1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910825068803321

Autore

Frisken Amanda

Titolo

Victoria Woodhull's sexual revolution : political theater and the popular press in nineteenth-century America / / Amanda Frisken

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2004

ISBN

1-283-89053-4

0-8122-0198-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (236 p.)

Disciplina

305.42/092

B

Soggetti

Feminists - United States

Women - Suffrage - United States - History

Suffragists - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [193]-207) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chronology of Events -- Introduction: Victoria Woodhull, Sexual Revolutionary -- Chapter 1. "The Principles of Social Freedom" -- Chapter 2. "A Shameless Prostitute and a Negro" -- Chapter 3. The Politics of Exposure -- Chapter 4. "Queen of the Rostrum" -- Conclusion: The Waning of the Woodhull Revolution -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

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.