I’ve been reading a lot about women’s suffrage lately. Some books are dry. Some are gripping. Other Powers is the “Women’s Suffrage: All the Dirt” version. This book describes the complicated career of Victoria Woodhull, and the high-profile adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher in which she was involved. By the end of the book, fortunes have been made and lost and made again, the women’s suffrage movement has been set back by decades, and everyone’s secrets have been splashed all over the papers, proving that the Victorians were no more proper than anyone else.

Victoria Woodhull was a suffragist who ran for President in 1872. She was also a spiritualist and a businesswoman. She grew up in a poor and tumultuous family and members of the family lived with her (and off of her income) intermittently for most of her life. She and her sister Tennesee Claflin formed the first brokerage firm on Wall Street that was owned and run by women. Her belief in free love made her notorious and her relationship with other suffragists fluctuated depending on how scandalous her life was at any given moment.

Other Powers is devoted, for good and for ill, to explaining how everyone’s personal, political, and business lives overlapped. In addition to people already mentioned, the list of figures includes but is not limited to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Staton, Frederick Douglass, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Lib and Theodore Tilton, Horace Greely, and Commodore Vanderbilt. Really, would a chart have been so hard to draw? Could we at least have gotten a list of people? It was frustrating to have a parade of characters march through the pages with no background or cohesiveness to their stories: people pop in, play their role in the drama of the chapter, and leave.

The book is so busy dissecting everyone’s public scandals and personal lives that it gives short shrift to their actual contributions to women’s suffrage. Based on this book one would seriously think that Susan B. Anthony did nothing with her life but gossip about her friends’ love affairs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a major player in the suffrage movement, not just someone who stood up for Woodhull. The book’s strength is that it shows how everyone is connected, but in trying to show what, at times, feels like LITERALLY EVERYONE was doing, each individual gets very short shrift – even Woodhull, who sometimes disappears from the book altogether.

The story is best when it lets Victoria Woodhull speak for herself by quoting her letters and speeches. She championed suffrage as part of a larger set of social reforms, some progressive and some, in hindsight, problematic. She believed in labor reform and in socialism. She thought women and men should marry for love and feel free to divorce and possibly remarry if they found they no longer loved one another. She felt that women should be in charge of their own bodies and their own reproduction and that girls should be raised with a knowledge of their own anatomy and of menstruation and reproduction. She was also a supporter of eugenics (this deeply problematic concept was a common “progressive” view at the time) and opposed abortion, although she championed birth control.

There’s so much social outrage in the book that it’s easy to see Woodhull as sensationalist as opposed to serious (she was, in fact, some of both). But whenever her speeches are quoted, the book moves from scandalous to electric with frustration and determination:

Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.

Of all the horrid brutalities of our age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage. Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and millions—yes I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak—millions of poor, heart broken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust…. The world has got to be startled from this pretense into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invests men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their wills, yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I say, eternal damnation, sink such morality!

The book shines in revealing not only how entangled people’s lives were, but also in how flawed our stereotypes of Victorians are. It also shines in revealing how incredibly miserable the life of a woman could be. Be aware that the book contains descriptions of spousal abuse, gaslighting, severe depression, child physical and sexual abuse and neglect, suicide, and murder. 

The trial that the book describes involves an enormously popular preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, who was charged with committing adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, a suffragist who was one of his parishioners. Elizabeth Tilton confessed the affair to her husband, who complained to Susan B. Anthony, who repeated it to Woodhull. Woodhull, fed up with Stowe constantly lambasting her for her opinions on free love and morality, published the allegations in her newspaper. Stowe went on trial for adultery and Woodhull for spreading obscene material in the mail.

Other Powers does a good job of showing that people didn’t act in isolation. Prominent suffragists knew each other. Spiritualists knew each other. Members of the same church knew each other. All these tangled personal and professional connections had serious impacts on the major events of the day. On the other hand, the story is often lost in the minutiae of who wrote what to whom and what someone’s friend of a friend of a cousin’s husband thought.

In closing, here’s a quote from Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

Victoria Woodhull has done a work for woman that none of us could have done. She has faced and dared men to call her the names that make women shudder, while she chucked principle, like medicine, down their throats. She has risked and realized the sort of ignominy that would have paralyzed any of us who have longer been called strong-minded.