‘The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage and Scandal in Gilded Age’ by Myra MacPherson

Click for Review in WaPo

1870s sisters Woodhull and Claflin = Most notorious women in New York

Anti-Women Wall Street in 1870 = Claflin, “a bodacious beauty in her early twenties,” and her charismatic elder sister descend from their open carriage amid a throng of reporters and rubberneckers. = Dressed in matching dark-blue outfits, with “shockingly short” skirts grazing their boots, they declared their new brokerage firm open for business. = Backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt for legitimacy = Affair with Claflin.

Mid-1870s the Sisters started their own radical newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, with the profits from their brokerage.

Woodhull addressed Congress and ran for president (with Frederick Douglass)
Claflin was named colonel of New York’s 85th, the state’s only African American regiment.

Sisters were how far ahead of their time in their attitudes toward women’s rights.

They addressed packed lecture halls around the country, crowds came as much to see them in the flesh as to hear their arguments. = Sisters’ words were attention-grabbing, making the case that women had the right to control their own bodies.

Stricter suffragists judged Woodhull a trashy distraction even though she stood in front of the House Judiciary Committee to argue that the 15th Amendment and other sections of the Constitution guaranteed rights to all “citizens.”

Rep. John Bingham of Ohio sputtered out, “Madam, you are no citizen — you are a woman!”

Sisters’ doctrine of “free love” earned horrified a Victorian World that women had no rights over their bodies. = “In arguing that a woman had a right to freedom regarding her own body, to choose her mate, to decide when she wanted sex, and actually to enjoy it, the sisters were so far ahead of the era that they were openly called prostitutes in print.”

Both used their femininity, as well as their feminism, to get what they wanted.

Both sisters became conservative in later life, publicly repudiating most of their “sex radical” beliefs.

Moving to London in 1877 they “decided to use draconian measures to sanitize their image.” = It worked = within a few years, both were married to wealthy Englishmen. By the early 20th century Sisters prescribed religion and eugenics rather than female emancipation.

Sisters = Emerge as odd outliers = So far ahead of their time that it becomes almost impossible to credit them with real influence. = Women got the vote at the very end of their lives, but it took much longer for women to gain control over their bodies.

Even in 2014, powerful men treat women’s bodies as political bargaining chips.

Two sisters with radical views on sex, love, politics, and business threatened the white male power structure of the nineteenth century.

Sisters become rich and famous, achieving a stunning list of firsts. = First women owned brokerage firm + first woman to run for president + first woman to address a United States congressional committee + Shocked the world by becoming the honorary colonel of a black regiment + First female publishers of a radical weekly + Open free lovers against Victorian hypocrisy + Exposed alleged adultery of Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America igniting the “Trial of the Century” + Imprisoned for allegedly sending “obscenity” through the mail + Married two of the richest men in England, dining with royalty.

suffrage movement + free speech + free love = roller-coaster + rags-to-riches lives of two beautiful backwoods country girls = fiction of Twain or Dickens but this is the real-life saga of the sisters Claflin-Woodhull = Rebellion against Victorian sexual enslavement and the power of white males

Victoria Woodhull = One of the great unsung characters of American history–a beauty, a radical activist, a con artist, and a true revolutionary who pushed every boundary and every button that the century offered. = If Sisters hadn’t existed, feminism would have had to invent them. = Long lost chapter of American history = Sisters deserve credit for crashing the glass front doors of Wall Street, Washington, and bedrooms across the country a century and a half ago.