Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Victoria Claflin Woodhull was the first woman to run for president. The first female stockbroker to open a brokerage house on Wall Street. The first person to publish Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto in the United States. And the first woman to address Congress and drive a motorcar through Hyde Park. She was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. A champion of the International Workingmen’s Association. The founder of a feminist newspaper read by tens of thousands. An enthusiast of both free love and eugenics-adjacent stirpiculture, or, "The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race".

She was also a "magnetic healer" who earned a living, and glimpsed a freer, more equal realm, through the doctrines of spiritualism. She was the singular Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927), “one of the few women”, writes second-wave feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem, "to live out in public the principles of female emancipation and sexual freedom that were not only unusual in her day but illegal."


Born in Homer, Ohio, in 1838, as the seventh child of an itinerant family, Victoria was named after the English Queen, who had acceded to the throne that previous year. Her father, a part-time confidence man named Buck Claflin, trained Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee (Tennie) — when he wasn’t abusing them with stinging whips and hand saws, claimed the biographer Theodore Tilton — to work the spiritualist-medium circuit from an early age. Victoria was married off at fourteen to Dr. Channing Woodhull, who delivered their mentally disabled son, Byron, at home in a state of alcoholic intoxication. (Victoria would subsequently blame their unhappy marriage for her son’s disability, and develop her eugenicist theories off the back of his suffering.) After her remarriage — to a Civil War veteran known as Colonel Blood — Victoria and Tennie sought, in 1871, a different form of speculation, on Wall Street, backed by the younger sister’s suitor, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The sisters said their edge in the stock market came from telepathic powers; newspapers across the country labeled them “Bewitching Brokers” (less for their clairvoyance than as a demeaning intimation that their brokerage operated like a brothel). With their earnings, they launched Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which claimed to be the “only Paper in the World conducted, absolutely, upon the Principles of a Free Press”. (The sisters were arrested for obscenity charges shortly thereafter.) Woodhull’s polemics on suffrage, which appeared with frequency in their Weekly and other periodicals, buoyed her reputation on the speaking circuit. By 1872, she came to depend on income from her lectures and commanded audiences unparalleled by any peer. Her unwavering defense of free love — "Yes, I am a Free Lover", she says in her speech “The Principles of Social Freedom”, I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere" — made her enemies among suffragettes and beyond. At the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1872, Susan B. Anthony cut the lights to prevent Woodhull from speaking. That same year, she ran for president of the United States as a member of the Equal Rights Party, with Frederick Douglass chosen by the party as her running mate (he rejected the appointment and suppressed the incident from his autobiography). As a result of her political ambition, writes the scholar Amanda Frisken, Woodhull "lost her home, her paper, her means of earning a living and Vanderbilt’s backing."


The lecture, The Impending Revolution, was delivered in February 1872 to audiences in Boston and New York. The latter venue, New York’s Academy of Music, saw an audience of six thousand, composed of various sections of the International Workingmen’s Association — the only national labor organization, at the time, not specialized to a single industry — with many more eager listeners turned away at the door. The New York Times was not impressed: “Her periodical exhibitions of bitter language upon the platform attract numbers of idle people, among whom are some whose ignorance and envy fit them to receive her folly as though it were words of wisdom.” But others had found a leader. A month after this lecture, 1500 workers began spontaneously chanting Woodhull’s name during a rally in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park.

The Impending Revolution envisions a Christian socialist uprising in which all divisions between citizens will be dissolved into the common good:

"The impending revolution, then, will be the strife for the mastery between the authority, despotism, inequalities and injustices of the present, and freedom, equality and justice in their broad and perfect sense, based on the proposition that humanity is one, having a common origin, common interests and purposes, and inheriting a common destiny, which is the complete statement of the religion of Jesus Christ, unadulterated by his professed followers."

Freedom! Equality!! Justice!!!

First but not the Last: Women Who Ran for President

Wiki

Colonel Blood & The Fogg Women

While the campaign was never taken seriously in mainstream circles, it was further hampered by Victoria’s involvement in publishing the details of the Beecher scandal. She would be in and out of courtrooms and jailhouses for charges of libel and obscenity over the next five years. In 1876, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was forced to fold, and nearly broke, the sisters moved to England, marrying into wealthy families and reinventing themselves as aristocrats and patrons of the arts. While their days of agitating for women’s rights and social reform were over, both lived to see women gain the right to vote both in the United States and their adopted homeland of Great Britain. Victoria Woodhull died in 1927 at the age of 88.

The First Woman To Run For President: Victoria Woodhull

November 25, 1914: English ship Bulwark, sunk in three minutes' time. HMS Bulwark was one of five London-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy in 1899.


A powerful internal explosion ripped Bulwark apart at about 07:53 on 26 November 1914 while she was moored at Number 17 buoy in Kethole Reach, 4 nautical miles west of Sheerness in the estuary of the River Medway. All the ship's officers were killed in the explosion and only a dozen ratings survived. A total of 741 men were lost, including members of the band of the gunnery school, HMS Excellent, which was playing aboard. Only about 30 bodies were recovered after the explosion. In terms of loss of life, the incident remains the second most catastrophic accidental explosion in the history of the United Kingdom, exceeded only by the explosion of the dreadnought battleship Vanguard, caused by a stokehold fire detonating a magazine, at Scapa Flow in 1917.


Nov 25, 1924: A Cuban actress, Ofelia Rivas, is killed by a shark after the liner Esperanza strikes rocks off Tampico, Mexico. News accounts say she jumps from the ship either to save her dog or a hat when she's attacked. All other passengers make it to shore safely.




Nov 25, 1924: "Midinettes"— young unmarried women in frilly headdresses and other costumes—walk the streets of Paris as part of a custom on St. Catherine's Day in which they're entitled to kiss the man of their choice.




Nov 25, 1944: at 12:26 pm on a busy shopping Saturday, a German V2 rocket  made a direct hit on a crowded Woolworth's store in London’s New Cross, killing 168 people. At the time of the attack, on a Saturday afternoon, the shop was crowded. It was the worst German V-2 attack on Britain during the Second World War.


Lest we forget New Cross (The Woolworths Museum)


Nov 25, 3978: The crew of the Liberty 1 awake from hyper sleep as it crashes onto a planet inhabited by talking apes.



The worldwide #1 hit "Magic Fly" as released in 1977 by Space. The band Space went on to record 4 albums which sold over 10 million albums before disbanding in 1981. They released a "Best Of" and "Remixes" in 2009 on NANG RECORDS.




A 400 year-old Skipinnish oak tree in Scotland. Winner of UK Tree of the Year 2024





How Elon Musk became a kingmaker  |  The Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker



Ukraine Support Tracker


Monday words...


It was said that the spirits of the dead lived in the river so I followed the burngrain, determined to complete my nekyia. I felt crumpsy, as it was only dawn, yet when I spotted the witches of the gandferd above me, I took it as a sign. There, in the river, the dead appeared.

I'm A Part Of You
Touch My Body
Wicked Ways
Up For Days
Sticks & Stones
Break Your Bones
Telephone
Out Of Zone
Chromosome
No Way Home
Trouble Comes
Gimme Some
Fuss & Fight
Black & White
Win Or Lose
You Can Choose
Blood & Guts
Gutter Slut
Camouflage
Decoupage
Pink & Blue
Take A Few
Nice & Clean
Guillotine
Thirsty Blade
Serenade
You're A Part Of Me
Drama Queen