Feminist, Reformer

Vicky and Tennessee.

Victoria Claflin was born on 23 September 1838 into a large and impoverished family in Homer, Ohio. By the time she and her sister, Tennessee Celeste, were in their early teens, their family was staging medicine shows at which one of the brothers sold cancer "treatments" and the parents hawked an "elixir of life" with a picture of the attractive Tennessee on the bottle. The two girls entered spiritualistic trances in which they offered comfort to the bereaved and the ill.

Marriage and Social Reform.

When she was fifteen Victoria married a physician, Canning Woodhull, with whom she had two children. Leaving her husband, Victoria worked briefly as an actress in California, then returned to Ohio and teamed up with Tennessee to perform feats of spiritualism and mesmerism. The sisters were dogged by accusations of fraud, prostitution, and moral turpitude. When one...