Customer Reviews

Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(1)
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Mary Gabriel handles her subject, Victoria Woodhull, without criticizing her as other authors like Irving Wallace and Emanie Sachs have done. She has the perspicacity to treat the accusations of prostitution as just that--accusations and gossip heaped on a woman who dared to stand out from the crowd. Gabriel does more to clear Woodhull's name than Woodhull's husband, Col. Blood, was able to do in his lifetime. As a descendant of Col. Blood's last wife, Isabell Blood, I recommend this book, if for no other reason than it continues the work he tried to accomplish--proving that Victoria Woodhull was a courageous, forward-thinking, and spiritual woman maligned by her contemporaries.

Victoria Woodhull was one of the boldest, most renowned, and most villified woman of the United States in the 19th century . Yet today many people have never heard of her. Also, what has been written about her has been so biased by attempts to either deify her or demonize her. Thus today's reader is well-served by this factual and chronological presentation of what can be known of the life of Victoria Woodhull. Mary Gabriel puts her background in journalism to good use in putting together this unbiased account of the woman and her times.

With chapter titles that consist of place names, months and years Ms. Gabriel takes the reader on a trip through Victoria's live from her birth in Homer, Ohio to her last days on her country estate in Glooucestershire, England. More than half the book is focused on the years 1971-1973 when Victoria, with her sister Tennie C. Claflin, rose to fame in a meteoric fashion. In this brief time they opened a brokerage house on Wall Street and published a news weekly on topics of social and political reform. In addition Victoria was the first woman to address a committee of Congress; she ran for president of the United States with Frederick Douglas as her running mate; and she presided over the women's suffrage movement, a New York chapter of the International Workingmen's Association, and the American Spiritualists Association.

Her stated goal was to rescue the women of America from sexual slavery and guarantee their rights to their own sexuality. When she found out that the famous minister Henry Ward Beecher was sleeping with members of his congregation during the week and condemning her politics from the pulpit on Sundays, she exposed his hypocricy. He was never condemned for his duplicity, but she was hounded into jail and ruin until her only recourse was to leave the country.

Mary Gabriel does a wonderful job of presenting the complex story, picking through the slanders and exagerations, and creating a readable history of this social reformer and her impact on her times. This is the best account of the life of Victoria Woodhull that I have read and I recommend it highly.

Victoria Woodhull's fight for women's equal rights surpasses that of the other women involved in the movement at that time in its boldness and intelligence (read the previous review). Unfortunately, her modern views on human rights earned her many enemies within the feminist movement, some of which later expunged her from the movement's history. It seems that even today Woodhull hasn't the merit she deserves.

She was an amazing woman! Her life story would perhaps make a great movie, far greater than HBO's "Iron jawed angels".
Mary gabriel delivered a very well documented account of what truly happened in the second half of 19th century feminist movement.

Very inspiring and frustrating book at once.

This is one of the most astounding books I have ever read. I had never heard of Victoria Woodhull, yet she was a true crusader for women's rights. And vilified for it, by men and women alike. Believing that so much more than the vote for women was at stake, she tackled myriad social issues affecting women that we now take for granted. Nothing less than total release from "sexual slavery" to men would satisfy her. Initially embraced by Susan. B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they eventually turned against her as being too radical. She was sued, jailed, and yet through her entire life, she supported her rowdy, parasitic extended family and made sure her mentally retarded son was cared for at home. Right down to the end, when she campaigned to raise the hemlines of women's skirts, claiming (surely correctly) that dragging in the streets they were a filthy, unsanitary encumbrance, she was simply incapable of keeping quiet about disabling social customs that kept women "in their rightful place." I found this book riveting and very well written - a real page turner, which is not often the case with nonfiction. Well done!

I commend Mary Gabriel's "Notorious Victoria" to the attention of anyone who fancies biographies, history and/or feminism. It's the best biography I've read since S. Ambrose's "Eisenhower." Gabriel's research is tireless, her prose evocative and her sense of perspective canny. A must read!

Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street, the first woman to run for President, and the first woman to address Congress, to whom, in 1871, she declared that, pursuant to the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, women had the right to vote. Yet Victoria Woodhull has been all but excised from the popular political and social histories of the 19th century America. With "Notorious Victoria", author Mary Gabriel has written a meticulously researched biography which attempts to establish Victoria Woodhull's importance as a social reformer while presenting a balanced picture of this most controversial and outspoken feminist. Unlike her more respectable and more revered contemporaries, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull had roots in poverty and was intimately familiar with the plight of the average American woman of the day. It was her conviction that freedom and equality for women would only be achieved when women had equality in marriage and in economics, and that the right to vote, although inalienable, was somewhat immaterial. This set her apart from the mainstream feminists who chose to concentrate narrowly on the less controversial agenda of suffrage for women and who eventually rejected Victoria wholesale for her radical advocacy of free love, workers' rights, and her talent for attracting scandal. The platform on which Victoria ran for President, representing the People's Party, would be radical even today in its call to prohibit government from enacting any law that would interfere with any individual's freedom "to pursue happiness as they may choose". Victoria Woodhull was a fascinating, colorful, and flawed woman who lived in a time of social upheaval and media frenzy, which rightfully secured her a place in American history. My only criticism of Mary Gabriel's book is that it offers very little comment on Victoria Woodhull's startling change in attitude when she reached middle age. For twenty years she made a career out of exposing society's hypocrisies, and then suddenly she seemed to embrace hypocrisy with gusto. It is very possible that no one has any idea why Victoria so viciously turned against her former husband, Colonel Blood, and tried to rewrite her earlier life. But I found the absence of comment on this puzzling behavior conspicuous. Nevertheless, "Notorious Victoria" is a fascinating and sometimes scintillating account of one frank and gutsy 19th century social activist and the tumultuous society in which she lived. And since Victoria Woodhull was a passionate "free lover", not a dry spinster feminist, her story is sure to intrigue and entertain an audience well beyond feminist historians, including many men.

This biography of Victoria Woodhull, a woman decades ahead of her time, is an interesting character study of Woodhull herself, and of her bizarre family, many of whom seem bent on destroying her in her efforts as a spiritualist, wall streeter, feminist,newspaper publisher, and budding politician. Woodhull is brilliant, aggressive, and sadly born 150 years too soon.

This is a wonderful account of an extraordinary woman. Clearly ahead of her time and I find it tragic that so little is known about her in this day and age. This would make a tremendous screenplay for a full length movie... seems to be the only way to educate the masses these days.

Mary Gabriel (who I met last spring) has a way of bringing Victorial Claflin Woodhull to life and drawing the reader into the true story of a little known woman in history(even Women's History). Gabriel's extensive research and knowledge about the subject matter is truly impressive. Five stars for both of these remarkable women!

Mary Gabriel will keep you entertained from cover to cover. This is a facinating book about a strong-willed, determined women living in the 1800s. I highly recommend it.