Early Life and Education
She was born Victoria California Claflin, the seventh of ten children (six of whom survived to maturity), in the rural frontier town of Homer, Licking County, Ohio. Her mother Roxanna "Roxy" Hummel Claflin was illiterate and was illegitimate. She had become a follower of the Austrian mystic Franz Mesmer and the new spiritualist movement. Her father Reuben "Old Buck" Buckman Claflin was a con man and snake oil salesman. He came from an impoverished branch of the Massachusetts-based Scots-American Claflin family, semi-distant cousins to Governor William Claflin. Victoria became close to her sister Tennessee Celeste Claflin (called Tennie), seven years her junior and the last child born to the family. As adults they collaborated.
By age 11, she had only three years of formal education, but her teachers found her to be extremely intelligent. She was forced to leave school and Homer with her family after her father, after having "insured it heavily", burned the family's rotting gristmill. When he tried to get compensated by insurance, his arson and fraud were discovered; and he was run off by a group of town vigilantes. The town held a "benefit" to raise funds to pay for the rest of his family's departure for Ohio.
Read more about this topic: Victoria Woodhull
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Every day care center, whether it knows it or not, is a school. The choice is never between custodial care and education. The choice is between unplanned and planned education, between conscious and unconscious education, between bad education and good education.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)