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"Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!"
Wife (with heavy burden). "I'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps."
This Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast warns against the allure
of the Free Love movement advocated by Victoria Woodhull.
In 1872, Victoria Woodhull, the well-known advocate of Free Love
and women’s rights, became the first woman to be nominated for president. She
ran on the Equal Rights party ticket at a time when she and other women were not
legally allowed to vote. She and her sister, Tennesse Claflin, published their
own newspaper, The Woodhull & Claflin Weekly.
In this cartoon, Thomas
Nast depicts Woodhull as Satan incarnate for her advocacy of Free Love—i.e.,
the rejection of marriage as an oppressive institution and the embrace of sexual
freedom. The poor wife in the background spurns the temptation, despite carrying
the heavy burden of children and an alcoholic husband up the steep and
treacherous path of life.
Near the end of the 1872 presidential campaign,
Woodhull would publish allegations that the nation’s most prominent and
respected clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, had been having an affair with the wife
of Woodhull's biographer, Theodore Tilton. In Woodhull’s estimation, Beecher was
hypocritically preaching one tenet while living by another, even though his
adultery was a far cry from Free Love. A subsequent trial over the case, which
ended with a hung jury, became a
sensational news story.
Robert C. Kennedy
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