Tennessee Celeste Claflin - Activism

Activism

When Susan B. Anthony turned over The Revolution to a less-than-capable follower, Tennie’s sister pleaded with her to publish their own newspaper, “‘We’ve got enough cash in the bank to swing it, and if we should run short, you, Tennie, have always got old Vanderbilt to fall back on.” They had not been involved in the feminist movement until they “burst upon the scene in 1870 with the publication of their radical feminist newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, prostitution, venereal disease, abortion and female sexuality and print news about workingwomen and their efforts to organize and better their conditions. The Weekly advocated spiritualism, socialism… and free love,” though it was believed to have begun solely to support Victoria’s bid for the U.S. Presidency. “Just as the brokerage had introduced Victoria and Tennessee to the leaders of the financial world, the newspaper, with its bold positions and columns open to would-be writers, introduced the sisters to the city’s thinkers.” Sales were “soon… up to twenty thousand copies at a nickel a copy,” and the Weekly lasted six years, closing on June 10, 1876, “longer than most papers of its kind.”

As a result of her sister’s appeal to the House Judiciary Committee for the right to vote already in the Fourteenth Amendment, the two “were asked to attend the suffrage convention. They had earned their stripes and had changed the course of the suffrage fight. Instead of battling for new rights, the suffrage leaders now proposed to assert those already in the Constitution.” The sisters’ “uninhibited sex lives, which they made no attempt to conceal,” though, was thought to have embarrassed some of the suffrage delegates. Suffragists were leery because “opponents of women’s rights had long used the charge of ‘free love’ to discredit the movement.”

“The flamboyance and grandiosity of Victoria Woodhull tend to obscure her and her sister’s real contribution to the ideas of feminism in their relatively brief association with the American woman’s movement. For publicly challenging the dearly held Victorian belief in the purity (that is, asexuality) of women, they were certain to be isolated and silenced. However, there is no doubt that Woodhull and Claflin gave voice to the secret longings and dissatisfactions of great numbers of women. Elizabeth Stanton wrote in her confidential diary, begun at the age of sixty-five, that she had come to the conclusion that ‘the first great work to be accomplished for woman is to revolutionize the dogma that sex is a crime.’ Later she added, ‘a healthy woman has as much passion as a man.’” Two articles written in the Weekly by Tennie, “a better writer and clearer thinker than her more famous sister” are of particular note. In one she “urged women to gain their sexual freedom by defying oppressive social customs; in the second, she pointed out that woman’s economic dependence forces her to submerge her own nature and become little more than a sexual snare for men.”

“It isn’t clear what Tennie actually thought of the women’s movement, or if she thought of it at all. Perhaps for her the fluttering of skirts and the earnest whispers of movement women were just a new bit of fun. The suffragists themselves were not entirely sure what to make of her, either. When one of their group called on Victoria and Tennessee, the suffragist chided her husband for putting his arm around young Tennie. But he defended himself saying, ‘My dear, when you take me into a house where a damsel as plump and pretty as Miss Tennie C. sits on the arm of my chair and leans over until I suspect there is very little if anything underneath the Mother Hubbard she is wearing—then how can you blame any man for putting his arm around the damsel to verify such a suspicion?’” During the 1870s she was a flamboyant proponent of women's rights with her sister Victoria Woodhull. Tennessee ran for the United States Congress in the state of New York. She held the controversial belief that women could serve in the military and was elected Colonel of a "colored" National Guard Regiment.