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

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With this equipment they entered Wall Street in the eighteen-sixties as consultants. The “lady brokers,” they were called. They quickly built up a profitable business. Old Commodore Vanderbilt was so tickled by their combination of beauty and effrontery, talents and ambitions, that he is said to have proposed marriage to Victoria. He was more valuable as a friend. She kept his picture on the wall of the salon where she received her clients, and under it the framed motto, “Simply to thy cross I cling.”

In 1870 Victoria Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for President in 1872. So successful was she in attracting and holding big audiences, and so brilliantly did she present the arguments for equal rights, that Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony threw scruples to the wind and took her into their camp—from which promptly there was a considerable exodus of scandalized ladies. Not only did Victoria win the countenance of these two great leaders, but she involved them in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, which for months she worked steadily to force before the public.