Notes from my Knapsack 3-12-2026
Jeff Gill
Victoria Woodhull, apostle of free love (or was she?)
___
In 1876, Victoria Woodhull in one of her last public statements on marriage in the U.S., before moving to Great Britain in 1877 (where she would live until her death in 1927):
"I mean by marriage, in this connection, any forced or obligatory tie between the sexes, any legal intervention or constraint to prevent people from adjusting their love relations precisely as they do their religious affairs in this country, in complete personal freedom; changing and improving them from time to time, and according to circumstances."
Allowing for some Victorian turns of phrase here, that's not a controversial statement in 2026. Some scholars even see it, in 1876, as a retreat from her more controversial earlier speech of 1871, where before a packed house in New York City, in response to a shouted accusation from the crowd, she said "Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere."
The latter statement, and the interpretation usually placed it, has defined Victoria Woodhull for generations. She's been called "the apostle of free love" and been adopted as a sort of mascot for all sorts of movements around sexual liberation. Her later comments modifying and limiting her intention are often dismissed as late in life prudery and a retreat from a former bold stance.
But I have come to believe that there is, for her time, an even bolder interpretation to put on her words in and just after 1871, which is in line with her later assertions against promiscuity, and in favor of marriage and commitment. It is present in her many recorded speeches from the late 1860s almost to the end of her life, though it has to be said that much of her rhetoric in the Twentieth Century leaned into the then-new eugenics movement. But her original theme is a bit disguised, again thanks to the euphemisms of her era which was indeed called "Victorian." To find it, let's look at some other eminent Victorians whose lives made me realize what our Victoria was trying to say.
Noted newspaper editor Horace Greeley ("Go west, young man") infamously had a tempestuous relationship with Mary Cheney, they were married in 1836: Wikipedia sums up by telling us their "marriage was not a happy one, and [that he] avoided his wife and their house. However, he kept her almost constantly pregnant." They had seven children and an unknown number of miscarriages. Not to be crude, but he could not have "avoided his wife" entirely, could he?
By way of comparison, in England the author Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, also in 1836; in the next fifteen years they would have ten children and at least two miscarriages. Though she was for that era a well-educated woman and an author herself, it was recorded that he said had "contempt" for her intellect, and called her housekeeping "incompetent." Yet there were at least a dozen pregnancies over fifteen years?
What I'm saying is that the skeleton key to Victoria Woodhull's social teaching was something even she could barely bring herself to say straight out: she was arguing a woman had the right to say no, even to her husband. And her audiences in general knew that was what she was saying. For this assertion, this right to say "no," she became known as "Notorious Victoria."
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a fourth and final installment coming later this month. Tell him what you think about our Victoria at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.
Jeff Gill
Victoria Woodhull, apostle of free love (or was she?)
___
In 1876, Victoria Woodhull in one of her last public statements on marriage in the U.S., before moving to Great Britain in 1877 (where she would live until her death in 1927):
"I mean by marriage, in this connection, any forced or obligatory tie between the sexes, any legal intervention or constraint to prevent people from adjusting their love relations precisely as they do their religious affairs in this country, in complete personal freedom; changing and improving them from time to time, and according to circumstances."
Allowing for some Victorian turns of phrase here, that's not a controversial statement in 2026. Some scholars even see it, in 1876, as a retreat from her more controversial earlier speech of 1871, where before a packed house in New York City, in response to a shouted accusation from the crowd, she said "Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere."
The latter statement, and the interpretation usually placed it, has defined Victoria Woodhull for generations. She's been called "the apostle of free love" and been adopted as a sort of mascot for all sorts of movements around sexual liberation. Her later comments modifying and limiting her intention are often dismissed as late in life prudery and a retreat from a former bold stance.
But I have come to believe that there is, for her time, an even bolder interpretation to put on her words in and just after 1871, which is in line with her later assertions against promiscuity, and in favor of marriage and commitment. It is present in her many recorded speeches from the late 1860s almost to the end of her life, though it has to be said that much of her rhetoric in the Twentieth Century leaned into the then-new eugenics movement. But her original theme is a bit disguised, again thanks to the euphemisms of her era which was indeed called "Victorian." To find it, let's look at some other eminent Victorians whose lives made me realize what our Victoria was trying to say.
Noted newspaper editor Horace Greeley ("Go west, young man") infamously had a tempestuous relationship with Mary Cheney, they were married in 1836: Wikipedia sums up by telling us their "marriage was not a happy one, and [that he] avoided his wife and their house. However, he kept her almost constantly pregnant." They had seven children and an unknown number of miscarriages. Not to be crude, but he could not have "avoided his wife" entirely, could he?
By way of comparison, in England the author Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, also in 1836; in the next fifteen years they would have ten children and at least two miscarriages. Though she was for that era a well-educated woman and an author herself, it was recorded that he said had "contempt" for her intellect, and called her housekeeping "incompetent." Yet there were at least a dozen pregnancies over fifteen years?
What I'm saying is that the skeleton key to Victoria Woodhull's social teaching was something even she could barely bring herself to say straight out: she was arguing a woman had the right to say no, even to her husband. And her audiences in general knew that was what she was saying. For this assertion, this right to say "no," she became known as "Notorious Victoria."
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a fourth and final installment coming later this month. Tell him what you think about our Victoria at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.
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