Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull

by Victoria Claflin Woodhull, Michael W. Perry (Introduction)

Francis Galton is said to have founded eugenics with an 1864 magazine article. But a single article does not make a movement and Galton, by his own admission, did little to promote the idea before 1901. This book demonstrates that eugenists have given us an inaccurate history of their movement, assigning credit to Galton, the eminent half-cousin of Charles Darwin, when the real credit belongs to a woman who was perhaps the most radical nineteenth-century American feminist. That woman was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President and, with her sister, the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street. This book contains all her major speeches and writings on eugenics to demonstrate that she was the first of either sex to take to the road and, in hundreds of speeches across the U.S., champion the idea of creating a "perfected humanity" by breeding "perfect children." She even beat Galton in his own land, moving to England in 1876 and introducing eugenics there. Woodhull was not a shy about her role. The title for this book comes from the headline of a 1912 London newspaper article proclaiming her "Lady Eugenist." In 1927, shortly before she died, the New York Times would carry an article in which she praised eugenic sterilization and claimed to have "advocated that fifty years ago in my book Marriage of the Unfit."

332 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 2005

About the author

Victoria Claflin Woodhull (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927) was an American suffragist who was described by Gilded Age newspapers as a leader of the American woman's suffrage movement in the 19th century. She became a colorful and notorious symbol for women's rights, free love, fighting corruption, and labor reforms. The authorship of many of her speeches and articles is disputed. Many of her speeches on these subjects were not written by Woodhull herself alone but also by her backers and husband. Either way, her role as a representative of these movements was nonetheless powerful and controversial. She was the first woman along with her sister to operate a brokerage firm in Wall Street and then open a weekly newspaper. She is most famous for her declaration and campaign to run as the first woman for the United States Presidency in 1872. Many of the reforms and ideals espoused by her for the common working class against the corrupt rich business elite were extremely controversial in her time though generations later many of those implemented are now taken for granted. Other ideas and reforms still remain controversial and debated today.