spit in the face of the sexual double standard. Called a prostitute
by a man at a public meeting, Woodhull responded: “A man questioning m y virtue! Have I any right as a woman to answer him? I hurl the intention back in your face, sir, and stand boldly before
you and this convention, and declare that I never had sexual intercourse with any man of whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world with the act. I am not ashamed of any act of m y
life. At the time it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any
desire that has been gratified, nor of any passion alluded to. Every
one of them are a part of m y own soul’s life, for which, thank God,
I am not accountable to yo u . ” 15 Few feminists appreciated her
(Elizabeth C ady Stanton was an exception, as usual) because she
confronted women with her own sexual vitality, the political meaning of sex, the sexual and economic appropriation of women’s bodies by men, the usurpation of female desire by men for the
purposes of their own illegitim ate power. She was direct and impassioned and she made women remember: that they had been raped. In focusing on the apparent and actual sexual worth of
wives and whores, she made the basic claim of radical feminism: all
freedom, including sexual freedom, begins with an absolute right
to one’s own body— physical self-possession. She knew too, in
practical as well as political terms, that forced sex in marriage led
to forced pregnancy in marriage: “I protest against this form of
slavery, I
the control of their maternal functions over to anybody. ” 16
Victoria Woodhull exercised sexual intelligence in public discourse, ideas, and activism. She is one of the few women to have done so. T his effort required all the other kinds of intelligence that
distinguish humans from animals: literacy, intellect, creative intelligence, moral intelligence. Some consequences of sexual intelligence become clear in Woodhull’s exercise of it: she made the women she addressed in person and in print face the sexual and
economic system built on their bodies. She was one of the great
philosophers of and agitators for sexual freedom—but not as men
understand it, because she abhorred rape and prostitution, knew
them when she saw them inside marriage or outside it, would not
accept or condone the violence against women implicit in them.
“I make the claim boldly, ” she dared to say, “that from the very
moment woman is emancipated from the necessity of yielding the
control of her sexual organs to man to insure a home, food and
clothing, the doom of sexual demoralization will be sealed. ” 17
Since women experienced sexual demoralization most abjectly in
sexual intercourse, Woodhull did not shy away from the inevitable
conclusion: “From that moment there will be no intercourse except
such as is desired by women. It will be a complete revolution in
sexual matters. . . ” 18 Intercourse not willed and initiated by the
woman was rape, in Woodhull’s analysis. She anticipated current
feminist critiques of intercourse—modest and rare as they are—by
a century. As if to celebrate the centennial of Woodhull’s repudiation of male-supremacist sexual intercourse, Robin Morgan in 1974
transformed Woodhull’s insight into a firm principle: “/
shocks, bewilders—who can imagine it, what can it mean? Now as
