The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull.
From the author of the bestselling 'Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last', this stunning combination of history and biography interweaves the stories of some of the most important and colourful social, political and religious figures of America's Victorian era with the courageous, notorious and astonishing life of Victoria Woodhull.
Billed as a clairvoyant and magnetic healer in her father's travelling medicine show, Woodhull was a devotee and practitioner of those 'other powers' that attracted ten million Americans to join the Spiritualist movement. She became Commodore Vanderbilt's spiritual and financial adviser, and was the first women to address a joint session of Congress, arguing that women as citizens should have the right to vote. A heretical "high priestess" of free love, a newspaper editor and proprietor, she founded the first stockbrokerage firm for women and, in 1872, ran against Horace Greeley and Ulysses S. Grant for the Presidency of the United States. When her colourful past as a prostitute was revealed, she fought against the hypocrisy of her detractors by publishing an expose of the sexual infidelities of preacher Henry Ward Beecher, which led to the sensational Beecher-Tilton trial, and her own ruin.
'Other Powers' is the story of an extraordinary and charismatic woman, the battle for women's suffrage, the Spiritualist movement and the bitter fight that pitted black men against white women in the struggle to win the vote.
