Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the entanglement between feminism, eugenics, and spiritualism in the late 19th century and early 20th century by focusing particularly on spiritualist and political activist Victoria C. Woodhull (1838-1927), and spiritualist and theosophist Lady Caithness (1830-1895).

Paper long abstract:

Quite some research has been devoted to the entanglement between feminism, eugenics, and spiritualism in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Not enough attention however has been devoted in this context to Victoria C. Woodhull (1838-1927). A protagonist of first-wave feminism in North America, Woodhull is remembered today among other things for publishing the first English edition of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in 1871 and for being the first woman candidate to US Presidency in 1872. But Woodhull was also deeply involved in spiritualism, to the point of being elected President of the American Association of Spiritualists. In the mid-1870s, she began to propagate ideas about eugenics and feminism couched in a rhetoric based on Biblical exegesis. For this purpose, she ventured in lecture tours and produced numerous pamphlets. Her ideas were later taken up by spiritualist and theosophist Maria Mariátegui, a.k.a. Lady Caithness (1830-1895), who was a close friend of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Anna Kingsford (1846-1888). Caithness is a neglected but important figure in the history of the early Theosophical Society and her connection to the ideas of Woodhull had been ignored so far. There are several reasons why this underground transmission of ideas is important. First of all, it shows how some aspects of the relationship between feminism, eugenics, and spiritualism still have to be written and understood. Secondly, it shows how a specifically religious rhetoric based on Biblical exegesis could serve the purposes of this relationship. Finally, we find here an important, if heretofore hidden, source of modern spiritual technologies applied to the body, and more particularly to the female body. Eugenics, understood as a form of bodily technology, played an important, ambiguous part in this story.