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Right-wing Women

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

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 protest against the custom which compels women to give

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