Woodhull and Claflin

US spiritualists, entrepreneurs, and activists. In 1868 Victoria claimed that she was visited by a spirit who told her to go to New York, New York, and the whole family followed her there. The sisters gained the support of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and soon were running Woodhull, Claflin & Company, the first stock brokerage owned by women. They prospered through their investments. Victoria then came under the influence of Stephen Pearl Andrews, a utopian intellectual, and in 1870 she announced she was a candidate for the presidency of the USA – the first woman to do so.

Victoria started Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly in 1870, which for the next six years published a mixture of muckraking, fads, and scandals, including the first English translation in the USA of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. She delivered a statement to a Congressional committee on the right of women to vote in 1871 and was briefly adopted by the women's suffrage movement, but she was dropped in 1872 and so formed her own Equal Rights Party. Meanwhile, she had publicly charged the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with committing adultery with a parishioner and by election time the sisters were in jail, accused of sending obscenity through the mails; they were acquitted in mid-1873.

They were both born in Homer, Ohio. As young girls they travelled with their dubious father as part of a family medicine show, claiming cures for all ailments. In 1853 Victoria married Dr Canning Woodhull and they would have two children; he would come and go in her life and in 1866 she divorced him and took out a marriage license with Col James Harvey Blood, a spiritualist and faddist. That same year Tennessee, after having been charged with manslaughter for the death of one of her ‘patients’, married a gambler.

After tempering her radical views, Victoria went to England in 1877, accompanied by Tennessee, and began lecturing on ‘The Human Body The Temple of God’. In 1883 Victoria married an Englishman, John Martin. Tennessee married a prosperous merchant in 1885, and when he was made a baronet, she became Lady Cook. They continued their crusading, both in England and on visits to the USA, and Victoria published a periodical promoting eugenics, Humanitarian (1892–1901).