About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century.
They say Hillary Rodham Clinton will announce soon. It is not her first run, and she is not the first woman to run for president. With a woman in the race, you can depend upon mudslinging, demeaning, and defamation: call it equal rights. Since she is a Clinton, you will have to hear, yet again, about White Water, Vince Foster, Monica Lewinsky, and Benghazi. You will sniff, snort or yawn depending upon your politics. Through it all Hillary is bound to fare better than the first woman to seek the office. That nineteenth century hopeful was in jail on Election Day.
Women ran for office before they had the right to vote. They ran not to win but to do what women do best and prize most: to talk. They talked about any and every conceivable issue that plagued the minds of women.
The first was Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Born in Ohio in 1838, she announced her candidacy in 1870 in a letter to the New York Herald. Actually the most serious impediment to holding the office was not her sex; it was her age. By law, she had to be 35 to hold office of president; she was 32.
In May 1870 she held a convention in New York City at which several hundred people had a very good time. There she formed a new party: the Equal Rights Party, was nominated its standard bearer, and named Frederick Douglass her running mate. Douglass neither accepted nor declined.
She started a weekly newspaper and published her platform. Her proposed reforms benefitted the working class and criticized the economic elite as greedy and corrupt. Many of the specific reforms she espoused were later enacted into law but were very controversial at the time.
It didn’t take long for her to be the focus of a series of accusations and scandals. She was said to have earned money in suspect ways as a clairvoyant, a healer, and a stockbroker. She was said to be no stranger to men. Then there was the final scandal that placed her in a jail cell on Election Day. Woodhull did not receive one Electoral College vote, and there is no record that she received a single vote anywhere in the country.
What she was in jail for? Obscenity: she was charged with sending obscene material through the U.S. mail.
What you may be asking does this have to do with Berkshire history? Everything.
Henry Ward Beecher was a “permanent summer resident” of Lenox. Smug, one suspects, in his good fortune. He was called the most famous man in the United States. He was a minister with a large and lucrative pulpit, and his sermons were described as a combination of “St. Paul and Barnum & Bailey.”
He was proud of his modest estate in Lenox. It was a spot from which he said he could see heaven — he could certainly see a wide sweep of the Berkshire Hills. He said it was the inspiration for his successful publication “The Star Papers.” All in all Beecher was considered quite the fellow striding around Lenox with a smile and a nod for all.
That was the man Woodhull accused. The obscenity that Woodhull sent through the mail was an explicit description of the affair Beecher was having with Mrs. Elizabeth Tilden. Oh the scandal: how could it be that the great man debauched a wife, a mother, and far worse, a parishioner?
Beecher issued a vociferous denial and the charge of obscenity against Woodhull followed. Truth is an absolute defense but a denial takes an instant and establishing the truth takes time. The arrest was a few days before the election; the truth came four years later.
The trial for adultery that proved the case took place in 1874. Truth was established by the simple expedient of the wife tearfully admitting the affair. By then the election was over, Woodhull was a footnote, and Beecher was forced to sell his property in Lenox to pay his legal bills.
Woodhull may have been the first but Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood was the most qualified.
Born in up-state New York in 1830, Lockwood was a school teacher who pursued the law. She passed her courses, fought for her diploma, and became the first female member of the bar. She was a lobbyist for suffrage, and when the Republican Party refused to add that plank to their platform in 1884, Lockwood became the candidate for the Equal Rights Party.
Like Woodhull Lockwood’s platform contained many reforms which eventually became law such as a woman’s right to vote and removal of laws that limited a woman’s right to own property.
Men organized “Belva Lockwood parades” in which they wore Mother Hubbard costumes as a way of mocking her. To belittle and demean seemed preferable to debate on the issues.
Why is a sex scandal always just around the corner from any campaign? Recently, Hillary Clinton said there is “a deficit of fun” in the country today. Immediately detractors quipped it was only she who wasn’t having any fun. Therefore, she is probably safe from the sort of mud slung at Woodhull. Clinton was far from the first woman to run for president but she may be the woman most qualified and the one who has the best chance to win. So they will have to do something. Maybe they can all dress up in pants suits and sashay down Fifth Avenue. Would that work today or today is a suit just a suit?
