1874 Woodhull & Claflins Weekly — Victoria Woodhull, Free Love — Dec 5 For Sale

1874 Woodhull & Claflins Weekly — Victoria Woodhull First Woman Presidential Candidate, Free Love, Labor Reform, Utopian Fiction Serial — Dec 5
📜 ABOUT THIS PIECE OF HISTORY 📜
In your hands is an issue of Woodhull & Claflins Weekly — December 5, 1874 — the radical, fearless, and utterly singular newspaper published by Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, two of the most extraordinary women of the 19th century. This is not merely a newspaper. It is a primary source document of the American womens rights movement, labor reform, free love advocacy, and Gilded Age radicalism — all firing at full intensity from the pages of a publication that scandalized, thrilled, and permanently altered the landscape of American thought.
Victoria Woodhull had, just two years before this issue, become the first woman ever to run for President of the United States — nominating herself on the Equal Rights Party ticket in 1872, with Frederick Douglass as her proposed running mate. She and Tennessee had already become the first women to operate a brokerage on Wall Street, backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt himself. Their paper had published the first English-language printing of The Communist Manifesto in 1872, and had shattered Victorian propriety by exposing the scandalous Beecher-Tilton affair — landing Victoria in jail on obscenity charges. By December 1874, the sisters were unbowed, still publishing, still fighting. Every issue is a document of that defiance.📖 FRONT PAGE SERIAL — \"BY AND BY: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE FUTURE\" — BY EDWARD MAITLAND — BOOK III, CHAPTER X
The entire front page is consumed by the continuing serial installment of By and By: An Historical Romance of the Future by Edward Maitland — a sweeping utopian novel set in a reimagined Jerusalem, following characters named Crise and Bertie through a world of reformed finance, international intrigue, and spiritually elevated civilization. Maitland — a British author and spiritualist — found a natural home in Woodhull & Claflins pages, where the vision of a radically better world was the papers animating purpose. That this utopian fiction ran alongside practical political agitation for womens rights and labor reform makes it one of the most fascinating cultural artifacts of the era.📚 FRONT PAGE BOOK LIST — VICTORIA WOODHULL & TENNIE CLAFLIN PUBLICATIONS
The front page also carries a remarkable advertisement listing the books and pamphlets published by the sisters and available through their offices — a snapshot of the full intellectual program of the Woodhull-Claflin movement. Titles offered include Victorias own works on Constitutional Equality, The Principles of Government, Reformation or Revolution, The Elixir of Life, The Scarce-Crown of Sexual Slavery, Tried as by Fire on social relations, and Ethics of Sexual Equality — as well as photographs of Victoria C. Woodhull, Tennie C. Claflin, and Colonel Blood available for purchase. For collectors of womens history, suffrage history, and free love movement documents, this reading list alone is a treasure.✊ INTERIOR — SOCIALIST & LABOR REFORM CONTENT
Interior pages carry the papers characteristic coverage of socialist and labor reform topics — the very DNA of the publication. Woodhull & Claflins Weekly was the first American newspaper to bring Marx and Engels to an English-speaking American audience, and its ongoing coverage of labor, capital, and social transformation reflects that commitment throughout its run.🗞️ INTERIOR — \"A NEW AND YOUNG ORDER OF REPUBLICANS\" & POLITICAL COMMENTARY
The papers sharp political eye is on full display in the interior pages, with commentary on Republican Party politics at a crucial moment — 1874 was a midterm election year in which the Democrats swept back into the House for the first time since before the Civil War, signaling the beginning of the end of Reconstruction. Woodhull & Claflins coverage of this political landscape from the perspective of radical reformers is a vivid and essential document.✉️ INTERIOR — CORRESPONDENCE, MISCELLANEOUS & BUSINESS EDITORIALS
The later pages carry reader correspondence, miscellaneous notes, and Business Editorials — a section that reflects the sisters unique position as Wall Street operators turned radical reformers. Their business commentary blended financial acumen with social criticism in a way no other publication of the era could match.🔍 CONDITION & TRANSPARENCY 🔍
Completeness: The first and last leaves — the outer advertisement pages — are absent from this copy. This is extremely common and entirely expected: when 19th-century periodicals were bound into institutional or personal volumes for preservation, the advertisement leaves were routinely removed as extraneous to the editorial content. What remains is the complete editorial and literary content of the issue — every article, every column, every serial installment — intact and unaffected. Collectors and institutions have long recognized bound-style copies of this kind as the standard surviving form for many Gilded Age weeklies.
Authenticity: Guaranteed original printing from December 5, 1874 — not a reproduction.
Condition Report: Presents remarkably well for a 151-year-old newspaper. Natural toning and age-consistent browning to the newsprint throughout — entirely expected and characteristic for paper of this era. Text throughout is legible and clear. Some light wear to edges consistent with age and handling over a century and a half. I have photographed every spread so you can inspect the condition closely before purchasing. Please review all images carefully — I am happy to provide additional close-up shots of any page or area of concern before you buy.📦 SHIPPING & PRESERVATION 📦Housed in an acid-free archival folder to protect the 151-year-old newsprint
Flat-shipped with heavy-duty reinforcement to ensure safe arrival
Fully tracked for your peace of mind
Can you imagine what it meant to hold this paper in 1874? To be a woman reading Victoria Woodhulls words just two years after she had run for the highest office in the land — had been thrown in jail for saying out loud what men whispered in private — and was still here, still publishing, still undefeated? What a thing to have survived.🏷️ TAGS
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