and especially she hated the men who profited sexually and economically from marriage:
It’s a sharp trick played by men upon women, by which
they acquire the legal right to debauch them without cost, and
to make it unnecessary for them to visit professional prostitutes, whose sexual services can only be obtained for money.
Now, isn’t this true? Men know it is . 13
Woodhull did not romanticize prostitution; she did not advocate
it as freedom from marriage or freedom in itself or sexual freedom.
Prostitution, she made clear, was for money, not for fun; it was
survival, not pleasure. Woodhull’s passion was sexual freedom, and
she knew that the prostitution and rape of women were antithetical
to it. She was a mass organizer, and the masses of women were
married, sexually subordinated to men in marriage. At a time
when feminists did not analyze sex directly or articulate ideas explicitly antagonistic to sex as practiced, Woodhull exposed marital rape and compulsory intercourse as the purpose, meaning, and
method of marriage:
Of all the horrid brutalities of this age, I know of none so
horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage.
* Woodhull wrote an expose of Henry Ward Beecher’s adulterous affair
with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his best friend. Beecher was an eminent
minister. His hypocrisy was the main issue for Woodhull. The expose was
published by Woodhull in her own paper,
She was arrested, as was her sister and co-publisher, Tennessee Clafin, for
sending obscene literature through the mails. She was imprisoned for four
weeks without trial.
Night after night there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and millions—yes, I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak—millions of poor, heartbroken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust. All married
persons know this is truth, although they may feign to shut
their eyes and ears to the horrid thing, and pretend to believe
it is not. The world has got to be startled from this pretense
into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among
pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invests
men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their
wills. Yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I
say, eternal damnation sink such m orality! 14
Wives were the majority, whores the minority, prostitution the
condition of each, rape the underbelly of prostitution. Woodhull’s
aggressive repudiation of the good woman/bad woman syndrome
(with which women, then as now, were so very comfortable), her
relentless attacks on the hypocrisy of the “good woman, ” and her
rude refusal to call the sufferance of rape “virtue” had one purpose:
to unite women in a common perception of their common condition. Selling themselves was women’s desperate, necessary, unforgivable crime; not acknowledging the sale divided women and obscured how and why women were used sexually by men; marriage, women’s only refuge, was the place of mass rape. Woodhull proclaimed herself a “Free Lover, ” by which she meant that she
could not be bought, not in marriage, not in prostitution as commonly understood. In telling married women that they had indeed sold their sex for money, she was telling them that they had bartered away more than the prostitute ever could: all privacy, all economic independence, all legal individuality, every shred of control over their bodies in sex and in reproduction both.
Woodhull herself was widely regarded as a whore because she
proclaimed herself sexually self-determining, sexually active; she
