| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Barbara Goldsmith. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1998. PP. xv, 531. $30.00.

"If the secret history of this tragedy is ever brought to light, we shall have such revelations of diplomacy and hypocrisy in high places as to open the eyes of the people to the impossibility of securing justice for anyone when money can be used against him" (p. 404). These are words that might have been uttered in 1998 or 1999 regarding impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. In actuality, they come from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, written after a Plymouth Church committee exonerated the church's pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, from adultery charges in relation to his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton. The Beecher-Tilton affair and its wide-scale public and private reverberations form an extended climax to Barbara Goldsmith's new "biography" of Victoria Woodhull. 1

Woodhull, flamboyantly visible in the Gilded Age for her spiritualism, feminism, and free-love views and practices, is remembered especially for addressing Judiciary Committee members from both congressional houses in 1871 in the stunning Woodhull Memorial, which argued that women were considered citizens in the United States Constitution and therefore already had the right to vote. She is remembered, too, for running for the presidency against Ulysses S. Grant and Horace Greeley in 1872. And she is also remembered in 1872 for her newspaper, which—then and first—publicly broke the news of the Beecher-Tilton scandal, the celebrity affair that rocked American popular culture and opinion in much the same way as did the impeachment proceedings of the late 1990s. . . .

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