Latest / 1-800-1800 / 1-800-1894: Queen Victoria Woodhull

Transcript

1-800-1894: Queen Victoria Woodhull · 1-800-1800

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Ring, ring.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Hello?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is this 1894?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: How did you get this number?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: I am a stalker.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_03: I found you.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: You got it from the spirit realm.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I channeled you.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Hello?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: You've reached 1-800-1800.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: 1-800-1800.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I have a burning question.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: 1-800-1800.
• 0:24
  [music]
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: I have a burning question.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, actually, is this Alex?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: This is Alex.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: This is actually Alex.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: In the flesh.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: In the flesh.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: Virtually here in my ears.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: Alex Hujong Laughlin.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: I'm so excited to be here.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's literally such a pleasure.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Mabel.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Madeline.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: And this is 1-800-1800.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: And every episode of this podcast, we just call up a random year and chat, chat, chat.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes we have the pleasure of another human being.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: And this is such a week.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Alex, we met you a year ago, almost exactly a year ago.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: When you invited us to be guests on your amazing podcast called Try Hard.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: And your podcast invites people to challenge themselves
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: to do something they've never done before,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: which is apt for our project because we've never done it.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Every time we do anything, it's the first time we've ever done it.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_03: But you are also a co-owner of Defector Media and a writer.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: You're writing a book, which I would love to hear about.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's called The Talent Cult.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: Can you tell us about it a little bit?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, my gosh.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: I actually turned in the first draft this week.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: So congratulations.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's like really terrifying because I'm like, all I can think about is what's wrong with it.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm sure it's amazing.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: Trying really hard to just like revel in the celebration of the milestone.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: The Talent Cult is going to be a nonfiction book, essay collection.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: the delineation of nonfiction to essay collection in
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: the publishing industry is actually really strange.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: And like nobody really will sell or admit that something is an essay collection on
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: the publishing side.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, so it's like sort of an essay collection.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: We won't tell them.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I bleep.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: I love essay collections, but apparently I'm in the minority here.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a collection about the role that So it really grew out
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: of my experience working as an audio producer at big media companies and being
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: the like behind the scenes labor of a lot of like on screen on mic talent.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Quote, quote, quote, big quote.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I just started to go down this crazy rabbit hole where I was like,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: what does talent even mean?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: Is talent real?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we obsessed with it in our culture?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what the book is.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's so fascinating.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like talent and like smarts are the two kind of like innate qualities
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: that it's still okay to judge people for.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like everything else that isn't your like problem to solve is like you can't be judged for it.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: But talent and being intelligent are the two things that it's like for some reason still okay.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: And those are both things like, I mean, I'm like staring at my wall of notes.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Don't get you started.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: They're both things that can be improved upon, like,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: objectively.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: It starts to get into, like, I mean, it starts to get into eugenics, like, really quickly.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, totally.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so does our episode today, so it's actually perfect.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the unavoidable beast in the room of all of these conversations.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: This is a perfect follow up to we had one of your like fighters in arms
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: in your field,
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: Harry Krinsky on two weeks ago to talk about basketball,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: which is,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: like the area where talent is the most mystical kind of and like what makes you good
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: at something is so indefinable.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: So I feel like talking about talent with you and talking
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_03: about also this person we're about to discuss who exists on this very other end of
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: the 19th century spectrum.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'm excited to get into that.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: So it doesn't have to be talent related.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: But what did you learn this week, Alex?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: So it's actually not talent related.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: But I learned that Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was published right before 9-11.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been going through this weird like male Gen X novelist phase this summer
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: and I just read the corrections for the first time, like, last month.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, like, I think it's, like, the 9-11, 25th anniversary that's maybe doing it for me.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: It started with Colson Whitehead,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: and then it was, like,
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Dave Eggers,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: and now I'm doing Jonathan Franzen,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: and I'm like, let's just go with Brad Easton Ellis next.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like, let's just do it.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: No way.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's time.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: I had not known that it was published so close to 9-11.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: And like, I, we're all about the same age.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like I was in elementary school when it happened.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I was not, you know, paying attention to contemporary literature.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's so strange.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: I know, I know.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: I was so behind.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I was like, this is going to be a hit for friends and sales.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's really evidence of my lack of talent, if you think about it.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah,
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: I listened to,
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was like the New York Times book review podcast where they talked
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: about it in the context of the anniversary of 9-11.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just like, wow,
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: it's so interesting to like go back to that moment as an adult,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: like the moment right before 9-11.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I've been really enjoying it.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: I've been reading it this week and-
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is good.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: I sort of was resistant to reading it forever just because it was such a fixture
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: of my dad's bookshelf in this way where I was like, that's not for me.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really good, unfortunately.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's hilarious.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: I wrote a little bit about this in the Defector newsletter this week,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: but I was like,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: I have never had any interest in these Gen X male novelists
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: because like why would I spend 500 pages reading something that reminds me
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: of my dad?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: Like there are so many other books in the world.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: But wow, they were on to something maybe.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm enjoying it.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: Reminding me too, like when I was a kid, I thought my parents knew Jonathan Franzen.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: Like I thought that – Like I also thought that because,
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: and I also thought my mom was friends with Madonna.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_03: Like I have these childhood memories where the big celebrities or cultural figures
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: that my parents talked about, I thought were actually related to us or we knew.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, why else would my parents be talking about these people so much?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: And like on a first name basis.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: Especially Madonna.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: I thought Madonna,
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: I like had this theory that Madonna was my aunt because my aunt,
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: my real aunt lived in London.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, the story is God.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, that would be so cool if true.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it could still happen.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: Mabel's a Nepo baby,
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: actually.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: I freaking wish.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still working on that one.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: We also got like sort of rudely mentioned in this N plus one thing that the letter
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: to the editor that just came out,
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: they did this whole thing about reissue presses and like one of the people
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: that they talk about as like actually being like an ambitious,
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: basically their thesis was like,
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: you shouldn't read these reissue presses,
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: you should read ambitious contemporary writing, which I took on Bridget, obviously.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: But their example of an ambitious contemporary writer was Jonathan Franzen.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I was kind of like, well, that book came out 25 years ago.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: So at this point,
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: that would be in these reissue presses, not in the New York Times bestseller list.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm opening this up in my browser, my second browser, so I can read it and be angry.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: We'll email it to you, yeah.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: I also,
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: the physical copy of N plus one where in which it is featured is right next to me
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: for some reason.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: Throw it.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's like glaring at me.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't found the article,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: but I did find a Reddit thread about it where people are debating it.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: So can't wait to check that out.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: I always forget to look at Reddit.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know we're really bad at that.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: I love Reddit.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: I only look at it if like, I'm like, my medication is making my like nails thin, right?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, no.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Madeline, what did you learn this week?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I this is a long road to a short thing I learned,
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: but I have been moving for three months
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: and it's really crazy how long I'm letting it take.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when I unpack,
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: I like to listen either to nonfiction books or fantasy novels,
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: because those are things that I don't like read on my own time always.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've been listening to RF Kuang and I listened to Babel, which is amazing.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you guys have read it.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's like genius.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I read like half of it, but she used the word tome too many times.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's the thing about like with fantasy.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I'm listening to it because when I'm reading it, I'm like, this is so bad.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: But then when I'm listening, yeah, I get it.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I listened to that and I thought it was great.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started listening to,
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: she wrote this trilogy called The Poppy Wars,
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: which is kind of like if the Tolkien universe was set in like
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: a medieval China instead of medieval Europe.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I haven't learned about medieval China since probably my 10th grade world history class.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of like in the same way that I was when I first read Tolkien.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, how much of this is like really history?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And actually kind of a lot.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I learned a lot about the imperial examination system in like it like ran
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: from like 600 AD to like 1900 basically.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it was this way that.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think as with these things in Europe and the US as well,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: like it's supposed to be kind of a more merit-based way to get people
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: from non-aristocratic families into government.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was obviously like very biased.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I was reading all of these things about it and it's just so interesting because
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: the debates that we're still having about the education system have been ongoing
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: for like 2,000 years.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like there was a really controversial introduction at one point in this system of
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: a kind of like formulaic essay where instead of Writing like an authentic,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: in the moment essay, they learned this, it was called like the eight legged essay.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it had like, it's sort of like the five paragraph essay that we're taught.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And scholars at the time compared it to like the worst book burning and this emperor
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: who like had 400 scholars buried alive.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like they were, it is such an assault on intelligence and education.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And like, there was also, um,
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I know your husband also did a PhD,
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: so he probably had a similar experience to me where the first day of my PhD,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: they sat us down and they were like,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: look to your left, look to your right, like one of you is not getting a job.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Which is like crazy to do to people like on day one.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: They had the same problem in this imperial system
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: where they started overproducing scholars and there was like a huge controversy
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: of what to do with all of these like excess scholars.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just been like really fascinating to learn about.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's super interesting.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's also like,
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: wow, there has always been a moral panic about the literacy crisis, hasn't there?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: Totally.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it really is just kind of spectacular.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's my thing.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Mabel, what did you learn?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Really good.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was going to talk about something which is in some ways similar.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I did sort of text you about this, Madeline, because I couldn't resist.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: I accidentally texted Madeline something I learned this week, which defeats the purpose.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: But I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the history of conscription in
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: the United States, like the draft.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: And It's reminded me of what you're talking about because obviously it's another way
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: that people are evaluated in a systematic way.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I was thinking about it too because in the United States
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: during World War I draft boards were making decisions about
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: who would be conscripted based off of their like social value.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: Talk about eugenics too.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_03: Poor people were considered to have like less potential contributions to the economy
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: and were less skilled labor for obviously social – like that was a production of
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: the society, but they were then therefore more likely to be drafted.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: But really what I wanted to focus on was this photo.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just going to share my screen for a second because I need you guys to see it.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's of a man who's the Secretary of War wearing a beautiful silk eye mask of
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_03: the sort that they sell for like $80 now.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: At Sephora.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: At Sephora.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: With his hand in a fishbowl with numbers in it, probably.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: He's also standing in front of a blackboard with numbers written on it.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_03: I guess every name was associated with a number, I'm guessing.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: And a bunch of other men in uniform are standing around staring at him.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's just like so eyes wide shut.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: I can't believe it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: And this is how people were determined to be like sent to their death.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_03: To die.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's wild.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'm sorry.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: I keep zooming in on this man's face.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's beyond.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_03: And he's wearing like a little jaunty early 20th century tie, which I love.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that like stiff collar.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then this huge silk eye mask.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I've actually been in the market for an eye mask.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: So inspo.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: Inspo.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I learned anything per se, but it happened to me.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's a striking image for sure.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So 1894 was, I actually didn't write down who the president was.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so sorry, everyone.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want me to do a quick check?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's good to know.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: It was Grover Cleveland.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: I actually know this because when we talked about 1891,
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: we discussed how Grover Cleveland would sandwich the president in between Harrison.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: You always remember stuff like that.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're so smart.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: No, I didn't remember it.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't remember it.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm reminded now.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not smart.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I will say there is a lot of sort of...
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's change in the air.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1894,
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: William Kennedy Dixon receives a patent for the motion picture film in
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: the United States.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the movies are upon us,
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: which is like, I would say the defining technology of the 20th century.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not the atom bomb, which is what most people say.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: How would you have one without the other?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: I saw Oppenheimer.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: I get it.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: It all really ultimately ends in Oppenheimer.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: In that vein,
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: one of the first acts of modern terrorism is committed in 1894 by
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: a French anarchist named Emile Henry.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the Café Terminus bombing.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a very famous thing if you study 19th century France.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he basically,
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Café Terminus is like outside one of the main train stations in Paris
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: and it killed one person and injured 17.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: In Korea,
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: you have this peasant uprising where it's a Neo-Confucian movement,
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: but they're rejecting the influence of these Western technologies and ideals
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: in Korean culture.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then you also have the first Sino-Japanese war about Korea as a colonial territory.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you have kind of this like...
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: These revolts and unrest,
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: this political unrest that is sort of spurred by
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: the larger colonial landscape is like global now.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: You have the worst economic depression in American history.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Up to that point,
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: there would later famously be a much worse one,
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: which led to the first significant protest march by a group called Coxie's Army,
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: which I had never heard of.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was an army of the unemployed.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And simultaneously that year, you also have waves of strikes.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Coal miners, Pullman and Taylors all go on wildcat strikes that year.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And why are you laughing at me?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because you said wildcat, so I went rawr.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like wildcat comes up a lot in that episode.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: You have the Dreyfus Affair beginning.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: You have oil discovered on the Osage Indian Reservation,
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: which makes the Osage Indians the richest group of people in the world at the time
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: and then results in like basically their horrific...
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like predatory behavior by a bunch of white guys who go and marry them and
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: then steal their money.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you have this is my favorite piece of information.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: The first issue of Billboard magazine,
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: which might not seem important,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: but it is a it's a huge deal because it's really like the birth of
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: the modern advertising industry.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's called Billboard because bill posting was like the main way
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: that advertisements were disseminated in the period.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have like this new culture I've written about people who are interested
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: in this, like in that time.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And like one of the big things they'll talk about is like,
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: how do we use these amazing technologies of advertising to make society better?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: Which is like, yeah, lol.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just like the fact that that magazine was founded shows this is like this is the moment.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Would you guys say any ad has made your life better?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I cry at like like a razor ad about feminism or something.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: There was a I like God, I think it was like a.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Chanel perfume ad in the early 2000s directed by Sofia Coppola
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: that I would just watch over and over and over on YouTube.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it so much.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't meaningfully good in any way.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: I really need to watch that.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: It was really cute.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds awesome.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure I also loved it.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: I just can't remember it.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'm trying to think if anything has like improved my quality of life.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like if I saw an ad for a medication that I realized I needed.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: Have you seen the ads for Impreza?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what that is.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: It has this cute song.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's like Impreza.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Number one prescribed Ingreza.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've been liking that ad.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: They're sponsoring this episode.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I love?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: I have psoriatic arthritis,
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: which means that I have tried Otesla, I have tried Skyrizi, and I am now on Humira.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Skyrizi, I've seen the ads for, definitely.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: That one sounds familiar.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's so exciting every time I see an ad where it's like,
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: did you have psoriasis patches and then develop joint pain?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: You might be hit with the double whammy.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, that's me.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's representation.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: You see yourself on screen.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's really, really important to see yourself on screen.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: So important.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: I do feel like starstruck when the allergy medication
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: that my girlfriend takes is advertised on TV.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, we have that in the fridge.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: You can't be what you can't see.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: They say it all the time.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, totally.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: Is that 1894 in a few minutes?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's 1894 in a nutshell.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_03: Should I tell us what we're talking about or why we're talking about 1894?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 20:42
  Okay.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: So Madeline's given us a sort of like globe trotting, expansive view of 1894.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: Now we're going to zoom in real tiny to something that's actually uneventful really
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_03: in of itself.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: So in 1894,
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: a woman named Victoria Woodhull,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: and we'll describe who she is,
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: sues the British Museum for harboring libelous material about her.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_03: And There's a lot I could say about this.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's interesting because I feel like we're all interested in sort
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: of disruptive women who are doing things that they're not supposed to do.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: And sort of the audacity of saying I'm going to sue an institution is just classic.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: And it was kind of like a new form at that time.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's like now everybody's like suing someone for something or like suing
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: a big company or whatever.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: But like to sue a British institution also as an American is interesting.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: But...
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: So we'll tell you, Victoria Woodhull is this really interesting woman.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: Madeline, do you want to give the five-second description
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: of her?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Victoria Woodhull, born into poverty, raised herself up via her career as a spirit medium.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: First woman to open a brokerage on Wall Street.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: First woman to run for president.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: First woman to address Congress.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: First person to publish the Communist Manifesto in the United States.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: She is embroiled in a national scandal that we will get into in detail involving one
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: of the most prominent ministers of the day.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Later moved to England, became very conservative and a proponent of eugenics.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Gloria Steinem writes that she is one of the few women to live out
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: in public principles of female emancipation and sexual freedom
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: that were not only unusual in her day, but illegal.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's so thank you.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like this is a crazy woman.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_03: So imagine this woman suing the British Museum.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: And what I'm interested in in particular is there's some nice symmetry
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: about this moment in her life because she's at this point living in the UK
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: and she herself was named after Queen Victoria,
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: who in 1894 is 57 years into her reign.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so you see these two Victorias converging in 1894.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: One of them is,
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: as Madeline said,
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: this like basically coming out of nothing, rags to riches several times over 20.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: And she's representing kind of all that is experimental,
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: avant-garde, crazy, subversive, transgressive about 19th century womanhood.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then on the other hand,
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: you have Queen Victoria,
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: who is the like defining traditional woman of the 19th century.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: She is wife.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: She is mother.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: She is widow.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: She is domestic.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, the irony there being that she is like the most famous woman in the world.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: She is a monarch who's presenting as a traditional wife.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: Who I think also rules
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: at that time over two thirds of the landmass of the entire world.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's the trad wife
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: conundrum.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: Literally, it is so yesteryear.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason we wanted to talk about Victoria Woodhull with you, Alex,
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_03: is because when I think try hard, I'm like, okay, Victoria Woodhull, you nailed it.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: So Alex, if she,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: Victoria Woodhull could come back from the dead,
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: which obviously she's definitely capable of and she's probably in
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: the room right now.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: And she came on your podcast.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: What would you talk to her about?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm trying to think.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: I think I would talk to her about starting the brokerage particularly.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very interested in her move from the sort of radical,
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: like extra legal world of scamming into the More sanctified world of scamming
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: on Wall Street.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I would want to talk about why she wanted to do that and how she did that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's like such an amazing inspiration to us all, really.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: I also like I just want to note.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: So her maiden name is Cloughlin,
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: C-L-A-F-L-I-N. And I was like, huh, that sounds an awful lot like Laughlin.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I Googled it and they are indeed linked names.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: Cloughlin is a like sort of shortened version of Mick Laughlin, which Laughlin is as well.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I have done my like ancestry stuff and I like my people did indeed pass through Ohio.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just going to claim kinship with her.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: You guys are related for sure.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: So she would like lose it knowing that she had a biracial descendant.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, her strain of eugenics was sort of fascinating because she actually wanted one race.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe it would be her ideal.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: She was anticipating the like great ways and awakening of the Sapana.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: Did you read the Waysian article, Alex?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I haven't read it yet.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: I really love Alex Jung and I like want to know what he has to say about it.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: But there was also part of me that was like, why'd they get a full Asian to write this?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: I just... You need to respond.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the first podcast I ever made like 10 years ago was for the Washington Post
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: and it was about being multiracial.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so like...
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Every, I mean, you're all white here.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: We're
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: all white here.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Majorly.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: But like biracial people,
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: like there's like a requisite period of cringiness that you must go through
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: in your personal awakening.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I went through it like a decade ago.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm kind of past it for the most part.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so now that I see like this next generation going through it,
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just like, oh, I know that you must go through it,
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: but wow, it's so annoying.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like it's a microcosm of everything else that is the culture right now.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: Like, yeah,
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_03: the kids I see on the street,
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: the outfits, I'm like, I cannot believe you're wearing this.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: I cannot believe you're wearing this stuff.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think it's also just getting older.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's like,
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure our elders felt the same way where I'm like,
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: you guys are still figuring that out.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, get over it.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also like I know that they can't get to the next step if they don't go
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: through this one first.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm like, just go through it.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: But like, just know that a million people have gone through this already.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: They also that generation does everything very publicly, I guess.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, yeah, it's not even aware of it.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the message.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's the medium by which they're
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: choosing to experience it.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: And honestly,
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: not to be like hack transition here,
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_03: but I'm like Victoria Woodhull proves that everything we've experienced
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: or thought was experimental was done 100 years ago.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: Truly.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: More than that.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: So let's go back in time.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: The year is 1838 and it's September 23rd.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: So it's nearly her birthday.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: She's a Virgo.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: A girl named...
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: She's actually a Libra.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: She was born the first day of Libra season.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's right.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: It makes way more sense to a Libra than a Virgo.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, I don't really like her enough.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: There are really chaotic Virgos, I will say, but
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: this is another level.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: So it's September 23rd, Libra season.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: The seventh of 10 children born in Homer, Ohio.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: I also, I love the name Homer, Ohio.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_03: She is born Victoria, California, Cloughlin.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_03: California as a middle name is very interesting.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: Her mother,
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_03: Roxanna Roxy Hummel Cloughlin,
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: the illiterate daughter of unmarried parents who was allegedly descended from a line
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: of German Jews who had intermarried with a tribe of Native Americans.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: What likelihood do you think that's true?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like 10%?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: That was in a book I listened to about Victoria Woodhull.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I was like, might be more true.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's not on Wikipedia or anything.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm like, I don't know.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_03: But I feel like everybody was saying such things in Ohio in 1838.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: Then her father was a man named Reuben Buckman Buck Cloughlin Esquire,
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: a con man,
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: literally a snake oil salesman.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: These are your people, Alex.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: Buck Cloughlin Esquire.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: I have a name for my future baby.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's good.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_03: There's not enough bucks being born.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: So he's a self-taught lawyer.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: This will be an important theme that will come up.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: The interest in the law only insofar as it can benefit you.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_03: He is literally a grifter.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: He buys a gristmill and burns it down for the insurance money.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: They live a life of crime.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a really terrible childhood.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_03: She is the seventh of these 10 children.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: Victoria is being
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: We don't really know the extent of the abuse, but we'd know it was happening.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_03: She had only three years of real education and they were extremely impoverished.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously,
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: there would probably be times like when they got the insurance money
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: when they had more money, but it was not being used well.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: And she has a sister who is named Tennessee.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_03: Love that.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_03: We love that.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: And...
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to start quoting from a book.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: We'll quote from it throughout the episode, which is important for our purposes.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's a book called Victoria C. Woodhull, a biographical sketch.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: It was published in 1871 by a man named Theodore Tilton.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: Remember that name.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: Tilton writes,
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: had she been born black or been chained to a cartwheel in Alabama,
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: she could not have been a more enslaved slave.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: So, The racial politics there we won't get into.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: We'll assume that's not true.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: But let's just say it was a bad childhood.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_03: Tilton writes, it is pitiful to be a child without a childhood.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_03: Such was she.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Not a sunbeam gilded the morning of her life.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: Her girlish career was a continuous bitterness, an unbroken heartbreak.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: And Victoria herself is quoted as having said, I have no remembrance of a father's kiss.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: So the father is a con man and an abuser.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: The mother has a whole other thing going on.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: Would you guys like to discuss
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: this for me?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Her mother is, Mabel wrote, a crazed and spiritualist follower of Bronze Mesmer.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Hell yeah.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so she...
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is sort of before spiritualism becomes the national movement that it is.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Mesmerism is practiced in the same sort of sideshow type spectacles
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: as probably whatever Buck Laughlin was doing.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Buck, sorry, Coughlin.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Alex.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: basically a male mesmerist would get a woman on stage and hypnotize her and
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: then she would like experience visions and,
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know, hysteria and all of these things.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of like a,
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: it was about like animal magnetism and the fluids around us in the air and all
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: of these things.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: I love this so much.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: And like I I'm trying to sit with a contradiction in my head
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: that is like this would be a horrible way to grow up.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: And like these people seem highly unstable and like not good parents.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: And also like I love the aesthetics of it.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: And this is so delightful.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: You're going to like raise your child this way.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: In like a caravan.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like, it is interesting because she does like-
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we can talk about this more later when we get into her career,
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: but I think there's this interesting contradiction in her too,
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: where it's like,
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: it's never quite clear if she is disingenuous and is like doing everything she does
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: to get ahead or if she really believes it.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that it's probably not that clear cut for her because she grew up...
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: With kind of like this showman con man dad and this mother who was like clearly like
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: a vehement fanatic about this thing and really believed in it.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: And like I can see that being an ongoing contradiction in her life.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's probably like growing up in any religion.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's an important like it's important not to think about
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: the spiritualism and the mesmerism as a kind of like freakish experimental thing.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's like this is a cosmology that is taken extremely seriously in this time
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: and place and within this family.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: And you know what it's reminding me of?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_03: I was doing, obviously, a little Gloria Steinem research upon her death.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't know this,
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: but she was the daughter of an itinerant antiques peddler and tap dancer.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: And her mother was a terrible drug addict.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: Gloria Steinem also grew up in the Midwest and also did not go to school
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: until she was 11, I think, and taught herself to read reading road signs.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: So it kind of puts that Steinem quote about Woodhull into context.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like they're actually very similar figures.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: That's really interesting.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's fascinating.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: And did we talk about the Rochester knockings yet?
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because I feel like that's an important context.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1848, I'll give my spiritualism spiel.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: In 1848,
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: three sisters,
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: the Fox sisters in Rochester,
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: New York, started hearing strange rappings, like knocks.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, listen to this.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, you know, they...
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Gathered neighbors, they gathered friends and family to witness these knocks.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was a man named Mr. Splitfoot who was a spirit that was visiting them.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: They did eventually dig up the cellar of the house and find bones underneath.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Mr. Splitfoot was allegedly a man who had been buried in the house.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: They then took this show on the road.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: This was a way that women,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: there were like sort of two pathways to financial autonomy as a woman
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: and they were being a spirit medium and prostitution.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And those and being a widow,
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: those were sort of the three possibilities to like financial freedom.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Fox sisters take the show on the road.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: It sets off a national craze.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is when spiritualism becomes less kind of like a set of folklore.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Narratives and practices and more of a defined ideology and it's spurred on
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: then it kind of subsumes mesmerism.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: It subsumes a little bit of like Calvinism and then becomes a huge movement after
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: the Civil War because there's so many Civil War dead.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think people really like glom onto it as a way to stay in touch
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: with their lost husbands, fathers, sons from the Civil War.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: There I'm like frantically Googling because I'm trying to remember the title
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: of this book I read a couple of years ago that was about the history
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: of American spiritualism,
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: specifically like focused on one spiritualist commune,
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think in like upstate New York.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe like Oneida or something.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know that it was Oneida.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember now.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: And wow,
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: there are so many books about spiritualism,
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: but I can't find the one that I I'm like looking at my bookshelf and
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like,
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: where are you?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I got super into it because there's like one community that still exists
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: that like people are still going to and practicing at.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I want to go so bad.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: It might be.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds...
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: What is it called?
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: I had Lilydale.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's like way up in like near Niagara Falls in New York.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: I had a...
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: Professor in undergrad,
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: the one who,
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Susan Aberth,
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: who has like since become kind of the number one Leonore Carrington expert in
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: the world.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: She like taught this class on outsider art and would go to Lillydale every year.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: And like this was in the early days of cell phone cameras.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: It actually might not have been her.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been a different professor,
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: but would go to Lillydale and take these pictures on their cell phones
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: that were like obviously just crap photos and then be like,
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: do you see the ghost in it?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I would be like, yes, I see it.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: I love that stuff so much.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yesterday I was walking by a huge Prada billboard with Hunter Schaefer on it.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I was saying to my friend Katie, I was like, she looks so pretty.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: And then as we, as Katie looked up, she was like, I don't see anything at all.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: Because then the,
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: like the sun reflected upon the Prada billboard in such a way
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_03: that like this ghostly apparition appeared on Hunter's face.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: And so she like disappeared.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: Really angelic.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like I was like, huh, she looks like an angel.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my God, she is an angel.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_03: So stuff like that.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's still with us.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: One of my favorite facts about the Cloughlin sisters being on the road
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_03: or like being touted also as spiritualist Yeah.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I did also there's this interesting thing,
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_03: like you were saying, Madeline, like what is performance and what is actual belief?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like Victoria will throughout her life be channeling things
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_03: and experiencing spirits starting from a very young age through the end of her life,
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: even as she morphs into these different versions of herself.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_03: And like you'll see that in her name itself, like the morphing.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_03: I love that she's always going to be named after Queen Victoria,
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: but she starts off Victoria, California, Cloughlin.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: And then she's Victoria, Cloughlin, Woodhull.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_03: And then she's Victoria, Woodhull, Martin.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so she's shifting.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_03: And then she's also trying on all of these different hats of like, I'm a stockbroker.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a newspaper editor.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a prostitute.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a scandalous red woman.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_03: And yet the spirits remain present.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that...
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: Is very much like the Mandylion version of the 19th century where the occult and
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_03: the spirit world are always kind of underlying all that seems to be sort
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_03: of stayed history.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_03: And she's kind of our perfect, perfect woman.
• 40:08
  [music]
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so...
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: At age 14, Victoria is sick.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_03: So her parents call a doctor named Canning Woodhull,
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_03: who is a 28-year-old man who does what any good doctor should do,
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: which is kidnap her and marry her.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_03: And also, he's not a doctor because in Ohio, you do not need to have a medication.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_03: So that's one of the worst stories of all time.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: He kidnaps 14-year-old Victoria and brings her to Chicago where they are married.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: And he is not only a pedophile, he's also a alcoholic and womanizer.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_03: So he disappears and abuses her and neglects her.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_03: And they have two children in quick succession,
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: a son named Byron and a daughter whose name starts out Zulu and becomes Zula,
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: which is amazing.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: And Byron is named after the poet Lord Byron and is also born with some sort
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: of intellectual disability,
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_03: which is referenced in strange ways throughout Victoria's life.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: And it's obviously very complicated at that time and in general.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: And Victoria and Canning end up getting divorced and she keeps his last name.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: And this is when it becomes very relevant what you're saying,
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: Madeline,
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: about like you're either a spiritualist or you're a prostitute or you're a widow.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_03: Due to the fact that she's a divorced woman, the latter is not available to her.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: So she ends up doing something in between telling fortunes and maybe turning tricks.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: We don't really know.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_03: And she ends up getting married again to a man named Colonel James Harvey Blood.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_03: They marry in 1866.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_03: He had been a Union Army soldier and was also the city auditor of St. Louis, Missouri.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_03: And that marriage also sort of disintegrates and doesn't go well.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_03: And then she moves to New York.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's where our story really begins.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you do.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like all girls, but it's like so crazy to be like, I mean, at this point it's 1868.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: So she's 30 and she's divorced two times over the mother
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_03: of two children having performed as spiritualist for decades.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's what a life.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it's only just beginning.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: How common was divorce at this time?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: Do you guys know?
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Very uncommon.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you,
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: it was like a,
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like the fact that the divorce was granted means that she had like real legal proof
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: that he was it wasn't like anecdotal that he was a womanizer and an alcoholic.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: He must have like really been up to no good for a court to grant
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: a divorce.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean,
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: it was like becoming something that was happening like a little bit more,
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: but it really was like it was hard to get a divorce.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was pretty hard to get a divorce like into the 40s, 1940s.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_03: Not to be confused with the 1840s.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Which is our other favorite 40s.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the other kind of like interesting thing that's not really,
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: it's sort of like comes in weird ways.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: He did continue to live with her off and on.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think divorce at that time, their lives were still very much enmeshed.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: And like, so...
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: It will come up maybe later,
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: but like when she moves to New York,
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: there are periods where she's living in a house with her current husband,
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: her ex-husband, her kids, her sister, whoever her sister is booking.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a family affair.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that gets into too,
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_03: like the strange thing I was experiencing about Victoria Woodhull
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_03: while we're doing this research was that there's not a great amount of information
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_03: about her on the internet.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_03: And she's so prolific to be actually diffuse, I feel like, and hard to pin down.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I felt like if one of these things had happened to anyone else,
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_03: there would be like a lot of organized information available about it.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: But I feel like she's being suppressed.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: I agree.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a truther about this.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: Me too.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: She's just like so incredible.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: You would think they would have like made a miniseries or something.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's calling out to be a show.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: I would love a like Gilded Age style TV show about Victoria Woodhull.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: Who do you think would play her?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I feel like my first thought was Millie Bobby Brown and that's not like complimentary.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's like that's what they would do to her.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: She's Enola Holmes.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think maybe that's why my brain just immediately went there.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched it.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've been tempted, of course.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's not good.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think, I mean,
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: I included in the sources,
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if either of you looked,
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: it really wasn't worth your time if you didn't,
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: but Christopher Latch in the 60s,
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: who's like kind of a notoriously like critical of feminism for various reasons,
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: some valid,
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: but wrote this article in 1967 in the New York Review
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: of Books called Emancipated Women,
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: which was about like a slew of biographies that came out in that book.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: Period of the first wave of feminism about figures like Woodhull,
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Eddie Baker, who started Christian Science.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he was basically like, these women had colorful lines.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: But they weren't like articulating anything meaningful, which is just like patently not true.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: And instead he was like,
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: if people really want to know about 19th century feminism,
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: they should read this like contemporary male scholar writing about it
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: because he's like saying something.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: And like,
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: and kind of was like the details of these women's lives that sort of shape
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: and color these narratives are like not important.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: To the story of feminism.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was just like interesting in contrast with the Gloria Steinem quote of like,
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: this woman teaches women how to live.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: And like what it is to be alive.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: Who's so valid?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: Chills.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I love that.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_03: I do think that there's people in history and in my own life who remind me that
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_03: a life can be so many different things and like on
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_03: a timeline that's not necessarily legible to our like Maybe
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: the way you imagine your life to be when you're a kid
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_03: and who's like hitting milestones that you don't even know are there and
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: who keep living.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_03: Like this is someone who does not stop living after she has kids.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_03: This is someone who lives like 18 other insane lives.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_03: Who knows what was happening to the children?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it's concerning to think about.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I really appreciate her also because she is not a perfectly saintly figure in any way.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_02: She's very complicated.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like when we sort of venerate these people who…
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: Lived their ideals, quote unquote, a hundred years ago more.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's this desire to be like, she was ahead of her time and pure of heart.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it just feels like a sort of like, I'm unbuttoning my pants a little bit to like relax.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: To know that there was somebody like her who can like exist in the contemporary imagination.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_02: As somebody who is forward thinking who like was radical in her own ways, but also imperfect.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: And also she was kind of a failure,
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_03: like in that these ideas would take another hundred years
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_03: before they were discussed again, much less accepted.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_03: They are still radical.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I like that she's not like a historical figure to venerate
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: because she didn't win everybody over.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: She just tried.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: And she also like didn't let herself become a martyr.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: She adapted because like that is what,
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know, like I think part of the sort of reason that she doesn't...
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like products and technologies that did enable women's freedoms in so many ways,
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: but also like had a much darker application.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just like, it is,
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think worth like going back and thinking about what was happening at that moment
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: that made these such controversial and complicated topics.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: Totally.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: And you don't know how a topic or theme or interest is going to like spiral out into
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_03: a history that becomes more complicated.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_03: Like her advocacy for free love.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_03: We now would, or we're like, awesome.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_03: Like feminist warrior, sex positive.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then it's like,
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_03: but because that has become a socially acceptable,
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_03: interesting thing,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_03: whereas like touching eugenics,
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_03: it's not, I mean,
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_03: you don't, they didn't know where that was necessarily going to go, you know?
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: And like,
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: you see this in the history of one of our books called Elsie Venner,
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_03: which is like,
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: Even in its 19th century lifetime,
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_03: over the three editions that were published by the time the 19th century ended,
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: the author, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., becomes more racist.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: The story stays the same and it's touching on these themes of human psychology and science.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: Human origins.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: And like over the course of the additions,
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_03: he's like,
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_03: you know what these ideas work very well with is like hating
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_03: and committing genocide.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, but that was not a determined outcome when he wrote the book in 1862.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe if he had just advocated for free love instead,
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_03: like that book would not have been forgotten.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_03: Should we talk about what she does?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_03: That's so crazy.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like we're, we're talking about its impact, but not necessarily what happened yet.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: So she and her sister moved to New York and set up shop as clairvoyants.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: And one of their clients is Cornelius Vanderbilt, who,
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: God love him,
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: was like notoriously like victim to astrologers and psychics of all ilk.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: And they apparently gave him such good stock.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think they made him something like $4 million in the currency of the day on this railroad tip.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's speculation that one of their friends was a mistress to,
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think, Jay Gould or some other railroad tycoon.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how they were getting these stock tips.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: But...
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Cornelius Vanderbilt,
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: he's like,
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: he, when people ask him for stock advice, he goes, do as I do consult the spirits.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is his like MO.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: So cool.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he sets his, also he was having an affair with Tennessee.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: It should be stated.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: I love love.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Mabel and I were joking.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you came across this in the reading,
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: but or in what you were looking at,
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: but like people talk about them as if they were like so beautiful,
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: like this like sort of overwhelming beauties.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Tennessee was meant to be even like more compelling than Victoria.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: We were looking at pictures.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: Victoria is way prettier.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the pictures are hard to evaluate.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_03: Let's discuss how she looks.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's the most important thing,
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: as we all know.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes such an important part of the history.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to leave it out,
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: but I'm like,
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: it's the only thing people say about them for the next hundred years, basically.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think she looks good here, Tennessee.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's a nice picture,
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: but it's that strange thing looking at pictures of famously beautiful people
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_02: from long in the past where it's like the beauty standards were so different that
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: if I were to see her today, I'd be like, that's a woman.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: I would be like, you know, oh my God, that face.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_02: But like, yeah, sure.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: I like her hair.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_02: I like her hair too.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's huge.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like,
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: it's kind of amazing that then for like the intervening century between like them
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: and first wave feminism where they're sort of like being reclaimed,
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: it's like the only thing that's said about them is
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: that they are these beguiling like brokers of like, you know, of Wall Street.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: They bewitched all of the men and they got the stocks.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like, oh, I mean, I guess.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_02: I like, I just put in a picture that I found of Victoria
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: and I think she looks quite handsome and
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: She was a handsome woman.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_02: She has a kind of a beguiling look to her.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: I do think with people like this,
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: it's also,
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_00: you can tell from the stories,
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: it's so much more about their personalities than about how they look.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's like sort of calling them beautiful is a complete reduction of all of that charisma.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_03: And also if you like think about the things that happened to a woman in her lifetime
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_03: that make it difficult to like maintain your beauty...
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, like it's just like by being free, they were enabled to be beautiful.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_03: Because they weren't like hiding in the kitchen.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: And their skincare products, I can't even imagine.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, everybody's doing beef tallow now.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's true.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: Beef tallow is back.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I mean…
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: Between acne and having very crooked teeth from birth, I would not have done well in this time.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_03: Also, I would be blind.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we talk about this a lot.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: My 19th century version of herself is
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: like, I mean, it's intense.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: My most toxic personality trait is that I think I actually would have been fine.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have braces?
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's crazy.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: I've never thought about that.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: My teeth aren't that straight.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: But they look great.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they look great from this virtual picture that I have.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_03: My thing is that like my canines were growing up into my skull, like out through my cheeks.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like how would that have played out?
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, no, it was.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was very fucked up.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I probably would have died of an infection long ago.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: it's also hard for me to project myself back 100 years because there weren't a lot
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: of waysions back then.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_03: I think you would have been really powerful.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_03: I think so too.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_03: You would have been the Victoria Woodhull of your time.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_03: Enchanting people.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_03: Making and breaking the men of Wall Street.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: Wait, so then Vanderbilt is like,
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_03: they're so good at stocks, they need to have their own brokerage.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what happens?
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he sets them up.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then from with the earnings from that,
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: they launched this feminist newspaper called Woodhull and Cloughlin's Weekly.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: Which then sort of.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there are like several ways we could go.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think in the interest of like being coherent,
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: we should sort of stick to the Beecher-Tilton affair,
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: which they break in this newspaper they found.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: But...
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: For context, they become these like suffragist activists.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's like a really tense relationship with the suffragist movement for
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: the reasons we've talked about,
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: which is that they are imperfect vehicles for the ideals.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: The suffragists kind of want to portray an image of domestic 19th century womanhood,
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: but just like with the ability to vote.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a The thing about Woodhull is she's a captivating speaker.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: So she speaks at a convention of the suffragists
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: and it's like goes over like gangbusters.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then the following year she gives a speech about free love.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's Susan B.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: Anthony shuts the lights off to get her to stop speaking because it's
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: so controversial.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_03: One of our bits on this podcast is that I'm constantly like,
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: okay, so you say that she's giving a speech to 7,000 people.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_03: How did they hear her?
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_03: But also, how did she close the lights in
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: 1872?
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_02: She was like, blowing them
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: out.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_02: Closed all the shutters.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't get it.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, God.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: I like, I so enjoy her tense relationship with the women's suffrage movement.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because it just, I mean, she's just such a chaotic figure.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: And like,
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_02: she is so brash and bold and keeps doing these things that like,
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: brings attention to the work they're doing.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: But they're also like, oh, you're not quite what we want to be representing us.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, she's like-
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know what
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean?
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_03: Where I'm like,
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_03: we want to make a hero out of these subversive people who seem
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_03: to represent our ideals.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_03: And then we, this is really different, I know.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_03: And there's probably a better example.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_03: But then we can't.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_03: We find their flaws and I would say Victoria Woodhull's flaws were really different
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: than Graham Plattner's but I just there is like some similarity where it's like
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_03: and it's related to what we're talking about like where she refuses
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_03: to be anyone's martyr like she's not willing to actually stop living and like being
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_03: a complicated person.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_03: But she didn't assault anyone as far as I'm aware.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_02: Should I talk about presidential bid?
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, please.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_02: Is this the time?
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is the time.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_02: So you mentioned before that she was the first woman to run for president of the United States.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_02: And she announces that in 1872 with this statement that
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_02: I thought was actually correct me if I'm wrong, because I worry I'm conflating two statements.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to parse out.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I think she.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she said it in some venue,
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_02: which is that like the suffragists were trying to advocate for an amendment to
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_02: the Constitution to give women the right to vote.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: And Victoria was like.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_02: Actually,
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that that's what we should be aiming for because women are citizens
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_02: under the Constitution and therefore we have the right to vote.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm going to run for president.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's like the most chaotic and just like like
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_02: a really maximalist response politically that I really enjoy.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: Love.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: And she announces that Frederick Douglass is her running mate.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think like unbeknownst to him.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, which I just, it's so crazy.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_02: Is it Marianne Williamson?
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the like the crazy white lady who ran for president?
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's her.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_02: She had my vote.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's a little bit what I'm feeling here.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah,
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: and the suffragists were like,
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_02: ah, once again, like, oh, this isn't exactly what we want.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_02: She ran on a platform of free love and she was like,
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_02: we're going to start a fucking civil war if you don't give women the right to vote.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: Civil war too.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, God love her.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like she did have like such a good grasp on media.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think also like speaking of the invention of Billboard and all of these things,
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: her speeches were like so amazing.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: The
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: Comstock laws were actually enacted to get her to stop sending her pamphlets in the mail.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_00: The Comstock laws are these really repressive laws about...
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: Basically that you can't put any incendiary speech or like, I forget, indecent.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think indecent is the word they use.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: These laws are still officially on the books in the United States of America, by the way.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can't send it through the United States Postal Service.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_03: She gets arrested for mailing her own diary, I think at one point is what I read.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like on the basis of those laws.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: So her like,
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: it's not like she's the thing I don't want people to misunderstand
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: about her is like, it's not like she runs for president and nobody knows.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, it's a big deal.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: And people are like, really shocked and upset by what she's saying.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_02: And she even I loved there was a an anecdote in the New York Review of Books article
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_02: about how she like goes to the White House.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_02: And President Grant like points at his chair and is like, that'll be your chair one day.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like she wasn't just like a rando.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_03: She's a huge deal.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_03: And even though, isn't she too young to run for president also?
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's like so funny.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like in addition to being a woman where she's like,
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: can't really,
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think they would have let her win because she couldn't even vote
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: for herself.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like if she was 33, which is just like unconstitutional, like inarguably.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_02: This is so dumb, but, uh, It feels not unlike Kanye West running for president.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, who was it?
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_03: This was reminding me of someone and I couldn't place it, but it is Kanye.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_03: You're absolutely right.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard an amazing anecdote.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: I have a friend who's like a music producer and I can't remember if it was him
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: or someone he knows who's like working on some, you know, new like podcast.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sound board or something.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: They're like doing a startup for some technology thing.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they went to Kanye's house in Wyoming to have a meeting about this thing.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this was like during the time he was like sort of floating the presidential run.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_00: He had left a legal, yellow legal notepad on the entry table when you went into his house.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: And on it, it just was like a to-do list.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it said President 2020.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a prop he had left out like for people who came to have meetings with him.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_03: Amazing.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like the most amazing thing
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've ever heard.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_03: I was watching the new Real Housewives of New York City last night and one
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_03: of them is in the process of getting divorced and she has a notepad,
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_03: similar legal size notepad and is on the phone with her lawyer and the camera zooms
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_03: in on her notes which says like assets, question mark, double income, question mark.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, oh girl, oh.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_03: And then it cuts to a clip of her being like, what am I learning from this?
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_03: I'm getting a prenup next time.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_03: I would say there's more to learn.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: Victoria, the lessons of Victoria Woodhull have not sunk in for these women.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_03: What I was going to say, too,
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_03: about what you're saying, Alex,
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_03: about the interpretation of the Constitution,
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_03: which is so fascinating,
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_03: is that, again,
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_03: this is a complete repeat of her own father's playbook,
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_03: which is learn the law to interpret it the way that you want to,
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: to make you slippery and unaccountable for your crimes.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_03: And that's kind of what she's doing with the U.S. Constitution.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_03: And there is a scholarship about how the suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_03: and Susan B.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_03: Anthony,
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_03: they did like undermine their whole movement by trying like basically there was
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_03: a Supreme Court case in the 1870s,
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_03: I believe,
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_03: which argued for this a certain interpretation, I think, of the suffragists.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_03: Like the act that freed, abolished slavery.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_03: And that was,
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_03: they were like,
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_03: well, if like freed black men can vote, like we should be able to also.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_03: But basically it created this thing where it became a state's rights issue rather
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_03: than a constitutional issue,
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_03: which dragged out the suffragist movement for another like several decades,
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_03: of course, into the 20th century.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_03: So it's kind of like they should have been relying
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_03: on Victoria Woodhull's legal advice from my perspective as a lawyer.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the ERA is like, you know, they still haven't passed anything.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_03: We don't exist.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: So her platform,
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: she envisions a Christian socialist uprising in which all divisions
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: between citizens will be dissolved in a common good.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in the speech, so her and her sister's relationship.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in the speech, in one of her speeches, like in her presidential bid, she says...
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_00: She makes this dig at Vanderbilt.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks,
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: but if a poor half starved child were to take a loaf of bread from his cupboard
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: to prevent starvation,
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: she would be sent first to the tombs and thence to Blackwell's Island,
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: which are like, you know, penitentiaries in New York.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so she's like calling out Vanderbilt, who's the very reason that she has all this money.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: For kind of being the sort of like,
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: as you said in the beginning, Alex,
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: like being the kind of scam artist that he is in order
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: to manipulate these vast reserves of wealth.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean,
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_02: would you it's hard to say because she grew up poor,
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: but I'm like, would you consider her a class traitor?
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's this phrase that's used a lot about her,
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_03: which is that she had multiple rags to riches stories,
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_03: which I think is really interesting because who is it who says not Vanderbilt,
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_03: but the Carnegie, I think.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_03: Andrew Carnegie has the famous quote,
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_03: like from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_03: And like Victoria Woodhull has shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_03: to shirt sleeves within her own life.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_03: And she changes her allegiances so many times.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's like she is a class traitor.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I would say.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_03: But like she betrays herself too as she changes.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think it's also interesting that she ends up basically like in
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: the English aristocracy because she's such an American character.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_00: I like her ability to kind of like change with the times and adapt
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: and lift herself out of whatever situation she's in,
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_00: kind of like,
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: like fail upwards to these,
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_00: like the highest like circles in American society and
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_02: And like manipulating
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_02: the media to do that.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's like so, I mean, that is just the most American thing I can imagine.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that the end of that like train of action is actually just being like
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_00: a lady is like so funny to me.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_03: And she completely...
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_03: Her role,
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_03: her work in England,
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_03: which we'll discuss,
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_03: I believe right now,
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_03: is really interesting because of like the way that her principles,
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_03: which are so American,
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_03: as you're saying,
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_03: the way that they run up against British society and custom is crazy.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_03: So it all kind of focuses really on something that happens sometimes.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_03: In America with her newspaper,
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_03: which you said before,
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_03: Madeline, which is that she and the newspaper, it's a little bit unclear.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_03: Is it her or is it the newspaper?
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_03: They cover this very huge scandal called the Beecher-Tilton affair.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_03: They don't cover it.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_03: They uncover it.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_02: They break that news.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_03: They've reported the news.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_03: They launch a huge scandal.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_03: And then it becomes, again,
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_03: blurry because it's between Victoria and her newspaper
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_03: because she's also personally implicated in it.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_03: So the affair is between Henry Ward Beecher,
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_03: who is a notable congregationalist clergyman and social reformer.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_03: He's an abolitionist.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_03: He is the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_03: who writes Uncle Tom's Cabin,
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_03: which is like the most famous abolitionist novel slash novel period in the time.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_03: And it's an affair that he has with a woman named Elizabeth Tilton, who is,
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_03: a suffragist and is involved in the circles that Victoria Woodhull is as well.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_03: She's a poetry editor for The Revolution,
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_03: which is the newspaper of the National Woman Suffrage Association.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_03: And she's a founder of something called the Brooklyn Women's Club,
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_03: which I wonder if it still exists because perhaps I'll become a member.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_03: And Elizabeth Tilton is married to Theodore Tilton.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_03: Remember when I said, remember this name?
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_03: So Tilton, Theodore Tilton is the guy who ends up writing this biography of Victoria Woodhull.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so this is a very, very catty affair.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_03: Basically, Henry and Elizabeth are porking in some way.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_03: And Victoria is...
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_03: Victoria is mad because Beecher had censored her and he
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_03: or he doesn't support her work advocating for free love
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_03: and he doesn't support her lecture circuit on this topic.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_03: And she's like, well, you're a hypocrite because you're practicing free love with Elizabeth.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_03: And then...
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_03: She discovers this affair,
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_03: I think,
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_03: from Theodore,
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_03: the husband of Elizabeth,
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_03: who has allegedly fallen under the spell of her magnetic personality.
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that's not quite explicitly said but is true is
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_00: that she did implicate that she had slept with both Beecher and Tilda.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_02: The blood is on her hands.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_02: Theodore was like, he knew about this affair and was like, chill with it, right?
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so they had...
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a fascinating story in and of itself and deserves its own...
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's an amazing book McNally Editions put out of a kind of retelling of it, but...
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Theodore had had other affairs with other women.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so he had actually strayed first.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And in a conversation about it,
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth had admitted that she was having feelings for Beecher
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_00: and they opened up their relationship.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it was like a totally, it was a novel.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: But it was,
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: still because of like the constraints of the society they were in,
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_00: even though they all kind of were on board for this,
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_00: it became like such a scandal in their congregations that they then were like
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: so humiliated that they kind of walked back some of the stuff
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_00: that they had like originally agreed to.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Reading about all of this, I just like can't get over how much this feels like Substack.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_02: This is just Substack drama.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's so cool.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is really that.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's hard for us to imagine now that there was such a famous minister that...
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_00: This was such a scandal,
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_00: but this guy was so popular that they ran special ferries on Sundays
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_00: when he preached from Manhattan to his church in Brooklyn.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_00: He was the guy.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_00: He's the Kanye of the time.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_03: Except opposite views on slavery.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know what I will say?
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_00: I will say this on the record because it's now public knowledge,
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_00: but I had heard for the longest time about the threesome between Harry Styles,
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Olivia Wilde, and Amrata.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know about that.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if that's on the record yet, Madeline.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_03: Breaking it here.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: I still don't really have a problem saying it because I have a pretty good source, but...
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they were like having threesomes and then it's, yeah.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_02: I guess, Batman.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Ethical non-monogamy.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've heard other things about him that I won't say on the record.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, please share later.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_02: New Dumas photos came out yesterday of him and Zoe and I'm just like,
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_02: That much hotness in one couple is like it.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_02: I can't even fathom it.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like bonking myself on the head.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's not appropriate.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's offensive to me.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_03: But I do think I saw him on the street yesterday.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_03: He probably did.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I was being chill about it.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, should I follow him and see if it's him?
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was being chill about it.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_00: I only considered stalking.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, totally reasonable response to St. Gary Stiles in public.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, I got to go meet my friends anyway.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_03: So this scandal happens and Victoria Woodhull is sort of branded as a scarlet woman.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_03: The Woodhull and Coughlin weekly is shut down in the process.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_03: It becomes also known as not the Beecher Tilton affair, but the Beecher Tilton Woodhull affair.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's, it's crazy.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_03: And cut to it's 1877.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_03: Victoria's like, I'm done with New York.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_03: And she is kind of done with New York, but also New York is done with her.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_03: She says goodbye to all that.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_03: Literally, she says goodbye to all that.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_03: But she heads not to her namesake, middle name, California.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_03: She heads east and goes to London with her sister and her parents.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_03: They're kind of like, they're running away in a way.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_03: And...
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_03: In classic Victoria fashion, she immediately starts a new life.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_03: She meets a wealthy banker,
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_03: the son of a wealthy banker named John Biddulph Martin, who knew about her.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_03: He'd been following her story from across the pond.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_03: They get married and Victoria's like, I know what my next chapter is.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a woman of society.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_03: London society is like, no way.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_03: No, thank you.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_03: So then this...
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_03: This takes us to 1894 because time passes.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_03: Henry Ward Beecher dies in 1887 and a biography is published about him.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_03: This biography ends up in the collection of the British Museum's library,
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_03: which I think is the British library.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_03: I actually am like a little confused about that.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if it won.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_03: I think they were merged and then the British library becomes the British library
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_03: or it's always the British Museum library.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's confusing.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_03: There is that reading room at the British Museum.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, which is beautiful.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_03: Gorgeous.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that is where this is all happening.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_03: So now we transition from sort of the Victoria Woodhull as a fascinating figure
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_03: of American history in the 19th century to the center of a really,
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_03: really boring legal case in the UK,
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_03: which in some ways changes the history of libraries in the UK forever.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_03: And it just goes to show you that one woman can contain multitudes.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_03: So basically, Victoria's doing her best to become a society woman in Britain.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_03: She has a friend named George Washington Moon, which is an incredible name.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_03: Incredible name.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_02: That reminds me of, I saw a post.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Apparently, there's somebody buried in the Lancaster Cemetery here named George W. Butt.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Love.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_02: I want to go see it.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: When we come visit, we'll come with you.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_03: Historic spot.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_03: So basically George Washington Moon is at the library at the British Museum
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_03: in June 1892 and he happens to find some pamphlets
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_03: about his friend Victoria Woodhull Martin which are making reference to
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_03: the Beecher Tilton scandal.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_03: There are books called, there are all these pamphlets.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_03: There's the Beecher Tilton scandal,
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_03: a complete history of the case from November 18th Second,
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_03: 1872 to the present time with Mrs.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Woodhull's statement as published in Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_03: Then there's the story of Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore and Mrs. Tilton.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_03: There's also Theodore Tilton's biography of Victoria Woodhull,
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_03: Victoria C. Woodhull, a biographical sketch from 1871, which we quoted from earlier.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_03: So...
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Mr.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_03: Moon is like, wait, these are saying things about my friend which I think she wouldn't like.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_03: So he goes to a man named Richard Garnett whose title is Keeper of Printed Books.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_03: Amazing title.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_02: I want that title.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_03: And in some ways I have that title as well.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_03: Me too.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_03: And he says to Garnett, there is obscene and libelous material about my friend in here.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_03: And Garnett goes, oh, you're right.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_03: This is kind of inappropriate.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_03: And he locks it up in a special cabinet and he withdraws one of the titles from the catalog.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_03: Important note here is that only two people had ever looked at this material in
• 1:17:27
  SPEAKER_03: the 20 years since this publication.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_03: So, but Victoria's pissed.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_03: Moon tells her about it and she's like, this is unacceptable.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_03: I've come to England to start a new life,
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_03: even though she's aware that her reputation has preceded her
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_03: because her husband knew about her.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_03: And she decides to go to the British Museum Library and talk to the keeper
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_03: of printed books, Mr. Garnett.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_03: And she says, you have to remove all this.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_03: And he's like, OK.
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_03: But he doesn't remove all of it.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_03: He removes one of the pamphlets.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_03: And a year later,
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_03: or actually like six months later,
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_03: in February 1893, Victoria's husband gets involved.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_03: And he writes a letter to the trustees of the museum.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_03: And he says, all of this needs to be removed.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_03: My wife is a clean, good woman.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_03: And this becomes very problematic within the British Museum.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_03: And Garnet is very concerned.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_03: And he writes a letter in 1893 saying,
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_03: I can easily understand that Mrs.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_03: Martin may not wish Mr.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_03: Tilton's biography of her to be generally read,
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_03: but I cannot perceive that the book is libelous, either in fact or in intention.
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_03: And basically he's like...
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_03: I will, you know,
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_03: upon request,
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_03: perhaps remove something from the catalog,
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_03: but I can't we can't start the principle or set the precedent
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_03: that we're removing something because it says something bad about someone because
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_03: then that's a very slippery slope.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like what our own library system is experiencing today.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like I was on the American Library Association website this morning reading
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_03: about like the top 10 censored books of the month.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_03: And number two is the perks of being a wallflower.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_03: It was insane.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_03: Because he's gay?
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_03: Is he gay?
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think he's gay.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_02: I like don't even remember anything scandalous about that book.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Me neither.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really either.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Did they drink?
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think they drank in it.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_00: They like went to Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is what I'm remembering.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_03: And it is a terrible precedent.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_03: Our books say things that are bad about people because everything is offensive to someone.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_03: Everything is liable to someone, which is also the Substack part of it too.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_03: It continues.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_03: So the trustees agree.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_03: They say, quote,
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_03: it does not seem expedient to interfere with its use by the public,
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_03: its use being the pamphlets.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_03: So Victoria and her husband do not accept the British Museum stance
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_03: and they are taking matters to the court as per Woodhull family tradition.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_03: And they say that the British Museum must remove this material.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's not good.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_03: And the British Museum is like, we don't even, we didn't even know that we acquired this.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_03: And this is where it becomes like an interesting Mandylion history thing,
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_03: because basically they have this vendor named Henry Stevenson's son,
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_03: who's just supplying the British Museum
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_03: with basically Basically like everything coming out of America since the 1840s.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_03: And they don't, they're acquiring 315,000 new volumes a year.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_03: They do not have time to read everything and to confirm if it's libelous to someone.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's a terrible precedent, right?
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_03: And under- 315,000 a year?
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in 1894.
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_03: So basically-
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_03: But it's not an ironclad case on either side.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_03: The library is like under obligation to acquire everything in the UK,
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_03: but they aren't really under obligation to acquire everything in
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_03: the US that's coming out of the US.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_03: And This quote reads, So it goes to court.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is the British Library then.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, just for the record.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're referring to it as British Museum Library.
• 1:21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because the British Library has everything that's ever been published
• 1:21:45
  SPEAKER_03: under British copyright law.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_03: At some point, they get a different building.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_03: And they're really right next to each other.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_02: Can I ask a question?
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_02: Please.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so this is coming from a deeply American perspective.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_02: Because my brain is like, free speech.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_02: What is the...
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_02: The standard of free speech in England at this time, do you know?
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not 100% sure on that.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know that in general,
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_00: England has much more repressive libel laws than we do because of free speech
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: as part of the Constitution.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you really can't speculate at all about things in the British media.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that goes back,
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_00: and they are prosecuting people for that,
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_00: but I don't, yeah,
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know exactly like what the standard of like free speech versus libel is at
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_00: the time.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's not like a core national value though, for sure.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_03: And this is made,
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_03: I always think about this because like if you follow Prince Harry and
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_03: the royal family,
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_03: they are able to sue in court and win if things were said about them
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_03: that are not true.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or that are not provable.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like they might be true, but they're not like...
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_00: The person can't doesn't have documentation or something.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_03: Where I get confused, though,
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_03: too, is that like the British gossip columns are evil in England and you famously.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_03: Like they're crazy and they're like tapping people's phones, like maybe because they need facts.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's so crazy.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_03: But it does feel like a distinctly this could only happen in England kind of thing,
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_03: like where she does kind of have a case that they're
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_03: That they're harboring libelous material about her.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_03: But ultimately what this court case becomes is like,
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_03: is it the library that's responsible or is it the person who published it in
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_03: the first place?
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_03: And she loses the case.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_03: But it's apparently an amazing court case.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_03: Like a lot of the text I was reading about it was like the judge was laughing,
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_03: the jury was laughing.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's like comforting that she could still put on a show in the same way.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's what I love about it is that she is...
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_03: Really rocking the crowd.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_03: So the British Museum's lawyers,
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_03: what they try to do is prove that it's not libelous because it's true, right?
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_03: So they're like, it is true that she was involved in the Beecher-Tilton scandal.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_03: It is true that she was a whore or something like that.
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_03: And they are regretful about it because they...
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_03: The quote is,
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_03: it was an ungentlemanly proceeding that might easily verge on persecution in
• 1:24:27
  SPEAKER_03: the eyes of the jury and help rather than hurt the Martins cause.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_03: Moreover,
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_03: Victoria was extremely hard to pin down for she was a fast and sure speaker adept
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_03: at making points without answering questions directly.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_03: Oh.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_03: And there becomes this really...
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_03: What I like about this case, too,
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_03: in this moment in Victoria Woodhull's life is that we've been talking
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_03: about her amazing,
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_03: expansive... You can't even wrap your arms around it, her biography.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_03: And this is her reckoning with her own legacy.
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_03: Because at one point,
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_03: the lawyer says,
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_03: well, would you rather not be mentioned at all in any great or exhaustive library?
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_03: And she says no.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_03: Like, she...
• 1:25:10
  SPEAKER_03: She's not, it's like ambivalence within her.
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, it's so important for her to be iconic and famous.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_03: And yet she doesn't want this to be the story.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_03: She wants to be able to control the story that's being told about her.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_03: And then she's asked about her opinions about free love,
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_03: which of course is like remains the most controversial thing she's ever done.
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_03: And she says this quote, which is amazing.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_03: I never knew that love was anything else but free.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_03: So sweet.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_03: And then apparently she also blames all of the articles in the weekly,
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_03: the Claflin and Woodhull weekly written about the Beecher Tilton scandal.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_03: She's like, there was a man on my staff who did all that.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't me.
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_03: I love her blaming a man.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_02: It was a man.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_02: He went to a different school.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's like behind every great woman is an
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_03: idiot man.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_03: So...
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_03: Then, you know,
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_03: the lawyers again point out only two people have ever referenced any
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_03: of this material about you.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_03: And she's like, it doesn't matter.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then, basically, the museum wins.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_03: They make this very clear case that it's not their responsibility.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_03: The jury deliberates and says...
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_03: That the material is libelous, but the museum wasn't responsible.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_03: That they are not guilty for negligence,
• 1:26:29
  SPEAKER_03: though they could have tried a little bit more to be a little bit more discerning
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_03: about what they were taking into their collection.
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_03: But it was really not the museum's fault.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_03: And damages were set at 20 shillings.
• 1:26:40
  SPEAKER_03: And his lordship took the case under consideration.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that she does win 20 shillings.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_03: But they had spent over 500 pounds on this legal case.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_03: So it was kind of...
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe not worth it financially.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_03: But I don't think this is about money.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it also it just goes to show how like how much nothing is new once again,
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_02: because like this reminds me so much of the discourse about fake news
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_02: on social media and holding the platforms accountable for what they allow to spread.
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_02: And in the context of a library,
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like,
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_02: oh yeah, no,
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_02: you should absolutely not be allowed to take down anything that's in
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_02: the library just because it makes somebody look bad.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_02: But a very similar question was being asked post-2016.
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's also, I mean,
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of this question of legacy and like,
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_00: I just think about the sort of disposability of those things now.
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you post something,
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_00: it's not because you like, I mean,
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_00: this does happen,
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_00: but it's not the intention that it's like being carried for posterity,
• 1:27:55
  SPEAKER_00: which is like the intention of putting something in the British library is
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_00: that like it is now part of this history of Britain.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_00: And like, I don't know.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think she was hoping that all of her pamphlets and stuff would be disposable,
• 1:28:10
  SPEAKER_00: that it would be like,
• 1:28:12
  SPEAKER_00: What we think of as social media,
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_00: where you put it up and it gets this reaction
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_00: and it like bolsters her like visibility, but it's not permanent in the same way.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and related to what you're both are talking about,
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_03: it also reminds me of like Taylor Swift suing that radio station host for $1
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_03: for groping her in what she did like in a post me too way.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like, I think that case was actually kind of admirable and interesting.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_03: It also reminds me of the Gwyneth Paltrow lawsuit about the ski accident.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_03: Remember that?
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_00: I just love her.
• 1:28:49
  SPEAKER_03: I just love when a woman sues.
• 1:28:52
  SPEAKER_03: I lost half a day of
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_03: skiing, she said.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_03: Well, so I guess in terms of the library legacy is that Richard Garnett,
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_03: the keeper of the books at the museum,
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_03: does think that this case needs to set a Precedent in British law about
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_03: the responsibility of the library.
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_03: So in his lifetime,
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_03: he's advocating that the museum and the library like have parliament pass something
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_03: which would protect the library in such cases because he foresees a future
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_03: where there will be future people intimidating or suing the library
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_03: on their own personal behalf.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not implemented in his own lifetime.
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_03: But in 1900,
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_03: Parliament passes an act called the Public Libraries Bill,
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_03: which exempts the library and its staff from liability to legal proceedings
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_03: in respect of libelous matter in any book or being used in their collection.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_03: And even in the decades following,
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_03: Garnett's letters about the Woodhull case are referenced as
• 1:29:57
  SPEAKER_03: a really important precedent.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_03: And If anything,
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_03: I know this is really about Richard Garnett's sort of foresight,
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_03: but it's actually it's yet another accomplishment.
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_03: And it's another feather in the cap of Victoria Woodhull.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like being so self-involved that she causes this like law to be passed in Britain,
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_03: which even if she was on
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_02: the side that we don't necessarily agree with.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_03: She's a pathbreaker here as well.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, she shaped the way that history is like literally contained and passed down.
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's a legacy in and of itself.
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing woman.
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Really incredible.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if one of you mentioned earlier that
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_02: You're kind of truthers about Victoria Woodhull's legacy
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_02: and you feel like she's being silenced.
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think she is doing the silencing from beyond the grave?
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think definitely in part.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think she's waiting?
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like she wants us to find her in another moment?
• 1:30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe this is her moment.
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_03: I do feel her.
• 1:31:02
  SPEAKER_03: I feel her in that.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_00: I also feel like we might finally be ready for like an imperfect woman as the sort
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_00: of character that we bring back.
• 1:31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like maybe the first wave feminists who found her, like it just wasn't the right time.
• 1:31:20
  SPEAKER_00: But now we love imperfect politicians.
• 1:31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_00: She's our Trump.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're addicted to them.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's true.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Woodhole, 2028.
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's vote.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine if we had a ghost president before we had a real woman president.
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_00: I do think it's more likely, unfortunately.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, ghost presidents don't get periods.
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's so true.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we can give her the nuclear codes.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_03: What's the like moaning Mona in Harry Potter?
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_03: Moaning Myrtle.
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_03: Moaning Myrtle.
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_03: I'm imagining her as president.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_03: She would be incredible.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_03: She would cause some problems for sure.
• 1:32:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:32:04
  SPEAKER_03: She's just flushing toilets left and right.
• 1:32:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well, any final thoughts on Victoria Woodhull, Cloughlin, Martin, California?
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_00: I am going to start writing a miniseries.
• 1:32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:32:21
  SPEAKER_02: Start the mini series.
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's my next project.
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_02: I will.
• 1:32:24
  SPEAKER_02: I will join in if you need help.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_02: Would love to help.
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_00: After you finish your book and I finish my dissertation.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, totally.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I give birth.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_02: A few small hurdles.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like raise a child.
• 1:32:39
  SPEAKER_03: Who cares?
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's a priority, you guys.
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think you should think less of yourselves and more of Victoria Woodhull.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_02: I am going to go digging more deeply into my ancestry and see if I can find
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_02: a Cloughlin connection.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure.
• 1:32:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, she's one of 10 children.
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_00: I sort of see her in you now that we've made this connection.
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, there's elements of you that I see.
• 1:33:08
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you, Alex, for doing this with us.
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_03: It was so fun.
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, what a delight.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so happy to have spent this time talking about my foremother, Victoria.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe we can do,
• 1:33:21
  SPEAKER_03: we'll find another incident in her very,
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_03: very long lurid life and discuss it together because I think there's obviously,
• 1:33:28
  SPEAKER_03: this is chapter one.
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:33:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is chapter one.
• 1:33:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is episode one.
• 1:33:33
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 1:33:33
  SPEAKER_03: And speaking of which, enjoy the episode.
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_03: Lovely people like it and follow Alex and listen to her podcast and support her project.
• 1:33:44
  SPEAKER_03: And when her book comes out, you better buy a copy or I'll know if you didn't.
• 1:33:48
  SPEAKER_02: And British Library, if you're listening, ding, ding.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_00: You need it.
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_03: But don't sue.
• 1:33:53
  SPEAKER_03: You guys don't sue.
• 1:33:55
  SPEAKER_03: Please don't sue.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_03: Don't sue anyone.
• 1:33:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:33:57
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, guys.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_03: Bye-bye.
• 1:34:00
  SPEAKER_03: Bye.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Hello?
• 1:34:03
  SPEAKER_01: You've reached 1-800-1800.
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_01: 1-800-1800.
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have a burning question.
• 1:34:08
  SPEAKER_01: 1-800-1800.
• 1:34:08
  SPEAKER_01: 1-800-1800.
• 1:34:09
  SPEAKER_01: I have a burning
• 1:34:10
  [music]