Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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As the struggle for equal rights grew in heat I became aware that it was far from a united struggle, that as a matter of fact leaders and followers were spending almost as much time disapproving of one another’s methods as fighting for their cause. The friction came largely from the propensity of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony to form alliances shocking to many of their oldest and wisest friends. Before the war they had, rather recklessly from a political point of view, supported easier divorce. As one of their friends wrote them, they had in so doing broken the heart of the portly Evening Post and nearly driven the Tribune to the grave. Time had not cooled their ardor for strange bedfellows. They made an alliance now of which I heard no little talk by my mother and her friends; it was with the two most notorious women in the eye of the public at the moment. “Hussies,” conservative circles in Titusville, Pennsylvania, called them—Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

It was not difficult for even a girl of fifteen to pick up some idea of what these women were, so well did they advertise themselves, and so delightedly did the press back them up in their doings. Beginning their careers as clairvoyants, they had developed professionally their undoubted powers until they were in the sixties—the two best known and best paid trance-physicians of their day. Victoria claimed to have raised a child from the dead, and Tennessee, the harder worker of the two, made enough money to keep thirty-five relations in comfort. “If I am a humbug sometimes, look at the dead beats I have to support,” was her answer to those who accused her of abusing her talents. Both women frankly advocated free love, and so it was believed quite as frankly practiced it.