echer Hooker and Paulina Wright Davis. They invited Victoria and her
sister, Tennessee Claflin, to their convention, and asked her to
repeat her speech for them.

At this convention Susan, encouraged by the favorable reception among
politicians of the Woodhull Memorial, mapped out a new and militant
campaign, based on her growing conviction that under the Fourteenth
Amendment women's rights as citizens were guaranteed. She urged women
to claim their rights as citizens and persons under the Fourteenth
Amendment, to register and prepare to vote at the next election, and
to bring suit in the courts if they were refused.

* * * * *

So enthusiastic had been the reception of this new approach to woman
suffrage, so favorable had been the news from those close to leading
Republicans, that Susan was unprepared for the adverse report of the
judiciary committee on the Woodhull Memorial. She now studied the
favorable minority report issued by Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts
and William Loughridge of Iowa. Their arguments seemed to her
unanswerable; and hurriedly and impulsively in the midst of her
western lecture tour, she dashed off a few lines to Victoria Woodhull,
to whom she willingly gave credit for bringing out this report.
"Glorious old Ben!" she wrote. "He surely is going to pronounce the
word that will settle the woman question, just as he did the word
'contraband' that so summarily settled the Negro question....
Everybody here chimes in with the new conclusion that we are already
free."[264]

Far from New York where Victoria's activities were being aired by the
press, Susan thought of her at this time only in connection with the
Memorial and its impact on the judiciary committee. To be sure, she
heard stories crediting Benjamin Butler with the authorship of the
Woodhull Memorial, and rumors reached her of Victoria's unorthodox
views on love and marriage and of her girlhood as a fortune teller,
traveling about like a gypsy and living by her wits. Even so, Susan
was ready to give Victoria the benefit of the doubt until she herself
found her harmful to the cause, for long ago she had learned to
discount attacks on the reputations of progressive women. In fact,
Victoria Woodhull provided Susan and her associates with a spectacular
opportunity to prove the sincerity of their contention that there
should not be a double standard of morals--one for men and another for
women.

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