Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Victoria Woodhull. Who? My high school and college history books and teachers never mentioned the third of these three suffragettes. Yet Victoria Woodhull had a stature and an impact perhaps equal to or surpassing the other two.

The book, Other Powers: the Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith (1998, Alfred A. Knopf) provides a spellbinding account of an era my history books and teachers either deleted, censored, or weren’t aware of themselves. I bet a lot of my classmates and I would have been keen students of history if this chunk of America’s hidden history had been presented to us.

This (the 1800′s) was an era when you’d find 20 taverns to every church in towns such as Selinsgrove, PA. It was a rough, rowdy, and promiscuous (for men) time of drinking, gambling, and street fighting. It must have been so full of debauchery that society and morality today is Victorian and Disney-like by comparison.

But in this man’s world, women were little more than slaves. They were forced to live a double standard. Men (including men like the famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher) had mistresses, and prostitution was a widely accepted social custom. Women were repressed, and many turned to “other powers” – spiritualism. For women, the “release provided by revival was intense, and sexual ecstacy was often crossed…” In this age of hypocrisy and dual standards, the emancipated Victoria Woodhull emerged.

So, who was Victoria Woodhull, this “Joan of Arc of the Woman’s Movement”? The prologue to Other Powers provides a partial answer: “The spiritualist, the ‘high priestess’ of free love, the crusading editor, the San Francisco actress and part-time prostitute, the founder of the first stock brokerage firm for women, the disciple of Karl Marx, the blackmailer, the presidential candidate, the sinner, the saint.”

This book is a fascinating read, and I recommend it not only to the readers of CS2 but to all the teachers, professors, and textbook publishers who have been hiding America’s history. If you really want students to be interested in history, then make it real!