very far with this, but it must have been an interesting prospect.

There is a long history in the book regarding the men who supported this early women’s movement, especially Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) and Theodore Tilton, and the protracted battle between them over Tilton’s wife. Tilton treated her like dirt, and partly in consequence, she fell in love with Beecher. The two men had other areas of conflict and sued and counter-sued each other over several trials and several venues. Fans of the Kardashians would have been right at home. They entertained the public for several seasons, and in the process destroyed a number of lives, including Mrs. Tilton’s and Beecher’s sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker’s. They also (with some help from other men and from some of the women themselves) managed to pretty effectively destroy the women’s movement, setting back the onset of women’s suffrage forty or fifty years at least. Who needs enemies when you can have friends, right?

One of the women they managed to almost destroy was Victoria Woodhull, although her family, who she could never get clear of, helped quite a bit in this effort as well. Eventually she divorced her second husband and went to England, where she remarried a third time, and except for a brief return to run for President again (this was mostly to show the English society ladies who refused to have anything to do with her that she was close to the leaders of the suffrage movement), she lived quietly in the English countryside for the remainder of her life.

An able unraveling of the historical knot, as far as it can be unraveled. Ably narrated by Margaret Daly as well.

[Susan O · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book twice, because I enjoyed it so much. I would say it is more a history book than a biography although I put it in both categories. Victoria Woodhull appears throughout the book, but the main focus is on the suffrage and spiritualism movements. You become acquainted with other personalities that are important in this period in history such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriot Beecher Stowe, among others. Definitely a good choice if you're interested in this period in American History or women's issues.

Of particular interest to me is the history of women's suffrage in the United States. Although women spoke out for their rights prior to 1848, many mark the Seneca Falls Woman's Convention as the beginning of the fight for women's suffrage. It took 70 long years and only one of the signers of the "Declaration of Sentiments" at the convention lived to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

The people involved in the suffrage movement were often involved in other reform movements such as abolition and temperance, and were very diverse. This created conflicts of both personality and conscience making for a very interesting read.

[Jocelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was great! It was such a thorough examination of the context surrounding spiritualism and women's suffrage. I learned a ton, and I was also very frustrated. Reading about how fractured the suffrage movement was reminds me of some of the bs going on today. Obviously we never learn from history. And I knew some details about how some suffrage leaders were basically shitty people, but this book really brought out information that I think is brushed under the rug a lot. Many of them were very racist and still very sexist at their core. While Victoria Woodhull was painted as corrupt, scandalous, and problematic during her time, I honestly think she's the most legit of all these women!

[Robert Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a real problem with this book. In the introduction, the author tells us that while the records concerning many of the events she depicts were sketchy, contradictory and supremely suspect, she assures us that the reality she depicts was verified through letters, documents, etc. (though these these are never footnoted).

But the text often depicts speculation as fact. At one point, Goldsmith tells us that Tennessee Claflin resented being used by her father to defraud people rather than using the (spiritual) gifts she in fact had. Does Goldsmith honestly feel these sisters had "special" gifts? Is she claiming to have "verified" this?

Given that Woodhull and the Claflins were all prodigious liars, it's imperative for their biographer to be able to determine, if not fact from fiction, at least the reasonably likely from nonsense.

[Bops · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great read. Historians might bristle at the lack of footnotes, but Goldsmith wrote a diverting tale. I love the American history from 1865- 1890, what a heady time America vacillated between mystical discoveries from the spiritualist and scientists. It was also the first time women had a sustained presence in the public sphere. Goldsmith really nails Susan B. Anthony on her Racism and anger at the 14th amendment. She also doesn't spare the Suffragist men who connived and delayed the movement 50 years for their own gain. Goldsmith also respects the work of Victoria Woodhull, who was prescient in her views of liberation, sexual and otherwise. Woodhull deserves to be more then a footnote in history. I want her on my silver dollar.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goldsmith forwards a fairly heady thesis that the initial feminist movement in the United States was helplessly entangled with spiritualism in its many aspects, from charlatan to aspirational. She does a good job of gathering information to back up her claim, too. The photo on the book’s cover displays Victoria Woodhull, America’s first female presidential nominee and on and off spokeswoman for the suffrage movement. The history of this woman serves as a conduit for Goldsmith’s story and for the feminist movement as it unravelled, an unfortunately apt verb. For you see, Victoria Woodhull was also a proponent of free love; she and her sisters, alas, did not have the luxury of The Pill. In fact, this aspect of her message sent her to prison several times, especially when she tried to out the then famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher for his own private practice of what he certainly didn’t preach, that same free love, with myriad female parishioners. This aspect of Woodhull's message also sharply divided the women seeking the right to vote, splintering the movement irrevocably until its resurgence one hundred years later. This book contains a wealth of information—perhaps too much for I feel it bogs down with the in-depth (nearly two hundred pages) examination of the Beecher-Woodhull-Tifton fiasco. Ms. Woodhull was too representative of her time: sometimes confused, sometimes under-handed, sometimes idealistic, sometimes self-seeking, and sometimes deluded. If you want a history of the early women’s movement in America, this book will serve you famously.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barbara Goldsmith's Other Powers is a strange book: ostensibly a biography of Victoria Woodhull, 19th Century American feminist, it's really a rambling, discursive look at the different threads of Gilded Age America that kinda sorta intermingled in Woodhull's career. Kinda. Goldsmith heavily stresses Woodhull's early career as a spiritual medium, arguing that spiritualism provided American women an outlet for independence and self-sufficiency in the Victorian Age. All well and good, and Goldsmith makes her case well. Yet the book spends a lot of its time on Woodhull's admittedly eventful life in business and activism, discussing the first serious suffrage movement in post-Civil War America, the conflict between feminists and advocates for Reconstruction and black civil rights, and more general discursions into Gilded Age politics and culture. It's hard to explain what annoys me about this book, because most of these topics are interesting on their own (our current debates over intersectionality show that frustratingly little has changed from the time when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass sparred over whose cause deserved more attention), but together none of them are handled in enough depth to really capture their import. Still looking for a Woodhull book that actually does her justice.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

History that exceeds most fiction for drama and surprise. Following the trail from Anthony Comstock to Victorian era trance speakers to Victoria Woodhull's astonishing life has been a very entertaining journey. I knew the history of progressive causes had been entwined with spiritualism but had no idea how deep the tangled roots go. Woodhull is a figure both fascinating, for the place she made in the issues of her day and for her courage to espouse ideas decades ahead of her time, and horrifying for the damage she and her family did to the quest for female equality by the chicanery, fraud, and blackmail they practiced. However villainous the Claflin clan may have been though is totally eclipsed by the sheer awful hypocrisy of Henry Ward Beecher and his supporters. No surprise really that the holiest man in America was a skunk.

As with all good history, there are lessons for today because too many of our churches are still lead by skunks and good works are possible for the most damned of our fellow creatures.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well researched book that focuses on an interesting gap (many really) in history. You really don't hear about significant figures in history also being in to spiritualism. And the dramas and intrigues! People think events today are outrageous. It's just history repeating itself!! IMHO, people should read more histories and old newspapers if only to realize that that adage is so true.

Anyway, I had not heard of Victoria Woodhull and it was interesting to read about her -- very liberal in her thinking about marriage for her time. As the first women to run for president, you'd think we'd have heard more about her.

This is a bit lengthy and definitely a history book, so it'll take a while to get through, but a worthy read if you're interested in this part of history or want to hear more about important characters at that time.

[Carla]

Well-written history of a fascinating time period; the combo platter of spiritualism and suffrage that meet in the personality of Victoria Woodhull is hard to beat. The whole wacky Woodhull clan is terrific, and the social history, ditto. So many great characters pass through this book.

[Jeanne]

I just couldn’t get into this one. It seemed so scattered and unfocused. And it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know. Meh

[Individualfrog · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, but unsatisfying panorama of the feminist movement of the second half of the 19th Century....or is it? Although this book apparently started life as a biography of Victoria Woodhull, and claims to be centered around her, in fact the central organizing point is the Beecher-Tilton Affair: a legal contest between two men. The book feels like a late Dickens novel, with several interweaving plot lines, and this case is the Jarndyce & Jarndyce of the book, where all the plots converge. The teleological cast is clear from the beginning, as even in the first chapters Goldsmith is alluding to what will happen in the last ones, the court case which will bring together all the characters: Woodhull and her sister Tennie C. Claflin (whose given name was Tennessee, but she changed it, a decision I must respect though not understand); Henry Ward Beecher, the Jimmy Swaggart of his day; Theodore Tilton, his protege and Radical Republican; his best friend Frank Moulton; feminist icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and that most Dickensian of clownishly evil Victorians, Anthony Comstock, compulsive masturbator and tireless persecutor of 'indecent' art and literature. With such massive characters involved, an entire galaxy of prominent 19th Century Americans are drawn into this orbit: Anna Dickinson and Laura Curtis Bullard, Commodore Vanderbilt, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Benjamin Butler, Mark Twain, on and on. And yet the actual trial (both of them, because one was an internal Plymouth Church hearing, the other an actual civil suit) is an incredible anticlimax, where nothing happens, a powder keg whose fuse merely fizzles away. So organizing the book around it is an inevitable letdown.

In that it is perhaps symbolic of the 19th Century suffrage movement in general, but that's not to say it's not frustrating. Victoria Woodhull is herself rather a letdown. One reads the blurb with mounting excitement: "She ran for President in 1872? With Frederick Douglass as her running mate?? As a supporter of the First International???" But one soon discovers that her candidacy was barely real, Douglass never even heard of it, Karl Marx himself denounced her for her free love advocacy, and much of her writings were really written by men like Butler, her partner Colonel James Blood, and radical Stephen Pearl Andrews. Even her brokerage firm, co-owned with Tennie C., was really mostly a lark of Cornelius Vanderbilt's. Only her free love views, universally despised at the time, seem to have been really her own.

But that is not nothing: the despisers were every single one of them wrong, and she was entirely right. One reads her speeches on the subject in some amazement; they are incredibly contemporary. She had a moral clarity on the subject that entirely cut through the absurd Victorian sensibilities that, even now, sometimes hang over our heads; she was more forceful an advocate for sex workers, for example, than anyone I can remember until maybe five years ago. She relentlessly criticized the barbarous marriage laws of the time, which treated women as nothing better than Realdolls for their husbands, voiceless, powerless, and to be considered sexually available at all times; but also the institution of marriage in general and the ideologies of chastity and purity to be destructive to everyone involved. I am by nature entirely a monogamist, and I have experienced many more failed open relationships than successful ones, but I know when someone is right, and Victoria Woodhull was right about that. Of course she denounced these views later in life, but for a little while anyway, she comes off well.

The list of people who manage that is very short. Frank Moulton, obscure middle-man between Beecher and Tilton, is Goldsmith's secret hero, and if it won't get me in trouble to say it, I suspect her history crush. He does no wrong in her telling; he comes across as outside of his times, irreligious, conscientously respectful and supportive of women, apparently the only good husband in the entire 19th Century (perhaps with the exception of Colonel Blood, who remains rather shadowy in this book, but who shared Victoria's free-love views and supported her in practice, and said, when she repudiated him for the sake of some chimerical propriety, only "The grandest woman in the world went back on me.")

The other is someone I knew only as a visual icon, the sort of person you read about in first grade readers: "In those days, women couldn't do anything. Susan didn't like that! She wanted to change it!" It is a pleasure to get to know the actual Susan B. Anthony, prickly and stubborn, constantly feuding with her nemeses in the New England branch of feminism, but relentless, fearless, and always clear-sighted in pursuit of her goals. Anthony responding to gossiping critics of Victoria Woodhull, a woman she didn't like and would rather have had nothing to do with: "When we begin to search records, past or present -- of those who bring brains or cash to our work for enfranchising women -- it shall be with those of the men -- not the women, and not a woman, not Mrs. Woodhull -- until every insinuation of gossip of Beecher, Pomeroy, Butler, Carpenter shall be fully investigated -- and each of them shall have proven to your and our satisfaction -- that he never flirted, trifled with, or desecrated any specimen of Womanhood. . . not until we chastise and refuse men will I consent to question women -- and it is only that Mrs. Woodhull is awoman -- and that we are women -- all of an enslaved class -- that we ever dream of such a thing." It's too bad that she and her fellow suffragists can no longer be named without mentioning that they were racist. It's true, I'm sure, although they all got their start as abolitionists; Stanton especially, but doubtless everyone, revealed bigoted sentiments at one time or another. But we don't seem to attach the same caveat about the fighters for the suffrage of black men, that they were sexist -- I'm sure they were that too. Everyone agreed both groups shoud get the vote -- that everyone should be able to vote; they only disagreed on how to go about it. I've seen people online sneer at the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920: "thank you brave suffragettes for helping white women get the vote, white feminism in a nutshell," etc. But the 15th Amendment, passed 50 years earlier, had advocates like Wendell Phillips who explicitly refused to include women in it -- there were even "Anti Female Suffrage Committees" among the Republicans. If it's understandable that Douglass, who believed in women's suffrage as well as black suffrage, was willing to sacrifice the former in pursuit of the latter, I don't see why the reverse isn't true for Anthony, who merely wanted to sacrifice neither, though her methods were doubtless wrongheaded.

In any case: the book. The writing is nothing special. The depth of research is incredible, but maybe too detailed -- even Dickens could not abide such an overabundance of plot. It is incredibly difficult to follow who is friend and enemy at any given point, characters disappear for two hundred pages and then pop up again like in a Pynchon novel, basic chronology gets confused in the massive jumble of facts and quotes. Organizing the entire book around a trial in which the supremely hateable hypocrite Henry Ward Beecher gets away scot-free and, even worse, nothing happens was a mistake. The stories of Woodhull and Claflin and the internal politics of the Republicans, the women's movement, and the Plymouth Church are all fascinating, though. 3 stars.

[Pilouetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

the first woman to run for president? not wilma mankiller or hillary rodham clinton, but victoria woodhull. this book was excellently researched and compelling to read. most significantly, goldsmith points out the controversy between establishing the right to vote for blacks versus women, and how the pitting of minority interests allows the majority to continue to hold and abuse power. imagine if frederick douglass, elizabeth cady stanton, harriet beecher stowe, susan b. anthony and victoria woodhull had gathered forces! an important lesson in today's environment of il/legal gay marriage, illegal immigrants' (& children of) rights, and the continuing fight for reproductive rights. this book is a SHOULD READ for all aficionados of american history! not only does goldsmith offer a fascinating look at the first wave women's movement, but she also provides an excellent history of new york, pre and post the civil war. a new york where women were allowed in delmonico's only with a male escort, and other treasures like the history of the word, "hookers," credited to the women who joined civil war general hooker during his campaigns against the confederacy. as for psychic powers, nancy reagan was peanuts compared to the gifts of victoria woodhull! spirtualist and consort to rockefellers!

[Kathleen Hagen]

Other Powers: the age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, by Barbara Goldsmith, Narrated by Margaret Daly, Produced by Audible Inc., downloaded from audible.com.

A highly readable combination of history and biography, Other Powers provides
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.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating book about Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president. Real insight into a very transformational time in U.S. history.

[Sally Kilpatrick]

This book was a JOURNEY.

So much is going on here. On one hand we have Victoria Woodhull's life as well as that of the Claflin family. On the other we have the Suffragette movement with Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Lucretia Mott, et al. As a third braid of this story we have the story of Henry Ward Beecher and his affair with Lib Tilton along with a healthy dose of New York--and national--politics. Oh, and spiritualism. And free love. With more than a dash of abolition.

I am a writer, and I could not have made this up.

This was a particularly interesting book to have started and finished the week that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. As if any of us needed any reminders that a good chunk of the U.S. population still see women as less than. In an odd way, it was kinda comforting. I kept thinking of what Susan B. Anthony said when asked in the early 1900s if women would ever get the vote. She said, "Failure is impossible."

There are a whole lotta lessons to learn from the downfall of the suffrage movement. First and foremost, squabbling amongst yourselves is a great way to never reach your goal. Squabbling of who is and is not worthy to be a part of your group? Also not a good look. Throwing other people under the bus to get your rights? An awful way to go about things. I am specifically looking at you, Stanton and Anthony. I know you were frustrated because you put women's rights to the side to get through the Civil War and to abolition, but resorting to racism to bolster your cause was atrocious.

The biggest lesson of all? The white man with the most money is going to, most infuriatingly, come out all right in the end while white women can reinvent themselves and possibly regain some a sliver of their former status if they "atone" and "reform." Going against the status quo could very well land you in jail, an insane asylum, or a different country because you can't live in your home country anymore.

I'll give Goldsmith one thing: she absolutely did not shy from showing people with all of their complexities and foibles on display. It's an ambitious book that covers a lot of territory, a fascinating look at a tumultuous time in history.

[Krystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many years ago, I wrote a few papers on Victoria Woodhull and used parts of this book for my arguments but I never had the chance to read the entire book so I am happy to finally come back around to read the book in its entirety. Victoria has always been one of my favorite historical characters - she was a con artist but one who I think truly believed in her own cons. She also had a sense of decency that those upstanding citizens that so maligned her were missing. She was not the best person but she, I think, meant well with every bad decision she made. She was also a woman before her time and when she dared to tell the truth about the hypocrisy of her age, the white male establishment closed ranks, and she reinvented herself once more as a staid, respectable wife of a British nobleman for the rest of her days. But for 20 years there, if there was a scandal, a movement or a right to stand up for, Victoria was there in the thick of it which makes a biography of hers so compelling. It is a biography of an age, of the 1860s and 1870s when America had some major growing pains and we needed to decide what it was we stood for and who would have a voice. We're still learning those lessons today and Victoria's story is seen still in the way we've treated the #MeToo movement and women like Christine Blasey Ford who dare to speak out against those in power.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want the dirt on pretty much every American figure from Reconstruction and the early Gilded Age, this is your book and it is a five-star read. (Hint: Only Frederick Douglass came out clean in this 500-page book.)

If you want a dishy history of the struggle for Women's Suffrage from Seneca Falls to --almost-- the addition of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution by the various women's groups that fought for it told through the story of Victoria Woodhull, this definitely is your book and, again, it is a five-star read.

If you want information on the promised-in-the-subtitle Spiritualism, a movement that at one point had millions of followers, and the connection to the struggle for Women's Suffrage (and, somewhat, other rights too), you will find it in this book. But it will be a rather disappointing read as that information is very much hidden in the weeds. As this reader was looking for this last aspect to connect this book with Peter Manseau's The Apparitionist: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man who Captured Lincoln's Ghost, he came away a tad disappointed. Hence the three-star rating.

Note: Unlike a lot of historians, Goldsmith can write is clear prose. This even though this book was 500 pages, it was a quick read. Bravo!

[Darla Ebert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started out well but deteriorated into a lurid bent of events that might have been better leaving out. A lot of the "history" seems to be more speculation. There is no doubt Victoria Woodhull's family were not of the highest calibre and most likely indulged in a fair amount of seamy activities but had I known the "detail" to be provided would have been of a depth as low as what was purported, I would not have read the book. That being said, there was almost enough of history to have made reading the book worth it anyway. The spiritualism segments were not explored enough and so I was left feeling cheated. I was expecting to read of the Clavlin family's having bilked people with their occult practices and then how they were ultimately exposed, but this was barely explored. Overall it was an interesting read but left me feeling a bit let down.

[Lara · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a LOT in this book, but it's all woven so intricately together, women's rights and spiritualism as a specifically female belief/faith system and free love in idea and practice (surprising no one then or now, men are usually for free love until they find out their wife is pregnant with another man's child) and church politics and political politics and Reconstruction, that nothing ever really seems superfluous.

HBO needs to get on this book for their next miniseries stat. History! Women's rights! Victoria Woodhull communing with the spirits and crusading for free love! Henry Ward Beecher being a relentless horndog! Attempts at open marriages that implode dramatically! Period clothing and facial hair!

[Groucho42 · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been on my shelf for years. A mystery set in the same time got me off my duff to write a review.

Many books about that time just focus one thing, spiritualism, the Civil War, the robber barons and the Gilded Age, or similar focus. This book is great because Victoria Woodhouse's story moves across all of those parts of Northeastern society during her time. The words "before her time" are often abused, but read this book and you'll see the definition. Among her many accomplishments, both good and bad, she ran for President before women could vote.

A great book.

[Siobhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book on late 20th century history reminding us that the thing to do with powerful Bad Men (per the modern too Interested in women who are not their wives standard) is separate them from progressive movements as soon as we know they're Bad because their scandal will take those movements down. Other lessons learned: intersectionality is the way to progress, don't make petty squabbles public, and Spiritualism was both empowering (to the might-as-well-be-property women of the late 20th century) and strange.

[Joanna Ford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enlightening look into the world of suffragists, abolitionists, and the spiritualist movement. Victoria Woodhull was, and remains, such an enigmatic and engaging figure and this book goes into a ton of details to help the reader understand the context and complications of the era.

There are so many details and so much information it can sometimes feel like you are not reading a book about Woodhull any more, but I think the information was necessary in order to be able to actually understand what led up to her imprisonment and later life.

[W.L. Bolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very comprehensive look at the context behind the entanglement of spiritualism and the suffrage movement. There are times when the sheer amount of information can become overwhelming, but it was an interesting look at how the different movers and shakers of their time were related, connected with each other as well as how they feuded with and supported those in and outside their circles.

[Mary Newcomb]

This was a tough read, I gave up around page 120. It is a thoroughly documented story of Victoria Woodhull and those who surrounded her. I was unfamiliar with many of the individuals presented so far and could not become interested. Those who are more familiar with the subject matter will likely find this to be a good addition to their knowledge base.

[Kai Charles(Fiction State Of Mind) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at women's role in the suffrage movement and Spiritualism. Victoria Woodhull is a figure in the center in the middle of several of the prominent people in the moment for women's equal rights.

It's a fascinating snapshot of a period of time that was undergoing great transformation.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! There was so much information in it and it was so cool to learn more about the I tomate lives and dramas of so many important figures in the women’s suffrage movement in the 1800s. It brought to life the reality of that era and was jam packed full of new perspectives and personal letters.

[Michael Kearney · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book about the backstory of the woman's sufferage/eaqual rights movement in the 1860' and 1870's. It reveled a more human side to susan B Anthony. Also how radical the leaders of this movement were.

[Kay Dee (what is your storygraph name? mine is in my bio. join me!) Meadows · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF. it was sooooooooooooooooo long. i did read some later chapters . like her move to the UK and the trial. i just couldn't do it. if this was an aduio or Ken burns miniseries i could have done it.

[Jessie B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the intersection of early American feminism and the spiritualist movement.