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Sex in the City of God: Free Love and the American Millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Cathy Gutierrez
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Abstract

This article examines several millennialist claims made in speeches and writings by Victoria Woodhull, the alternately celebrated and scandalous proponent of Spiritualism, Free Love, and women's suffrage in the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on a utopian vision detailed in a speech, “The Elixir of Life,” that Woodhull addressed to the tenth annual meeting of the American Association of Spiritualists, in which Woodhull predicted a swiftly arriving millennium that would unite heaven and earth, bringing eternal life to the living and restoring the dead to an earthly but perfect existence. This millennial vision centered on the perfectability of the human body at the intersection of the discourses of medicine, politics, and religion. This utopia would be ushered in by society's embracing of the principles of Free Love, the reform movement that espoused that emotional and physical romantic relations should be governed by mutual love alone without interference from legal or religious authority.

This speech is read against the backdrop of contemporaneous social movements in Spiritualism, Free Love, and alternative forms of medicine. The article argues that Woodhull defied both normative Christianity and the mainstream of Spiritualist believers by refusing to subordinate the body to the soul. The millennial impulse toward progress, seen so keenly in Spiritualist circles, was transformed here to refer to the individual rather than society at large. Social perfection would follow corporeal perfection. Arguing for a natural immortality of the body, Woodhull maintained an essential union and interreliance between the body and soul rather than a disjuncture between them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Summer 2005 , pp. 187 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2005

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References

Notes

1. There are several engaging, if popularizing, recent biographies of Woodhull's life. See, for example, Goldsmith, Barbara, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar. See also Underhill, Lois Beachy, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull (New York: Penguin Books, 1995)Google Scholar. Here I am using Gabriel, Mary, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1998), 14 Google Scholar.

2. Stern, Madeleine B., ed., The Victoria Woodhull Reader (Weston, Mass.: M & S Press, 1974), 6 Google Scholar.

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7. Woodhull, Victoria, Tried as by Fire; or, The True and the False, Socially (New York: Woodhull and Claflin, 1874), 17 Google Scholar.

8. See Klaw, Spencer, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Penguin Press, 1993), 154–58Google Scholar.

9. Woodhull, Tried as by Fire, 18.

10. John Humphrey Noyes, unpublished letter to Tirzah Miller, 1881, Syracuse University Archives.

11. Victoria Woodhull Martin, “Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race,” in The Victoria Woodhull Reader, ed. Stern, 10.

12. Ibid., 10–11.

13. Woodhull, Tried as by Fire, 15.

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17. Ibid.

18. Victoria Woodhull, “A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom,” in The Victoria Woodhull Reader, ed. Stern, 42.

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30. Ibid., 219.

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33. The theory behind homeopathy remains somewhat obscure despite many heroic attempts by scholars to elucidate it. Nonetheless, it was a popular medical movement of the day in which patients were given minute amounts of drugs designed to promote the symptoms of the disease in question, as if the body could be nudged toward curing itself before it became truly ill. For a very brief overview of the movement, see Taylor, Eugene, Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999), 101–5Google Scholar.

34. Davis, Andrew Jackson, The Harmonial Philosophy (Chicago: Advanced Thought Publishing, n.d.), 353–54Google Scholar.

35. Woodhull, Victoria, The Elixir of Life; or, Why Do We Die? (New York: Woodhull and Claflin, 1873), 5 Google Scholar.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 7.

38. Ibid., 10.

39. Spanos, Nicholas P., Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. See, for example, Emma Hardinge, Six Lectures on Theology and Nature (n.p. [1860]); and Hatch, Cora L. V., Discourses on Religion, Morals, Philosophy, and Metaphysics (New York: B. F. Hatch, 1858)Google Scholar.

41. It is worth noting that, while no doubt Blood had a serious influence on this speech, I suspect that Woodhull penned The Elixir of Life herself, since many of her other lectures are marked as “presented by Victoria Woodhull,” and this one gives her as the author. While in later life Woodhull denied that she had ever personally advocated free love, her interest in designing utopias continued, and, at any rate, the much later retraction is immaterial for the speech's effect on the audience at the time.

42. Woodhull, Elixir of Life, 16.

43. This use of apocalyptic rhetoric even after it has been drained of its biblical content remains with us today in myriad forms. For an excellent overview of contemporary uses of millennial forms in secular as well as sacred society, see Boyer, Paul, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–18 Google Scholar.

44. Woodhull, Elixir of Life, 16.

45. Olcott, Henry, “People from the Other World,” Daily Graphic: An Illustrated Evening Newspaper, 6: 536 (1874), 182 Google Scholar.

46. “Mumler Trial,” New York Times, May 4, 1869.

47. Woodhull, Elixir of Life, 15.

48. Ibid., 17.

49. Ibid., 23.

50. Davis, Harbinger of Health.

51. See Laderman, Gary, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, for the most extensive discussion of death and images of resurrection in the century, particularly chap. 6.

52. Hanegraaff, Wouter, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 515–17Google Scholar.