This story is available exclusively to Business Insider
subscribers.
Become an Insider
and start reading now.Have an account? .
The story of the first women to work on Wall Street has everything.
Advertisement
It is a rags to riches story of two sisters who made it from a small rural town in Ohio to the Big City, with spiritualism, scandal and a presidential run included.
Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, opened a successful brokerage firm in 1870 on Wall Street, sparking a wave of sensationalist news and cartoons.
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider
subscribers.
Become an Insider
and start reading now.Have an account? .
They were radical women's rights leaders, and Victoria was the first female presidential candidate. They were also the subject of numerous scurrilous rumors.
Some claimed they were prostitutes during their time as spiritualist mediums. Others insinuated that they slept with male clients at the brokerage firm.
Advertisement
The younger sister, Tennessee, was also linked with the railroad tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was said to have been her lover.
Scroll down to read about the sisters' rise from rags in a rural town in Ohio to riches to Wall Street.
Advertisement
Woodhull was born September 23, 1838, in Licking County, Ohio. She was the seventh of 10 children raised by a con man and an illiterate spiritualist. Her sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, the youngest of 10, was born in 1844.
At 11, her con-man father burned their family enterprise, a gristmill, down in order to collect the insurance benefits.
But the townsfolk caught on and the family was driven out of town instead.
At 14, Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, then 7, were marketed by their father as mediums who could heal people and communicate with the dead. They became the family's primary breadwinners.
The father wrote to Victoria, then 14, saying: "Girl your worth has never yet been known, but to the world it shall be shown."
At 15, Victoria married 28-year-old Canning Woodhull, her doctor who turned out to be a nobody. He had no steady medical practice and proved to be a serial adulterer and a drunkard. Quickly, the 15-year-old had her fairy-tale notions of romance dispelled.
She would have two children with Canning Woodhull, and worked to pay for his alcoholic habits. She was rumored to have been a cigar girl, stage girl, and a topless waitress. She divorced Canning Woodhull not long after.
After leaving her husband, Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, set up shop once more as traveling spiritualist mediums, with the Civil War raging on in the background. They made a small fortune as medical clairvoyants and selling spiritual wares.
At some point in this era, Tennessee was sued for manslaughter. One of her cancer patients died despite her spiritualist treatment.
Victoria had a second marriage starting in 1866 and ending in 1876. The continued divorces, heavily stigmatized, may have led to Woodhull's activism later in life. She supported the freedom to marry, divorce, and bear children without government intervention. She also supported the legalization of prostitution.
In 1868, the sisters became spiritualist advisers in New York. Tennessee became the clairvoyant to famed railroad-tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, 73 — and they were rumored to be lovers. He called her "my little sparrow" while she called him "the old goat."
Advertisement
Then in 1870, the two sisters opened the door of their Woodhull, Claflin and Co. brokerage house with the backing of Vanderbilt. It prompted the New York Sun to write "Petticoats Among the Bovine and Ursine Animals." Wall Streeters crowded to the brokerage's windows to get a glimpse of the female traders.
Vanderbilt gave the sisters stock tips — one of which led to a profit of $700,000, about $13 million today.
It was a time when women had nothing of their own — but the sisters soon had a regular coterie of society wives, widows, teachers, actresses, and high-priced prostitutes served behind private doors at the brokerage. The firm was an instant success.
Her ex-husband Canning Woodhull was also allegedly still living with her and her then husband.
Advertisement
In May 1870, the two used their brokerage firm's profits to found Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly — used to support Victoria Woodhull's bid for the presidential seat. It would publish on topics including sex education, free love, women's suffrage, and more.
Tennessee also ran for New York congressional seat in the 1870s.
Advertisement
They would start taking on Wall Street, too. They took on Tweed rings, fraudulent railroad schemes, fire-insurance companies, bond-scheme frauds, and more.
The public, however, was growing eager to paint a sexualized picture of the pair as they became more public.
Their background as spiritualists was also shady to Wall Streeters, as the practice was sometimes associated with prostitution.
Advertisement
They would use money earned from the brokerage firm to fund the suffrage movement, and Victoria Woodhull would come to be known as the first woman to petition for women's suffrage in front of Congress.
Victoria later said, "We went unto Wall Street, not particularly because I wanted to be a broker ... but because I wanted to plant the Flag of women's rebellion in the center of the continent."
Victoria Woodhull was nominated as the US presidential candidate for the Equal Rights Party. Her vice presidential candidate was Frederick Douglass, though he never acknowledged it.
Things started going downhill. In response to the virulent attack lobbed at her from media, Woodhull published stories on the sexual scandals of minister Henry Ward Beecher and stock-broker Luther Challis. She was arrested for sending obscene mail, and spent election night in prison.
The sisters soon lost the respect of their women's suffrage comrades because of their political ambitions. Later, when one of the first published books on the women's suffrage movement came out in 1880, both were omitted.
Advertisement
The brokerage firm also stuttered to a stop in the Panic of 1873. Some clients began suing the sisters when the firm's performance went south. Their father's debt collectors also came knocking.
Woodhull would continue to speak publicly on women's suffrage throughout the 1870s, though her paper, the Weekly closed in 1876. She married a wealthy English banker in 1883, after moving to England.
Victoria tried again in 1884 and 1892 for the US presidential nomination.
Victoria died in 1927. The New York Times would print in her obituary: "As a young woman she engaged in the banking business for a short time in New York." Her sister had died in 1923.
It wasn't until 1967 — nearly a century later, when another woman would make her way onto Wall Street and become the first woman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange: Muriel Siebert.