(1)
Victoria Woodhull, Lecture
on Constitutional Equality (20th February, 1872)
That the framers of the Constitution had Woman's Rights
clearly in their minds is borne out by its whole structure. Nowhere
is the word man used in contradistinction to woman.
They avoided both terms and used the word "persons"
for the same reason as they avoided the word "slavery,"
namely, to prevent an untimely contest over rights which
might prematurely be discussed to the injury of the infant
republic.
The issue
upon the question of female suffrage being thus definitely settled,
and its rights inalienably secured to woman, a brighter future dawns
upon the country. Woman can now unite in purifying the elements
of political strife in restoring the government to pristine integrity,
strength and vigor. To do this, many reforms become of absolute
necessity. Prominent in these are:
A complete
reform in the Congressional and Legislative work, by which all political
discussion shall be banished from legislative halls, and debate
be limited to the actual business of the people.
A complete
reform in Executive and Departmental conduct, by which the President
and the Secretaries of the United States, and the Governors and
State officers, shall be forced to recognize that they are the servants
of the people, appointed
to attend to the business of the people, and not for
the purpose of perpetuating their official positions, or of securing
the plunder of public trusts for the enrichment of their
political adherents and supporters.
A reform
in the tenure of office, by which the Presidency shall be limited
to one term, with a retiring life pension, and a
permanent seat in the Federal Senate, where his Presidential
experience may become serviceable to the nation, and on
the dignity and life emolument of Presidential Senator he
shall be placed above all other political positions, and be excluded
from all professional pursuits.
A reform
between the relations of the employer and employed, by which shall
be secured the practice of the great natural law, of one-third of
time to labor, one-third to recreation
and one-third to rest, that by this intellectual improvement
and physical development may go on to that perfection
which the Almighty Creator designed.
A reform
in the system of crime punishment, by which the death penalty shall
no longer be inflicted - by which the hardened criminal shall have
no human chance of being let loose to harass society until the term
of the sentence, whatever that may be, shall have expired, and by
which, during that term, the entire prison employment shall be for
- and the product thereof be faithfully paid over to - the support
of the criminal's family, instead of being absorbed by the legal
thieves to whom, in most cases, the administration of prison discipline
has been entrusted, and by whom atrocities are perpetrated in the
secrecy of the prison enclosure, which, were they revealed, would
shock the moral sense of all mankind.
In the broadest
sense, I claim to be the friend of equal rights, a faithful worker
in the cause of human advancement;
and more especially the friend, supporter, co-laborer with
those who strive to encourage the poor and the friendless.
If I obtain
the position of President of the United States, I promise that woman's
strength and woman's will with God's support, if he vouchsafe it,
shall open to them, and to this country, a new career of greatness
in the race of nations.
In accordance
with the above, we shall assume the new position that the rights
of women under the Constitution are complete, and hereafter we shall
contend, I not
for a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, but that the
Constitution already recognizes women as citizens, and that
they are justly entitled to all the privileges and immunities
of citizens.
It will
therefore be our duty to call on women everywhere to come boldly
forward and exercise the right they are thus
guaranteed. It is not to be expected that men who assume that they
alone, as citizens of the United States, are entitled
to all the immunities and privileges guaranteed by the Constitution,
will consent that women may exercise the right of
suffrage until they are compelled. We will never cease the struggle
until they are recognized, and we see women established in their
true position of equality with the rest of the citizens of the United
States.
(2)
Victoria
Woodhull, speech, (February, 1872)
These privileged classes of the people have an enduring hatred for
me, and I am glad they have. I am a friend not only of freedom in
all things, and in every form, but also for equality and justice
as well. These cannot be inaugurated except through revolution.
I am denounced as desiring to precipitate revolution. I acknowledge
it. I am for revolution, if to get equality and justice it is required.
(3)
Cincinnati Commercial, May 11, 1872
Last night I stepped
into Apollo Hall, one of the noblest and most picturesque halls
in the city, where the National Convention of the Woodhull and Claflin,
Male and Female Labor Party are holding a two days’ session.
As I approached the place, I heard the voice of Mrs. Woodhull resounding
through the hall, and when I entered I found her standing in front
of the platform, which was filled with people of both sexes, and
declaiming in the most impassioned style, before a crowded audience
of men and women who had been wrought up to a very high state of
excitement. The scene was really dramatic, and to those who were
in sympathy with it, it was, doubtless "thrilling," "glorious,"
"sublime." Somehow or other, Mrs. Woodhull, as she stood
there, dressed in plain black, with flushed face, gleaming eye,
locks partly disheveled, upraised arm and quivering under the fire
of her own rhapsody, reminded me of the great Rachel in some of
those tragic or fervid passages in which the dominating powers of
her nature and genius were displayed in their highest effect. She
seemed at moments like one possessed, and the eloquence which poured
from her lips in reckless torrents swept through the souls of the
multitude in a way which caused them to burst, every now and then,
with uproarious enthusiasm. A moment after I entered there was one
of these spiritual explosions, which brought her to a brief pause,
and the first sentence I heard was her exclamation, in loud, clear
tone: "Who will dare to attempt to unlock the luminous portals
of the future with the rusty key of the past?" Age, indeed
who will? was the thought which involuntary came to one’s mind
while looking at the extraordinary spectacle displayed in Apollo
Hall.
When her
declamation ended, the audience, masculine and feminine, sprang
to their feet and cheered till their wind was exhausted, cheered
with a frenzy and force that must have startled the multitudinous
promenaders who swept along Broadway. The heroine of the moment
disappeared from the platform, but the multitude encored till she
returned, stepped to the front, and bowed once and again her acknowledgments
for the applause.
Then a stout
and hearty personage, who was recognized by the Chair as Judge Carter
of Cincinnati, stepped quickly to the front, and in stentorian tones
nominated Mrs. Victoria C. Woodhull as a candidate for the Presidency
of the United States. "All who are in favor of the nomination,
say aye" were the words from the Chair, and instantly the shouts
of the Convention, delegates and outsiders, burst forth in a roar,
thunderous and continuous, which might have blown the roof of the
building to the skies. Again Mrs. Woodhull appeared on the platform,
and accepted the nomination in a few words.
Then followed
an hour’s wrangle, with countless speeches as to the candidate
for the Vice Presidency. The first nomination made was that of Frederick
Douglass, who was eulogized by half a dozen speakers in succession,
and opposed by two or three, on various grounds. We had the oppressed
sex represented by Woodhull; we must have the oppressed race represented
by Douglass. Other names followed: Ben Wade, Theodore Tilton, Spotted
Tail, Ben Butler, Henry Ward Beecher, Robert Dale Owen, Governor
Campbell, Wendell Phillips, Richard
Trevithick, and
others. Frederick Douglass, however, at last got the vote of the
Convention. And was thus nominated for the second place on the Woodhull
Presidential ticket - the Executive Committee being empowered to
substitute another name in case of his refusal to accept.
The platform
of the party, which demands a new National Constitution, and numerous
other things in the revolutionary line, was subsequently adopted.
I forgot
to say that throughout the entertainment, the audience were excessively
merry and were as wildly enthusiastic. She left the place pretty
well exhausted with cheering. The audience were highly respectable,
as well as large and strikingly American in physiognomy and appearance.
There were large numbers of fashionable dressed ladies, and most
of the gentlemen evidently belonged to the business and professional
classes. There were also plenty of "Reformers," and in
fact, it was they who contributed the real genius of the assemblage.
At the close
of the session, Mrs. Woodhull, the nominee for the Presidency, passed
into an ante-room, where her friends crowded to congratulate her.
She was in ecstasy, and so was her sister, Miss Claflin. Her face
beamed under her high-crowned Neapolitan black hat. She shook hands
with the gentlemen enthusiastically. The ladies kissed her and embraced
her, kissed each other, and kissed her again. I never before saw
so much kissing and hugging in public, nor, for that matter, in
private either. Men were not afraid to pass hands round women who
were not their wives, and women indulged in political osculation
till they were tired.
(4)
Victoria
Woodhull, Woodhull and Claflin's
Weekly (15th June, 1872)
From
various quarters we hear the query, "Do these reformers really
mean what they have put forth as their platform, or have they willfully
perpetrated a large joke?" Had the inquirers been present in
Apollo Hall and taken note of the sort of material that constituted
the convention which constructed the platform, there would have
been no need of making this inquiry. If there ever were serious
people, meaning every word they said, those to whom we refer were
such. And although the enthusiasm of the occasion raised, at times,
to a high degree, it never ruled, at the expense of wisdom and discretion.
Hence,
we may safely assure everybody that every word which appears either
in platform or resolutions which that convention formed, was intended
in dead earnest. Some brainless editors who have never grasped an
idea or had the capacity to entertain a principle, but who, from
a continuous practice of lines of policy, bring all their natural
capacities to do either, may talk of its being child’s play
and nonsense; but they will live long enough, if they live only
till next November to learn that their wisdom is indeed foolishness.
Many imagine because, in reality, they have never stopped to think
about it, that our systems of law, organism and execution, are consistent
with the theory laid down in the Declaration of Independence. There
could be no greater error than this supposition. There is not even
the faintest shadow of truth in it, unless, perhaps, it may be said
that the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment may be an exception;
and whatever of salvation there was in that, they attempted to defeat,
by the next section, fearing to let a single grain of real freedom
and equality stand free from the tares of despotism.
The
declaration that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, is inalienable in the individual was the first expression
of the great change in the uses of government, which is but just
now beginning to be understood. We say beginning to be understood,
for there is no law upon the statute books of any country, whose
first purpose is to establish and protect human rights, but they,
one and all, are for the purpose of establishing and protecting
property rights, to the utter ignoring of those of the higher sort.
If
the right to life were, by law held to be, as the declaration maintains
it to be, inalienable, there could be no law providing for the death
penalty. In the abstract sense, the taking of life, whether by the
individual or by the State, is equally murder, and there is no sort
of logic that can controvert this fact. If it were necessary that
a murderer should be hung to save the lives of members of the community,
there might be a reasonable argument in favor of capital punishment;
but nobody pretends that any such proceeding is necessary in these
days of safety asylums like our prisons. Therefore, when the community
commits murder, the crime is multiplied from the individual into
the whole number who constitute the community, each one of whom
is equally guilty with the person whom they murder for having murdered,
and there is no way of escaping the inevitable law of divine compensation
and justice, which is administered without regard to any arbitrary
distinctions.
The
same rule is applicable in the same way when persons are deprived
of their liberty for any purpose except for the protection of the
community. The present imprisonment of criminals is to carry out
the idea of punishment. Nothing that is thus administered can by
any possibility be just, since justice exists alone in the immutable
laws of the universe, while human laws ought to be so founded upon
principles as not to militate in any manner whatever against their
prerogatives.
But
if in our systems, the inalienable rights to life and liberty are
infringed, how much more so is that to the pursuit of happiness.
This right is hedged upon every possible side by all conceivable
forms of law and standards of public opinion. Instead of being formulated
to protect this inalienable right, our laws could not have been
better constructed if prohibition were their purpose.
The
right to the pursuit of happiness means that every individual has
the right to seek his or her happiness, as he or she may determine;
and as a corollary the necessary implication follow that in whatever
manner the individual shall choose to seek that happiness, all other
individuals should respect and the community as a whole protect.
But,
says the objector, if everybody shall be permitted to follow his
or her own inclinations in the pursuit of happiness and there should
be no law to prevent it, what assurance is there that such pursuit
will not interfere with the rights of others. Now this is the great
stumbling-block everywhere raised to oppose the spread of the new
interpretation of individual freedom, but at the same time the most
fallacious one possible to be conceived of. Nobody denies the right
of community to erect and maintain a government; but it is demanded
that government be restricted to its legitimate uses, the protection
of individual rights. If this idea be properly conceived of, the
objection named will vanish before is as mist before the noon-day
sun.
Up
to, and including this time, governments have not been maintained
to protect the inalienable rights of individuals, but to enforce
the edicts of one class of the community upon its other classes;
and no better illustration of this statement could be had than the
manner in which one-half of all the people are denied a right freely
exercised by the other half, this other half being the denying power.
This is a self-evident exemplification of the various theories which
our governments, national and State, vitalize; and which are declared
by the platform of the Equal Rights Party, to be far behind our
present civilization.
It
is the mission of this party to reconstruct the government so that
the theories it shall give vitality to shall be those set forth
in the Declaration of Independence, which are in strict accordance
with the theory which involves all other theories; the theory that
there are such things as human rights, all-sided freedom, equality,
justice and equity; not only in one specific department of life,
but in all departments; in the political, the social, the industrial
and the educational departments; which then include all that can
properly be brought within the legitimate limit and sphere of government;
since it has not jurisdiction over those things that necessarily
are matters of individual thought and conscience.
At
least seven-tenths of all the people, whether conscious of it or
not, naturally and inevitable belong to the Equal Rights Party.
Not a person who is not constitutionally opposed to freedom and
equity, can deny a single proposition of principle laid down as
its platform. It is too true, however, that, heretofore the people
generally have had no considerable realization of the theories laid
down by the founders of our government. But it may safely be assumed
that they require only to be presented to be apprehended, appreciated
and accepted; and in this fact rests the certain success of the
Equal Rights Party.
