THE IMPROBABLE VICTORIA WOODHULL

The eventful life of a maverick.

Publisher, world traveler, and communications consultant Collinsworth takes on the notorious Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927), spiritualist, suffragist, free love advocate, and daring iconoclast. Born into poverty, she was the daughter of grifters—Collinsworth calls her father a “one-man crime spree”—who exploited Victoria and her younger sister, Tennie, promoting them as “Amazing Child Clairvoyants.” At 14, she married a man twice her age, who turned out to be an alcoholic and morphine addict, and left him for another man who abetted her own scams. Claiming to have had a vision that she would become wealthy, famous, and the ruler of people, she ended up in New York, where she set up the Magnetic Healing Institute & Conservatory of Mental and Spiritual Science. Among her clients was Cornelius Vanderbilt, who paid her to predict stock market trends—tips, unbeknownst to Vanderbilt, that came from his eldest son. The grateful Vanderbilt agreed to back her when she and Tennie decided to open their own brokerage firm—the first founded by women. Other firsts followed: Victoria was the first woman to testify before Congress, on the matter of women’s suffrage, and, in 1872, the first to run for president. She touted her causes—suffrage and free love—in a newspaper column, “The Petticoat Politician,” and a weekly newspaper she and her sister published. Early admirers included Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, and newspaperman Horace Greeley. But Victoria’s notoriety and arrogance undid her: She “hunted trouble and didn’t care where her foot landed,” Collinsworth notes succinctly. Anthony Comstock had her arrested twice. Mired in scandal, in 1877, she sailed for England, where, with stubborn determination, she reinvented herself.

A zesty biography of a colorful woman in the raucous Gilded Age.