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  • Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics
  • Amanda Frisken
Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics. Edited by Cari M. Carpenter. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. xlii + 337 pages. $35.00 paper.

Victoria Woodhull, a social radical who defended women's right to sexual autonomy, gave voice to some of the nineteenth century's most provocative ideas. She may not have authored all of her unorthodox works—many of her formal lectures, particularly, were likely written by others—but the public splash they made remains worthy of scrutiny if only because of the ripples they created in American society and culture. Despite continuing controversy over the authorship of these works, their appearance in a new collection, Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics, provides a convenient and well-presented scholarly resource. Cari M. Carpenter offers a framework to reevaluate Woodhull's career as representative of evolving trends in the perception of human sexuality in the late nineteenth century.

The collection brings together Woodhull's key speeches and writings on social freedom, women's economic and social rights, and eugenics. Roughly ninety percent of the material gathered here comes from Woodhull's most influential years in the 1870s; the remainder is a small sample of her less significant—and less palatable—eugenics writings in England near the turn of the century. The book includes Woodhull's most famous works, such as her "Memorial" to Congress on women's constitutional right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, her famous free love speech called "The Principles of Social Freedom," and her popular lecture on the Beecher-Tilton scandal, "And the Truth Shall Make You Free." It also includes a number of private letters and some public exchanges from the pages of Woodhull's radical newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. [End Page 152]

Carpenter suggests that scholars have been overly scrupulous in avoiding Woodhull's works due to "a lingering question about the extent of her authorship" (xlii). She acknowledges that others, notably anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews and Woodhull's husband James Harvey Blood, probably contributed substantially to Woodhull's speeches and writings, but she insists "that Woodhull was the public voice of these controversial ideas and that she rose and fell by these, her words" (xlii-xliii).

In her introduction, Carpenter demonstrates that a focus on sexuality, motherhood, and breeding connects these writings, from the 1870s free love lectures to the 1890s texts about eugenics. She rejects the assumption that Woodhull's life represented "two distinct phases—her early, progressive commitment to free love and her later conservative eugenics." Identifying traces of Woodhull's thoughts on eugenics in all her major nineteenth-century works, Carpenter argues that the two phases "are more connected than previously imagined, and . . . need to be refigured in order to understand both her and her context" (xi). Given this focus, it is unfortunate that the collection does not include Woodhull's first major speech, "Children: Their Rights and Privileges," delivered before the American Spiritualist Association in 1871. Delegates attending the convention found the speech so compelling that they elected her their president, a position she held for the next five years. Heavily influenced if not written entirely by Andrews, the speech explained "Stirpiculture," his term for the concept of scientific breeding applied to humans. The responsibilities of motherhood and childbirth, according to this speech, were keys to women's power. The speech provides early evidence of what Carpenter calls Woodhull's "striking conflation between a call for free choice in sexuality and the coerciveness of eugenics, in which individuals are obligated to sacrifice individual needs to the 'greater good,' which is of course a racialized, gendered, and nationalist entity" (xxxix).

More broadly, Carpenter questions why Woodhull remains a problematic figure in American history and the history of American feminism—why she is written out or ignored, or often just misunderstood. "In neglecting [her]," Carpenter argues, "we create a simpler—and more limited—view of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement: one that does not include 'The Manifesto,' Wall Street, or free love. Nearly a century after her death, Wood-hull calls attention to our assumptions about...

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