Customer Reviews

Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull

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This is a wonderful addition to the Victoria Woodhull literature. Her actual speeches on free love are very readable and will bring people in touch finally with what she meant by free love: what the movement was all about then and now. Again this book is flawed only by the choice of a male critique interspersed between speeches.This person not a great choice as he was quite opbviously never a woman nor destined to think like one.This is a must chick book!!!!

I purchased the text to potentially assign in it upper-division US history courses on the late 19th century and on US Women's History. Victoria Woodhull was one of the nation's great radical women--one of the first to trade on Wall Street, and one of the first to openly lay claim to the mantle of free lover. Several other biographers have written fascinating accounts of her life. I had hoped to amplify those works with her original words.

The book is a compilation of reproductions of articles about Woodhull and some of her earlier speeches. The writings are in the original typeset, so they are of varying quality. The book opens with a reproduction of a New York Time's article. This article is widely available at any public or university library with a subscription to the NYT historical archive. The facsimiles are of varying quality in terms of reproduction and intellectual material. "The Principles of Social Freedom" is probably the most interesting, and the most useable for a classroom discussion of Women's history, social equality, Gilded Age Free thought/spiritualism.

The material provided by the book's compiler, Matthew Perry, is simply laughable. In no way could you assign this book to a class of students (as I had hoped to do). The analytical passages provided by Perry are less than helpful. For instance, the author's strange digression about contemporary marriage and divorce practices on page 15 does little to contextualize the import of Woodhull's life, work, and ideas in regards to marriage, sex, and divorce.

In the end, Woodhuill deserves better and so do you.