Magnetic Healing and Seances play a role in the women's suffrage movement.
SCANDAL,
SEANCES 
& SENECA FALLS
Spiritualist Victoria Woodhull ran for President
twice: first in 1872 and 20 years later in 1892. She was also the first
woman to open a stock brokerage firm, and the first woman to address
the joint houses of Congress. The story behind her feminist career has
been dug up by Barbara Goldsmith in her recently published book
Other Powers (Knopf).
Victoria Woodhull addresses members of Congress, 1871
It is an incredible tale of ghouls, fools, and feminist tools.
Operating in the Dark
Women in 19th century America had very little control over their lives.
As they fought for the abolition of slavery, they became aware of their
own restricted situation. They could not vote or dispose of their own property.
Education for women was severely limited; universities and colleges would
not admit them. There was no sex education either, even for married women.
Women could not control pregnancy. When large families resulted, society
demanded that they stay at home and not work.
What did women know of the world of business (money), politics (power)
or sex? This was men's domain in 1860.
Women had so little confidence that the suffragettes elected men as the
presidents of their two national organizations in 1870! AWSA chose Henry
Ward Beecher, an inspired, charismatic preacher from a well-to-do congregation
in Brooklyn. The more radical NSWA, started by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony, elected Theodore Tilton. He was an up-and-coming social
activist and newspaper editor. The two groups of feminists, AWSA and NSWA,
had split apart over the issue of reforming marriage and "free love."
Unfortunately, the women were outside the information loop. They didn't
know that preacher Beecher was having a love affair with Tilton's wife.
. .
Inside the Information Loop
Victoria Woodhull and her younger sister, Tennie C., on the other hand,
had found a way to acquire accurate and very valuable information. Working
as part-time prostitutes and spiritualists in New York City, they befriended
actresses and other sex workers. (New York had an estimated 20,000 sex workers
and 600 brothels). These women relayed back to the sisters insider information
about business deals of their influential clients.
Victoria as seductress in Harriet Beecher
Stowe's novel My Wife and I
The sisters were very experienced in blackmailing their "respectible"
clients. They had grown up in a family of con artists and quack medical
healers. Their father Buck Clafin had incested Tennie C. and beat her into
accepting her role as a prostitute to support the Clafin family. Victoria
escaped her family through marriage: first to a drunk physician and later
to Colonel Blood, a demoralized war veteran.
Tennie C. eventually leaves the Clafin gang, and she joins Victoria, the
Colonel, and their children in New York. Shortly after arriving, the sisters
made a bee-line over to the mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt
was a former ferry boat captain who cleverly amassed a fortune in shipping
and later railroads. He was also a rapacious, old skinflint, who put his
wife in an insane asylum while he sexually harassed every parlor maid and
governess in his employ.
Tennie C. virtually moved into Vanderbilt's residence, and she started
treating his enlarged prostate condition with . . . "magnetic healing."
The Telegraph of Spirit Guides
After the Civil War, Americans were not really ghoulish, but they needed
to contact the dead. Millions of fathers, brothers, and sons had died terrible
deaths during the war. Spiritualism with its seances and clairvoyent spirit
guides offered a gentle way to absorb this tremendous loss. Goldsmith estimates
there were about 10 million believers in the post war years. The electric telegraph, no doubt, inspired all the knocking effects
on the "spirit tables" and ouija boards.
Transportation and communication devices like the telegraph were transforming
America. Industrialization was in full swing in the second half of the century.
Its impact was extremely harsh and demoralizing. The ups and downs of laissez
faire capitalist markets drove many families into poverty.
Even Cornelius Vanderbilt was haunted by a 7 year old boy who had been trampled
by his horse-drawn carriage in Central Park. He couldn't shake the memory
of the railroad worker who was mangled under his private car, the Flying
Devil.. He turned to trance mediums like Victoria to conduct seances.
In 1869, Victoria passed information to Vanderbilt about a plan for
stock manipulation of the gold market by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. Vanderbilt
made 1.3 million on the debacle known as "Black Friday." He gave
Victoria half of his profits: $700,000. In today's dollars, this would be ten times more, about 7 million dollars.
