And it's taken a long time. And we're still struggling.
Two US deputy marshals, Colfax and Bernard, appeared early in the morning in Broad Street, calling at a nondescript shop front at number 48, around the corner from the imposing facade of the New York Stock Exchange. It was not their usual beat, but there they were, on a bitterly cold morning, trudging down Wall Street, to arrest a woman.
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The deputy marshals were just in time. As they knocked at the door, a fast carriage swept past, but they could see the passenger was their woman, and gave chase. Stopping the carriage and producing a warrant, they arrested her on charges of sending obscene publications through the mail.
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Her call to action was published in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, the paper she ran with her sister in New York for six years.
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Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee (“Tennie”) Claflin, who was seven years her junior, had financed the newspaper out of handsome profits from their earlier venture as New York’s first female stockbrokers.
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The battle cry – “We advocate the rights of the Lower Million against the Upper Ten!”– would find an echo in the slogan of the Occupy movement more than a century later. In December of 1871, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was the first publication in the United States to print an English translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
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Woodhull’s presidential campaign was based on a platform far ahead of its time – it began with female suffrage, but she also endorsed free love and an end to the “slavery” of marriage. She believed in workers’ rights and trade unionism, equal pay for men and women, universal healthcare, and prison reform.
What obscenities triggered the warrant for her arrest, you might well ask?
The Weekly’s first scoop targeted the celebrated New York preacher Henry Ward Beecher. [...] Woodhull published a detailed account of his adulterous affair with the wife of one of his long-term supporters, the abolitionist and poet Theodore Tilton.
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The next column in this special edition of the Weekly depicted an even more sordid scandal. In an article attributed to Tennie Woodhull, Luther Challis, a prominent trader and Wall Street wolf, was accused of seducing two young girls. [It] cited a source that bore witness to the man’s recent night out at the Academy of Music, where he was seen to escort two girls aged 15 and 16, fresh from school in Baltimore. He and a friend plied them with wine and later adjourned with the girls to a house of ill repute, “where they were robbed of their innocence”.
The obscenities, it seems, were the acts of privileged men, but the charges were leveled at the "lurid articles" written about them. And not only that, but the sisters did not mail their papers until religious fanatic Anthony Comstock ("secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a United States postal inspector") pulled a fast one.
Employing intermediaries, he ordered copies of the Weekly through the post, to trigger an arrest warrant under legislation designed to protect the moral probity of the US Postal Service. A warrant was issued for the sisters’ arrest, and they were soon apprehended by Colfax and Bernard, caught in the act of attempting to stop the authorities from confiscating copies of the offending edition.
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[Their attorney] formulated a plea that there was no basis for an obscenity charge because everything in the Weekly articles (and worse) could be found in Shakespeare or the Bible.
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The sisters were released on bail a month after their arrest, and exonerated of obscenity charges the following June, when the judge ruled that existing obscenity legislation did not apply to newspapers.
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Anthony Comstock, was outraged by her acquittal in the Beecher case but used it to build new support for stronger obscenity legislation. He travelled to Washington in the wake of the trial and was instrumental in drafting new and more comprehensive censorship legislation – which became known as the Comstock law.
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[B]y 1917, the suffragist Jeanette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress, as a Republican representative for Montana, one of the few states that had agreed to allow women to vote. By 1918, women had won the right in 40 states, but with Rankin’s advocacy, the constitution was amended in 1920 to mandate universal female suffrage. Laura Clay, a southern Democrat, was placed on the presidential ballot that year. But restrictive rules and escalating campaign costs in subsequent years slowed the cause, and there were no more female presidential candidates in the running until 1964.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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