Posted on: March 18, 2026 by Mary L. Shearer
Historians will tell you she was:
- One of the first women to open a stock brokerage (1870)
- Publisher of an American newspaper Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly (1870-1876)
- The first woman to speak before a U.S. House committee (1871)
- The first U.S. publisher of an English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1871)
- The first woman nominated for President of the United States (1872)
- Publisher of a British Journal The Humanitarian (1892-1901)
- An internationally known lecturer and celebrity.
All of that is true. But it’s not the whole story.
What They Don’t Tell You
Victoria Woodhull is one of the most persistently misrepresented women in American history. For over a century, authors have repeated dramatic stories about her early life that don’t hold up under scrutiny. These myths persist not because they are well-sourced, but because they tell a compelling and cinematic story that encourages repetition.
When you go back to the original records—tax documents, court filings, property records, and contemporaneous newspapers from 1838 to 1868—a very different picture emerges. Victoria wasn’t born into poverty. A fire on June 13, 1846 placed her father in heavy debt to his mortgage lender, and it took him nearly seven years to recover. Contrary to the standard biographical account, Buck Claflin was not an arsonist who collected $500 for burning down his mill. Instead, the insurance company paid $4,819.76 directly to his mortgage lender after the destruction of Buck’s gristmill and sawmill. Adjusted for inflation that represents a payout of over $215,000 today.
Errors like this are not minor. They show that the foundational narrative of Woodhull’s childhood—Dickensian poverty, itinerancy, and running from the law—rests on shaky evidence. The idea that the Claflins were too poor to afford an outhouse is absurd. The $644 insurance premium note was so substantial that only a man with the resources to afford more than one hundred outhouses could have secured it. Clearly, the entire story of her life before she became famous needs to be rewritten.
The Problem with Sources
Some of the most scandalous allegations about Victoria trace back to late and unreliable sources. For example, accusations published in the Chicago Mail in 1892 have been used to support claims that Victoria and her sister Tennessee engaged in blackmail and ran disorderly houses in the 1860s. These libelous articles were published by a newspaper editor later convicted of obscenity and accused of blackmail. In 1896 he was said to have blackmailed hundreds of prominent Chicago men. They had to pay as much as $1,000 to prevent publication of a scandalous article; and yet, his articles have been treated by some biographers like Barbara Goldsmith and Emanie Sachs as a credible source.
Other “sources” are not sources at all but works of fiction mistakenly treated as biography.* These fictional accounts helped to solidify vivid myths—such as the image of Victoria as a child clairvoyant traveling in her family’s medicine show wagon—despite the fact that traveling medicine shows with multiple performers like Hamlin’s Wizard Oil did not exist until the 1860s when Victoria was an adult.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
Careful examination of primary sources reveals a different story:
- Victoria’s father—except for 1848 and 1849 possibly—lived in Homer, Ohio, from 1838 to 1852. The family did not travel the country extensively in the 1840s as described in the biography The Terrible Siren.
- Her father could not have counterfeited a $100 bill as the United States did not issue paper currency in the 1840s and 1850s. Back then, “bills” were private bank notes that were so much larger than today’s currency that they later earned the nickname “horse blankets.” In 1847, The Cleveland Weekly Plain Dealer said the State Bank of Ohio “has never issued any note” for $100. Had Buck possessed a counterfeit, it would’ve been an obvious fake and swallowing the evidence would’ve led to his arrest and a serious medical crisis.
- Tennessee Claflin (AKA Tennie C.)—not Victoria—began traveling by train as a child clairvoyant in 1858, when she was about twelve or thirteen years old, not six years old. That’s the year of the fire in the cupola of Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, Pennsylvania that legend—but not contemporaneous evidence—says Tennie predicted.
- Victoria began working as a clairvoyant and magnetic physician in 1860, as a twenty-one-year-old married woman. Before that date, she did not accept money for her “clairvoyant faculty.”
- Magnetic physicians were used as alternatives to allopathic physicians (MDs). While some critics dismissed them as “quacks,” many patients considered clairvoyant and magnetic physicians safer than medical doctors who still used mercury.
- Victoria and her sisters were itinerant physicians or “doctresses,” practicing in hotels, boarding houses, and mansions, not in carnival-style wagons. Their brother Hebern ran the Northwestern Institute & Infirmary in Quincy, Illinois where he demonstrated his cancer cure to members of the American Medical Association.
- At the time Victoria Woodhull practiced medicine, there were very few states that required doctors to have a license. She and her family were practicing medicine legally.
- Miss Tennessee’s Magnetic Life Elixir was sold at drugstores nationwide through established patent medicine wholesalers, not on the back of a wagon. By the standards of the time, it was not “snake oil.”
- The Claflins’ cancer treatment—an escharotic—was consistent with accepted medical practices of the 19th century, though it would be considered unsafe and illegal today. Characterizing them as “con artists” for its use reflects a presentism bias.
- Court records from Ottawa, Illinois show there was no raid on the Claflin cancer infirmary in 1864. Victoria visited her family in Ottawa, but she did not live there. She was living in St. Louis in June 1864 when Tennessee was indicted for manslaughter, a charge that was later dropped.
- The alleged Claflin cancer salve recipe—“scent, sheep’s fat, and lye”—is simply the formula for soap. Biographer Barbara Goldsmith claimed the salve could “strip paint from the side of a barn” and provided no source attribution for this recipe.
A Life Buried Under Myth
What has come down to us is not history, but a layered accumulation of:
- rumor
- repetition
- unverified claims
- fictionalized accounts
- hostile late-period attacks
- misunderstanding of 19th century context
Recovering her life requires going back to the sources and asking a simple question:
What is the proof?
My Project
After more than 25 years of research, I’m writing a book that places Victoria Woodhull within the context of her family and separates documented fact from inherited fiction. Right now, most of my findings are not shared on this web site, but will be once my book is published. In the meantime, a simple guideline applies:
If a claim about Victoria Woodhull has no primary source, it should be treated as suspect.
Check out the list below for the four biographical novels most commonly used by authors and Woodhull biographers as historical sources. The authors who utilized these books are listed in the bullets below. All four books contain fictional dialogue and events.
HISTORICAL FICTION MISTAKENLY USED AS HISTORICAL SOURCES FOR VICTORIA WOODHULL*
1. Jubilee Jim: The Life of Colonel James Fisk, Jr. by Robert H. Fuller (1928)
- Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1998)
- Johanna Johnston, Mrs. Satan: The Incredible Saga of Victoria C. Woodhull (1967)
2. Whirlwind in Petticoats by Beril Becker (1947)
- Gerald W. Johnson, in “Dynamic Victoria Woodhull,” American Heritage (June 1956)
- Gerald W. Johnson, in Chapter 6, “Victoria Claflin Woodhull,” The Lunatic Fringe (1957)
- Irving Wallace, in Chapter IV, “The Free Lover Who Ran for President,” The Square Pegs (1957)
3. The Vixens: A Biography of Victoria and Tennessee Claflin by James Brough (1980)
- Eden Collinsworth, The Improbable Victoria Woodhull (2025)
- Encyclopedia.com Brough’s novel listed as a source for Woodhull, Victoria Claflin (1838-1927) Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology
- Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1998)
- Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (2003)
- Diana Pounds, Master of Science Journalism Thesis: “Booze, Ballots, and Wild Women: Coverage of Suffrage and Temperance by Three Iowa Newspapers, 1870–1875” (Iowa State University, 1990)
- Steve J. Shone, Women of Liberty (2019)
- Wikipedia.fr (French Wikipedia entry on Victoria Woodhull)
Honorary mention for The Vixens:
- Nan Bowman Albinski, Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction, Vol. 1 (1988) compared the work of Madeleine B. Stern with James Brough in an endnote. She inexplicably said that Brough’s work “is longer, more factual” than Stern who compiled primary sources for her book The Victoria Woodhull Reader and wrote We the Women.
- Theresa Kaminski, Reader’s Guide to American History, edited by Peter J. Parish (1997). In her biographical entry for Victoria, she described The Vixens as follows: “Resembling a novel rather than a scholarly biography, the book incorporates dialogue which is taken from contemporary but uncited sources.” While it is true the book contains some contemporary dialogue, most of the dialogue is folksy and fake.
- Myra MacPherson, Scarlet Sisters (2014) listed The Vixens in her bibliography but not in her source notes. She claimed the magnetic elixir contained laudanum, which is a detail that originated in the novel, but may have come Goldsmith. It’s unclear how much Brough influenced her story, but her claim that Victoria’s mother “slept in seedy hotels and at the back of creaking medicine show wagons” seems suspiciously like The Vixens.
4. Victoria la scandaleuse: La vie extraordinaire de Victoria Woodhull, 1838–1927 by Nicole Blondeau and Jean-Paul Feuillebois (1980)
- Wikipedia.fr (French Wikipedia entry on Victoria Woodhull)
For a fuller review of a century of historiography on Victoria Woodhull, please see my literature review.