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Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution
Amanda Frisken
Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America
University of Pennsylvania Press
May 2004
On Sale: May 10, 2004
240 pages ISBN: 0812237986 EAN: 9780812237986 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president,
forced her fellow Americans to come to terms with the full
meaning of equality after the Civil War. A sometime
collaborator with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, yet never fully accepted into mainstream
suffragist circles, Woodhull was a flamboyant social
reformer who promoted freedom, especially freedom from
societal constraints over intimate relationships. This much
we know from the several popular biographies of the
nineteenth-century activist. But what we do not know, as
Amanda Frisken reveals, is how Woodhull manipulated the
emerging popular media and fluid political culture of the
Reconstruction period in order to accomplish her political
goals. As an editor and public speaker, Woodhull demanded that
women and men be held to the same standards in public life.
Her political theatrics brought the topic of women's
sexuality into the public arena, shocking critics,
galvanizing supporters, and finally locking opposing camps
into bitter conflict over sexuality and women's rights in
marriage. A woman who surrendered her own privacy, whose
life was grist for the mills of a sensation-mongering
press, she made the exposure of others' secrets a powerful
tool of social change. Woodhull's political ambitions
became inseparable from her sexual nonconformity, yet her
skill in using contemporary media kept her revolutionary
ideas continually before her peers. In this way Woodhull
contributed to long-term shifts in attitudes about
sexuality and the slow liberation of marriage and other
social institutions. Using contemporary sources such as images from
the "sporting news," Frisken takes a fresh look at the
heyday of this controversial women's rights activist,
discovering Woodhull's previously unrecognized importance
in the turbulent climate of Radical Reconstruction and
making her a useful lens through which to view the shifting
sexual mores of the nineteenth century.
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