If this woman was alive today, she’d have my vote. Shit.
#she put frederick douglass on her ballot as v.p. too #unfortunately he didn’t know about it at the time #he read about it in the papers and was like ‘is this chick serious’
Victoria Woodhull 2016
This fails to mention that she was the first woman to run for US president, as well as being the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street alongside her sister Tennie Claflin, and their newspaper published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto known to date
@reservoircat HEY LOOK WHAT JUST POPPED UP ON MY DASH
YES, I HAVE *OPINIONS* ABOUT THIS POST.
Okay, for starters, Victoria wasn’t a sex worker. She wasn’t necessarily anti-sex worker in the manner of the time–she viewed it as a societal ill that occurred because of the inequality of women and the power structure which allowed and abused such sex work. But she very much wanted to destroy the structures that forced many women into sex work and sex trafficking.
The claims that Victoria herself was a sex worker come from two things: her supportive stance on ‘free love’, i.e. the allowance for men and women to chose their own consensual sex partners outside of marriage, and her rise to power as a millionaire New York stock broker and newspaper owner. See, men of the time refused to believe that Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee Claflin could truly be such shrewd, ambitious and forward thinking businesswomen all on their own. So they spread the rumor that the sisters got their positions and fortunes from being sugar babies basically.
She was also virulently anti-trafficking after her younger sister and business partner Tennie Claflin was kidnapped and sold into brothels by one of their business rivals. When this happened, Victoria and her husband Colonel James Blood tracked the traffickers down and retrieved Tennie at gunpoint from her captors.
Victoria was not well liked by her fellow suffragists either because she was an ardent supporter of Black suffrage and total equality of all races. She regularly told Stanton and Anthony to go fuck themselves.
It was awesome. She was awesome.
I just love Victoria Woodhull so much ;-;
I forgot to mention last time I saw this.
The Woodhull Freedom Foundation/Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance, named after this wonderful woman, affirms “sexual freedom” as a basic human right.
They run the Family Matters Project, which not only supports same sex marriage, but helps polyamorous groups fight eviction based off of “single family home” zoning and otherwise fights discrimination based off of “family structure.”
They collaborated with the Florida ACLU to end the shackling of female prisoners in labor in Florida.
Their overall goal is to end “social and legal sexual oppression.”
They give out “Vickis” to individuals who support the sexual freedom movement every year.
Their bookstore includes books about male homosexuality and consent, pornography, abortion, bisexuality, trans people, the anthropology of menstruation… (I think I want to pick that one up when I have the money).
IOW, this woman inspired a whole bunch of people to work on protecting your right to be a slut ;). (Or to not be a slut…the sexual freedom movement is not quite the same thing as sex positivity, which can tend to drift towards supporting promiscuity as “better” than chastity).
