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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
Victoria Woodhull was Mrs. Satan. Or at least that is what Harper’s Weekly wanted its readers to see. The popular New York City-based paper published a full-page engraving, by its most famous artist, of Woodhull as the biblical devil in February 1872 (Figure 2). Horns curl away from her skull and spiked wings stand almost as tall as she does. Anthony Comstock, an evangelical Christian who made it his mission to protect public morals, almost certainly imagined the woman who promoted free love as the personification of evil. He needed public support for his crusade, and this cartoon by Thomas Nast helped him win it. Comstock arrested Woodhull on November 2, 1872, for distributing her supposedly obscene newspaper.
1 On Woodhull’s life, see Gabriel, Mary, Notorious Victoria: The Uncensored Life of Victoria Woodhull: Visionary, Suffragist, and First Woman to Run for President (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1998)Google Scholar; Goldsmith, Barbara, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar; Frisken, Amanda, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” Journal of American History 87 (Sept. 2000): 403–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Stinchcombe, Owen, American Lady of the Manor, Bredon’s Norton: The Late Life of Victoria Woodhull Martin, 1901–1927 (Cheltenham: O. Stinchcombe, 2000)Google Scholar; Underhill, Lois Beachy, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull (Bridghampton: Bridge Works Publishing Company, 1995)Google Scholar.
2 “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!” Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 17, 1872, 143.
3 “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!” 143.
4 “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!” 143.
5 John C. Underwood to Victoria Woodhull, Feb. 17, 1872, Victoria Woodhull Martin Papers box 1, folder 7, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois (hereafter SIU).
6 For more on women who battled Comstock, see Sohn, Amy, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)Google Scholar. For more on Woodhull and Comstock’s different views on sexuality, see Horowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex”; Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002)Google Scholar.
7 See “The Female Abortionist” on the front page of the National Police Gazette, Mar. 13, 1847, and Nov. 6, 1847.
8 Syrett, Nicholas L., The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (New York: New Press, 2023)Google Scholar.
9 For more on the flash press and trends in the era’s popular images, see Brown, Joshua, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Frisken, Amanda, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilfoyle, Timothy J., Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, and Cohen, Patricia Cline, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Lange, Allison K., Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Manion, Jen, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Rouse, Wendy L., Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Lange, Picturing Political Power.
13 Brown, Joshua, “‘The Social and Sensational News of the Day’: Frank Leslie, The Days’ Doings, and Scandalous Pictorial News in Gilded Age New York,” New-York Journal of American History 66 (Fall 2003)Google Scholar.
14 Brown, Beyond the Lines, 150, 233–34.
15 For more on this scandal see Fox, Richard Wightman, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
16 Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution, 85–116.
17 Few publications printed cartoons of Comstock during his lifetime. Rare examples caricaturing Comstock include “That Fertile Imagination,” Life, Jan. 12, 1888, 18; “Browne’s ‘Dizzy’ Pictures of Brooklyn Belles,” Illustrated Police News, Oct. 18, 1888, 5; and “Comstock’s Adventure,” National Police Gazette, Mar. 8, 1879, 4. Thank you to Lauren MacIvor Thompson and Andrew Cohen for generously sharing their research.
18 Tennie C. Claflin, “What Was Her Crime?” Nov. 27, 1876, Victoria Woodhull Martin Papers box 1 folder 3, SIU.
19 Tennie C. Claflin, “What Was Her Crime?”
20 Victoria Woodhull to Mrs. Townshend, July 26, 1877, Victoria Woodhull Martin Papers box 1 folder 2, SIU.
21 For more on her later years in England, see Stinchcombe, American Lady of the Manor.
22 Woodhull’s papers include samples of images that might have been her favorites (like the one from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1871). Victoria Woodhull Martin Papers, box 3, folder 20, SIU.