> Dogmatic Marxism's hostility toward "non-class" demands has been around for
> a very long time, judging from the evidence of Timothy Messer-Kruse's "The
> Yankee International: 1848-1876." (U. of North Carolina, 1998) Furthermore,
> you are left with the disturbing conclusion that this problem existed at
> the very highest levels of the first Communist International, and included
> Marx himself.
A very nice post, Louis, with lessons we should have learned by now.
I've just got a few things to add.
> The names of some of the early recruits should give you an indication of
> the political character of the new movement. Included were abolitionists
> Horace Greely, Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. Feminist Victoria
> Woodhull joined in and put her magazine "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly" at
> its disposal. The weekly not only included communications from Karl Marx,
> but spiritualist musings from Woodhull. The native radical movement of the
> 1870s was a mixed bag. Socialism, anti-racism, feminism, pacifism and
> spiritualism co-existed comfortably. The Europeans were anxious to purify
> the movement of all these deviations from the very start. Unfortunately
> they put anti-racism, feminism and spiritualism on an equal footing.
Barbara Goldsmith's recent book, *Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull* makes a major point of the deep connections between feminism and spiritualism.
Spiritualism began in feminist circles, which were quite small at the time, and spread much more widely than feminism per se did. It offered a stark contrast to the harsh and impersonal Calvinism of the Second Awakening, and was much more congenial to women. It spoke directly to their common suffering, especially their loss of infants and young children, who of course died in numbers unimaginable today. In passing beyond contacting the spirits of dead loved ones, it did something more overtly political: At a time when women had no public authority, speaking as channels for famous men from history was a means for them to enter into public life.
Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Caflin came out of this world, and were drenched to the bone in women's suffering (their own as well as that of thousands of women of all classes they had met) and their aspirations to find relief.
> Victoria Woodhull was unquestionably the biggest irritant, since she
> defended all these deviations while at the same time she spoke out
> forcefully for free love, the biggest deviation imaginable in the Victorian
> age:
>
> "The sexual relation, must be rescued from this insidious form of slavery.
> Women must rise from their position as ministers to the passions of men to
> be their equals. Their entire system of education must be changed. They
> must be trained to be like men, permanent and independent individualities,
> and not their mere appendages or adjuncts, with them forming but one member
> of society. They must be the companions of men from choice, never from
> necessity."
In retrospect, Woodhull was a century ahead of her time. But only because the confluence of spiuritualism, feminism, anti-racism and labor radicalism fell apart. As Louis points out, Marx played a big part in this, by kicking Woodull out of the First International.
A more well-known side of this downfall came at the hands of the Bill Clinton of that day, the Brooklyn preacher Henry Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe), who was the most prominent preacher in America at the time. While Woodhull preached free love in the sense described in the passage Louis quotes above, many involved with the women's movement practiced it in the most careless 1960s pre-feminist sense -- Beecher most of all. Woodhull repeatedly sought their open support, and was repeatedly rebuffed. At last, as efforts to isolate and ruin her grew more intense, she published a report exposing an affair involving Henry Beecher. This lead to her arrest by Anthony Comstock at the very beginning of his decades-long legal crusade against vice.
Much like Clinton today, Beecher's charisma, leadership position, libido and cowardice combined to do untold damage to the possibilities for the position he espoused (the progressive politics of his time) as well as the much more radical politics of many who supported him -- and whom Woodhull represented far better than he.
It's our misfortune to have our Beecher at the head of state, and no Victoria Woodhull at all.
p.s. Woodhull was the first woman to testify before a Congressional Committee. She did this when the Sixteenth Amendment--granting women the right to vote--appeared dead in Congress. She published an article in Woodhull and Caflin's Weekly declaring that women, as citizens, already had the right to vote, and appeared before a Congressional committee to present this argument, which left the Congressmen in a state of mute amazement. For a while it seemed that a simple Congressional resolution recognizing the validity of her argument would be all that was needed to give women the vote, but this fell apart and women had to wait almost 50 years more to get the federal right to vote.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"