Words Worth Remembering: Woodhull’s Stand
Ready to make history, Victoria Woodhull strode confidently into the Capitol on Wednesday, January 11, 1871, leading what the New York Herald described as “A Delegation of Fair Ones” before the House Judiciary Committee. Dressed in a dark gown with a blue necktie, her brown hair tucked under an Alpine hat, she was the first woman to address a congressional committee.
A wealthy suffragist and scandalous thirty-two-year-old radical, Woodhull was used to firsts. A year before, in April 1870, she formally announced her candidacy for president despite a litany of disqualifications. “This is an epoch of sudden changes,” she had written in her announcement letter. “What may appear absurd today will assume a serious aspect tomorrow.” To critics, she wrote, “They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform.”
A month had passed since her allies in Congress introduced her petition in the House and Senate calling for legislation to enforce women’s right to vote under the Constitution.
Supported by the presence of such suffrage titans as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Woodhull rose from her chair, removed her hat, and began to speak. “Her voice was very clear,” the Herald reported, “and did not appear embarrassed in the least.”
“The Constitution makes no distinction of sex,” she told the committee, emphasizing the Fourteenth Amendment. “The Constitution defines a woman born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, to be a citizen. It recognizes the right of citizens to vote.”
Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment also directs that no state can “abridge the privileges or immunities” of American citizens, nor deny “the equal protection of the laws.”
“The right to vote,” Woodhull continued, quoting the Fifteenth Amendment, “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Race, color, and servitude all described the state of American women. “Race and color,” she said, “include people of both sexes.” And women “had from time immemorial” been in a state of legal servitude.
The logic of the New Departure movement, though novel to many, was clear to Woodhull and her supporters. If the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments included and protected freedmen, they included and protected women, too. State laws barring women from the ballot box were therefore unconstitutional.
Woodhull pressed further, calling the committee’s attention to first principles. “‘Taxation without representation’ is a right which was fundamentally established at the very birth of our country’s independence,” she said. “By what ethics does any free government impose taxes on women without giving them a voice?”
She explained the difference between a monarchy and a republic. In a monarchy, the people are the subjects of a sovereign person. What rights they receive are the result of “gracious favor.” In a republic, citizens are sovereign and grant limited power to their elected officials.
“As sovereignty can not be forfeited, relinquished, or abandoned, those from whom it flows—the citizens—are equal in conferring the power, and should be equal in the enjoyment of its benefits and in the exercise of its rights and privileges,” Woodhull said. “One portion of citizens have no power to deprive another portion of rights and privileges such as are enjoyed and exercised by themselves.
“The male citizen,” she added, “has no more right to deprive the female citizen of the free, public, political, expression of opinion than the female citizen has to deprive the male citizen thereof.”
“To my mind, the argument is perfectly invincible,” the lawyer and former congressman Albert Gallatin Riddle told the committee in remarks following Woodhull’s. “It can never be met, and never will be, and will ultimately work out its own end.”
Woodhull’s appearance on Capitol Hill made the rounds in the press. Horace Greeley’s critical New York Tribune wrote that the women “made the first move of the year on their tyrants in Congress,” with Woodhull having sounded “the attack right gallantly.”
A Philadelphia correspondent described Woodhull as “one of the forces of nature behind the storm, or a small splinter of the indestructible; and if her veins were opened they would be found to contain ice.”
It was a sign, perhaps, of progress in the arduous struggle to realize founding ideals. “There is no disguising the fact,” the Herald wrote with confidence, “that the women suffrage advocates are making headway in Washington.”
Yet despite the appearance of favorable headwinds, the House Judiciary Committee found Woodhull’s argument lacking and denied her petition. The majority concluded that to pass legislation establishing the right to vote without regard to sex would be a gross infringement of state sovereignty.
As ever, the road toward progress was marked by the reality of defeat and retreat, obstructed by the lingering pall of resistance to right.
Two congressmen issued a minority report supporting Woodhull’s case. “From the beginning, our Government has been right in theory, but wrong in practice,” they said. “The Constitution, had it been carried out in its true spirit, and its principles enforced, would have stricken the chains from every slave in the republic long since.”
The influence of old dogmas, the congressman wrote, had long interfered with the march toward equal rights. “It was but a few years since declared, by the highest tribunal of the republic, that, according to the ‘general understanding,’ the black man in this country had no rights the white man was bound to respect.”
Precedents of prejudice, they concluded, “are not infallible guides toward liberty and the rights of man.”
“I believe the question of woman’s rights necessarily involves the question of human rights,” Illinois’s George Julian told the House a week later. “I am a Democrat in full of all demands, and I can not, therefore, accept as a real democracy, or even a republic, a government ‘half slave and half free.’”
We’d do well to utter the same sentiment, now and forever.