There is some irony in the fact that the primary Victoria Woodhull archive is in Boston, Massachusetts.
Woodhull never lived in Boston. She grew up in rural Ohio, and later lived for short stays throughout the Midwest, including Cincinnati, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri. In her early adulthood she spent a few years in the then wild west of San Francisco, California. During the early 1870s when she was a nationally-known American public figure — a stock broker, Presidential candidate, and controversial free-love advocate — she lived in New York City. But she spent the last half of her life outside the United States. So she lived in England far longer than anywhere else.
And when Woodhull was touring the United States as a public lecturer, Boston was the most hostile to her social freedom message. The cultural capitol of Puritan-founded New England, Boston was then a stronghold of the American Protestant Christian political establishment and its values, including the standard of sexual morality that was very different than the “free-love” values Woodhull was promoting. Several times when Woodhull came to lecture in Boston, she was made to feel very unwelcome, flatly denied access to the lecture halls in Boston.
One aspect of the Victoria Woodhull Papers in the Rare Books and Manuscripts department of the Boston Public Library that does fit with Boston’s cultural heritage is that the papers in the collection are from the phase of life when she most conformed to the sort of moral values Boston was known for. This Victoria Woodhull archive is from the period after she disavowed any support for free-love, married John Biddulph Martin (with a church wedding), and had a stable, monogamous marriage, and not until death did they part. The bulk of the papers in the Boston Public Library collection are the letters between Victoria and her husband.
One of the most interesting things about the Victoria Woodhull archive being kept by the Boston Public Library is the fact that the location is only a few blocks away from the archive for Mary Baker Eddy. Coincidentally also, the Boston Public Library building was built around the same time that Eddy built her church, which later expanded to include her publishing company building where the Mary Baker Eddy Library would eventually be located.
Woodhull and Eddy were both among the most famous American women in the nineteenth century, and although the two public figures could not have more opposite views on the topic of marriage and “free-love,” they also have some curious similarities. There are enough things in their lives to compare and contrast to keep a scholar busy for a long time. I have already spent three years doing just that, and I know there is still more there to explore. How convenient that these two treasure troves of papers are just a few blocks away from each other!
Cindy Safronoff has begun research work for the sequel to her first book, Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage (This One Thing, July 4, 2015). This untold story of America’s nineteenth-century culture war is available on Amazon, or by special order from your favorite local bookstore.