UNSTOPPABLE
The Victoria Woodhull Story
by Kate Danaher
Danaher’s historical novel reconstructs the remarkable life of the first female U.S. presidential candidate.
Victoria Claflin’s upbringing is not auspicious. She’s born into utter poverty in 19th-century Homer, Ohio, and the book implies that she and her siblings might have suffered physical abuse from their father. Married off at 15 to a local doctor, Canning Woodhull, who’s much older and prone to drinking, Victoria seeks refuge in books. Largely self-educated, she first learns about conception in a “marriage guide” at a bookshop in Cleveland. She has a son, Byron, who never learns to speak, and a daughter, Zula. And though the marriage ultimately fails, she and Canning remain close. These early experiences instill in her a conviction that she has “a natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can,” and in time she becomes a passionate advocate for what the press misleadingly terms “free love.” Consumed by an Emersonian fervor (as a child, she has a mystical vision of Demosthenes that gives her a sense of extraordinary purpose), Victoria finds it a grave injustice that half the nation is disenfranchised: “I also pay taxes on such pleasures as tea, coffee, and sugar, all to maintain a government in which I have no voice.” So she decides to run for president, in a campaign that earns the support of her second husband, Colonel James Blood, and then-president Ulysses S. Grant, who points toward his own desk and says, “Someday you will occupy that chair.” But after she accuses famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher of adultery, she attracts the scrutiny of powerful foes who seek to put her in jail.
Danaher has written a deftly paced and meticulously researched novel about the life of an unjustly forgotten feminist pioneer, a far-seeing woman with shockingly modern notions of religion, gender politics, and happiness within marriage: “Men suffer nothing for their indiscretions, but women, even on suspicion of them, are crucified,” she notes. But she also challenges the assumption that women who sell sex are wicked while men who buy sex are simply being men. Victoria remains a vibrant presence throughout the book, a woman who scandalizes Wall Street (100 policemen are called out to restore order when she launches the first brokerage for women), claims powers of prophecy and clairvoyance, and earns the enmity of Susan B. Anthony. The irony that Woodhull sought election in an era before women could vote (and thus could not even cast a ballot for herself) is not lost on the author. Victoria’s sister Tennie, an equally exceptional woman who would later marry an English baronet, becomes almost a second protagonist. The world of 19th-century America, a world of house parlors, greased-pig races, steamship guides, lavender sachets, and lavish dinners (“oxtail soup, tenderloin of venison…old English plum pudding”), is rendered with novelistic detail, making the book a genuine pleasure. A number of the greatest men and women of the age have cameos, among them Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who pursues a brief flirtation with Tennie. An appearance by a world-weary President Grant is a highlight; when Victoria visits him to announce her intentions to run for office, he laments, “You came to speak of your dreams, but I burden you with my nightmares.”A compulsively readable portrait full of rich characterization and well-observed historical detail.