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

by Barbara Goldsmith (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.25

  Billed as a clairvoyant and magnetic healer in her father's travelling medicine show, Victoria Woodhull was a devotee and practitioner of those other powers that attracted ten million Americans to join the Spiritualist movement. She became Commodore Vanderbilt's spiritual and financial adviser, and was the first woman to address a joint session of Congress, arguing that women as citizens should have the right to vote. A heretical high priestess of free love, newspaper editor and proprietor, she founded the first stockbrokerage firm for women and, in 1872, ran against Horace Greeley and Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency of the United States. When her past as a prostitute was revealed, she fought against the hypocrisy of her detractors by publishing an expose of the sexual infidelities of preacher Henry Ward Beecher, which led to the Beecher-Tilton trial and her own ruin. This biography of Victoria Woodhull tells of the battle for women's suffrage, the Spiritualist movement and the fight that pitted black men against white women in the struggle to win the vote.