Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull.

Barbara Goldsmith Alfred A. Knopf, $30, 512 pp.

Suzanne Keen

Readers interested in absorbing a portrait of an age through the agreeable medium of a group biography will relish this book. The fascinating as well as "scandalous" Victoria Claflin Woodhull is the link among a cast of nineteenth-century Americans that includes the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Horace Greeley, and Commodore Vanderbilt. When I picked up Other Powers, I had never heard of Woodhull, who was born in 1838 to poverty, obscurity, and abuse, but managed to collect a fistful of firsts before retiring from the public eye: She was the first woman to address the United States Congress, the first woman broker on Wall Street, and the first woman to run for president (against Ulysses S. Grant). The ex-slave and influential activist Frederick Douglass, whose name has retained its evocative power a century later, filled out Woodhull's slate as her vice-presidential candidate. The implicit question of precedence posed by the Woodhull/Douglass ticket animates one of the many stories told so compellingly here, the post-Civil War struggle to extend the franchise. Who would get the vote first, women or black men? Why did it have to be one group or the other? And why did women end up waiting well into the twentieth century for the franchise they demanded at the Seneca Falls Convention in 18487

That this story of rival factions struggling for the vote would be complicated by the widespread belief in spiritualism provides one of the fascinating surprises of Other Powers. Though church and state may have been separate (more or less) from the start in the United States, occult practices and references have been present enough in politics to allow conspiracy theories about Freemasons, for instance, to bubble up repeatedly. The vulnerability of an open society to cranks, faddists, and cults (of course Roman Catholics have been included on this list) would therefore seem to make it imperative that those entering the political mainstream avoid strange beliefs and aberrant behavior. Knowing relatively little about it, I would have assumed that women seeking access to power would have kept the mesmerism, the mediums, the table-rappings, and the otherworldly visitors to the late Victorian parlor behind the drawing-room curtain. Why invite charges of irrationality and unfitness for the franchise? Goldsmith shows that, to the contrary, spiritualism and the fight for women's suffrage were intimately connected and even advertised. Unlike the mortifying revelation that Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers, Victoria Woodhull's clairvoyance and skills as a magnetic healer were prominent items on her resume, part of her appeal as a public speaker, newspaper proprietor, investment counselor, and advocate of women's rights.

Goldsmith persuasively argues that spiritualism seemed significantly less wacky in the post-Civil War years. Americans were still coming to terms with the hundreds of thousands of husbands and sons lost in the war as well as confronting new forces beyond their comprehension, such as long-distance communication by Morse code. Why wouldn't believers and the bereaved be able to tap into the unbroken chain of communication between themselves and the Infinite? More important, Goldsmith explains how influential advocates of women's rights, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, could combine beliefs in suffrage and spiritualism. Spiritualism, by enabling Woodhull to call on advisers such as Demosthenes, Napoleon, and Josephine, empowered women to speak and to defy the proscriptions that otherwise governed their behavior:

Spiritualism and woman's rights drew from the same well: Both were response to the control, subjugation, and repression of women by church and state. Both believed in universal suffrage - the equality of all human beings. For women - sheltered, repressed, powerless - the line between divine inspiration, the courage of one's convictions, and spirit guidance became blurred. Not all woman's-rights advocates became spiritualists, but spiritualism embraced woman's rights.

If spiritualism was part of the mainstream of the women's-rights movement, then it cannot (in itself) be the source of the scandal that made Victoria Woodhull notorious. Doubtless Victoria's part in her con-artist father's deceptions and frauds made her talents seem more opportunistic than inspired. But while Goldsmith's description of a discredited way of thinking contributes a novelistic evocation of a vanished and alien time, her account of the scandal that ruined Woodhull seems completely recognizable as a modern tale of libel suits, character assassination, loss of fortune, and mudslinging, all hinging on the challenge to the status quo posed by "free love."

Woodhull, an avowed free-lover, precipitated her own downfall by publishing articles revealing the adulterous liaison of Henry Ward Beecher, one of America's most prominent ministers, with his parishioner Lib Tilton, who was herself a wronged wife. Woodhull's beef with Beecher lay in his hypocritical refusal to endorse free love from the pulpit, though he practiced it behind the scenes. This part of Goldsmith's story is vividly realized: I wanted to shake the feeble Lib Tilton and smack both her husband and her lover. Woodhull herself evokes a more complex response: She is audacious, impolitic, noisy, self-deceiving, and seemingly bent on self-destruction. She can be exasperating, admirable, and pitiable all at once: The reader knows that she was once a prostitute and waits for the revelation of this fact to seal her fate.

Though Woodhull collected quite a batch of antagonists in her life, Beecher was the most powerful. His charismatic orations made his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn hugely popular and prosperous; entranced female parishioners surrounded him, and power-broking men cut lucrative real-estate deals that hinged on Beecher's support. Goldsmith depicts Beecher as manipulative, self-regarding, and thoroughly repulsive, though she duly records his immense popularity. Ultimately, the sex scandal brought down Woodhull, as society closed ranks around its adored preacher. If there is one failing in this superb book, it lies in the lack of insight into how such a creep as Beecher could seduce practically everyone but Victoria Woodhull.

Suzanne Keen, a longtime Commonweal contributor, teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.