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The Woman Question in the North American Branch of the International Workingmen’s Association, 1867–1876

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2026

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Isobel Plowright*
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Histoire, Université du Québec à Montréal , Montréal, Canada
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Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between members of the American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association and the women’s rights movement. The International in the United States supported the formation of women workers’ sections. Its members also tended to privately support women’s suffrage, but did not want its inclusion in the International’s platform. In the United States, the question of what women workers should be organized toward was refracted through the struggles over voting rights and political power ushered in by Reconstruction. What distinguished this question in the United States was the entanglement and disentanglement of the abolitionist, feminist, and labor movements, particularly with regard to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Drawing on the papers of the North American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association as well as the minutes of labor and women’s rights conventions, this article shows that the split in the International over women’s suffrage was fundamentally over the question of political power. First, this article examines the split between former abolitionists and the women’s rights movement, which led suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony toward organized labor. The second part follows the split over Section 12’s rise and fall within the International, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's candidacy for president of the United States. The article then moves toward the ruling of The Hague Congress of the International against Section 12 in the third part. Finally, it concludes with Section 26 in Philadelphia’s attempt to enfranchise women in the state constitution of Pennsylvania.

Keywords

MarxismfeminismInternational Workingmen’s Associationlaborabolitionism

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Special Feature
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International Labor and Working-Class History , First View , pp. 1 - 21
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

The International Workingmen’s Association established itself in the United States in the twilight of the American Civil War.Footnote 1 It entered the fray of politics at a moment when citizenship, suffrage, and political power were contested and redefined. The International was active in the labor movement, trying to establish a solid footing within the working class of the United States. This orientation led it to consider the organization of women workers. The International also hosted women’s sections and mixed-gender sections in both Europe and North America. In the United States, the “woman question” was refracted through the struggles over voting rights and political power ushered in by Reconstruction. The American members of the International tended to privately support women’s suffrage but rejected its inclusion in the organization’s platform. What distinguished this question in the United States was the entanglement and disentanglement between the abolitionist, feminist, and labor movements—particularly with regard to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The foundation of the North American branch of the International Workingman’s Association in December 1869 was closely related to the National Labor Union (NLU), the first labor organization to organize American workers on a country-wide scale. In Europe, the International Workingmen’s Association was particularly enthusiastic about the NLU’s endorsement of the demand for an eight-hour day.Footnote 2 The first section of the International in the United States, formed from the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), enrolled itself as Local No. 5 of the NLU.Footnote 3 Section 1’s secretary, Friedrich Sorge, was a music teacher who participated in the 1848 uprisings in Germany.Footnote 4 The International sought to bring a political orientation to the NLU.Footnote 5 While the NLU repeatedly expressed its sympathy with the International, even sending a delegate to one of its Congresses, it never formally joined.Footnote 6

The North American branch of the International collided headfirst with the question of women’s suffrage when Victoria Woodhull, a member of Section 12 of the organization, announced in 1872 that she would run for president of the United States. She is widely acknowledged as the first woman to do so. Her candidacy was not well received in the International, though many of its members endorsed women’s suffrage. The controversy was caused by the argument that women’s enfranchisement took precedence over the labor question.Footnote 7

Victoria Woodhull’s association with the International grew at the precise moment when one wing of the women’s suffrage movement moved away from the former abolitionist movement and appealed to the labor movement. Suffragists in the United States, who hailed primarily from the middle and upper classes, attempted to make the case that the vote would enhance women’s economic and social power.Footnote 8 This was clearly not the International’s position, which was skeptical of bourgeois politics as a means of social and economic change for women or anyone else.

Most of the prominent women in the North American branch of the International came from the professions, including Caroline Burnham (a law student) and Mary Byrnes (a teacher). Woodhull and Burnham supported the view that the ballot was ultimately the key toward the reconciliation of labor and capital. They believed that political rights would lead toward social and economic equality. The stance that women’s enfranchisement had to take precedence over working-class organization fuelled tensions and eventual splits within the North American Branch of the International.

Section 12, which Woodhull belonged to, was expelled on account of introducing bourgeois ideas to the organization. At issue, at least in part, was Woodhull’s class background: She was the first female stockbroker on Wall Street. Section 12 had defended itself by claiming that “Political Equality”—meaning, for them, the right to vote—“and Social Freedom of all alike, of all races, both sexes, and every condition,” were “necessary precursors of the more radical reforms demanded by the International.” Section 12’s defense downplayed their political ambitions, which far exceeded the demand for women’s suffrage, stopping at nothing short of establishing a new constitution and universal form of government in the United States.Footnote 9 These goals were plainly at odds with the priorities and goals of the International.

Early waves of Marxist and social historians of the First International have explained the split over women’s suffrage in the North American branch through the intrusion of social reformers in the labor movement. In his canonical work on the organization, Samuel Bernstein highlighted how Section 12 and its supporters had argued that there was “no need to pursue the emancipation of labor,” since women’s suffrage took priority.Footnote 10 David Montgomery describes the Section 12 split as bringing in a large influx of American social reformers within the International.Footnote 11 Montgomery dubs these mostly middle-class women and men “sentimentalists” who wanted to win adherents among the working classes to their “schemes of social redemption,” but believed that these movements should be led by them.Footnote 12

A later wave of historians recuperated Section 12 and the Spring Street Council, viewing their expulsion as the outcome of a chauvinistic tendency within the International. Mary Jo Buhle opens her classic Women and American Socialism with this event, framing the schism as paradigmatic of the fraught relationship between the socialist movement and the “woman question.”Footnote 13 Timothy Messer-Kruse coined “Yankee International” to describe Woodhull, Section 12, and the Spring Street Council. He posits that the Spring Street Council grew out of an “American reform tradition” that was pluralistic and averse to socialist dogma.Footnote 14 Messer-Kruse points to the way in which the Yankees saw the politics of the International as consistent with other republican positions, as well as broader social reforms. His account often downplays the political differences that existed between the Yankees and the rest of the organization, and overlooks Woodhull’s ties to the wing of the women’s movement that had broken with abolitionists.Footnote 15 August Nimtz describes how this group, who were “once fervent abolitionists, […] opposed the extension of voting rights to Black males because it wasn’t granted to white women.”Footnote 16 Michel Cordillot helpfully reframed the conflict within the North American branch of the International as centered on centralization and autonomy, a concern central to dissenting sections that advocated for their right to advocate for women’s rights.Footnote 17 Robin Blackburn highlighted that while “[b]oth ‘Yankee’ and German Internationalists deplored racial violence and supported female enfranchisement,” these more progressive views were not mainstream within the trade union movement that the International sought to attract.Footnote 18

This article follows Nimtz and Cordillot in situating the rise and fall of the “woman question” in the North American branch of the International within the politics of Reconstruction and the history of the women’s rights movement. It is relevant that the branch of the women’s rights movement connected to Section 12 turned its back on the Fifteenth Amendment, since it shows how they had prioritized the demand for suffrage above all others. This was a part of the movement that had already alienated itself from other social movements before it made its way to labor. Drawing on the remaining papers of the North American branch of the International Workingman’s Association as well as the minutes of labor and women’s rights conventions, this article shows that the split in the International over women’s suffrage was fundamentally over the question of political power, rather than the result of chauvinism or some aversion to “the woman question.” It anchors this history within the trajectory of the women’s rights movement in the Reconstruction era.

First, this article examines the split between former abolitionists and the women’s rights movement, which led suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony toward labor organizations. The second part follows the split over Victoria Woodhull and Section 12’s rise and fall within the International, culminating in her candidacy for president of the United States. The third part moves toward the ruling of The Hague Congress of the International against Section 12. Finally, it concludes with Section 26 in Philadelphia, which attempted to enfranchise women by changing the state constitution of Pennsylvania.

Women workers and women’s suffrage

In trying to establish itself in the United States, the International Workingmen’s Association attempted first to recruit former abolitionists and then the labor movement, particularly through the newly formed NLU. This brought the International into the orbit of the women’s suffrage movement, part of which had recently split from the former abolitionist movement after the American Civil War. During Reconstruction, the women’s suffrage movement took on features that would characterize it throughout the nineteenth century: It was an “independent reform movement, composed primarily of white, middle-class women, which defined women’s emancipation and equality largely, although not exclusively, in terms of the franchise.”Footnote 19 The question of women’s right to vote entered into the International through a wing of the suffrage movement that had split from the former abolitionist movement and pivoted toward the newly formed NLU.

During Reconstruction, the American Equal Rights Association (AERA)—the most prominent women’s suffrage group in the United States—split over the Fifteenth Amendment, which prevented racial discrimination in voting rights and enfranchised African American men. At a women’s suffrage convention in New York a few weeks prior to AERA’s founding, veteran abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper criticized the emphasis on the ballot, citing the need to end racial discrimination first.Footnote 20 AERA was founded in 1866 as a reaction to the American Anti-Slavery Association declining to merge with the women’s rights movement.Footnote 21 It was established a month before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Significantly, the Amendment included penalties for anyone trying to deny a male citizen’s right to vote. This measure was intended to ensure Black men’s enfranchisement after the abolition of slavery.Footnote 22 AERA tried to bridge the movements for Black civil rights and women’s suffrage into one organization, forming an unsteady coalition.Footnote 23 Then in her eighties, Sojourner Truth spoke at the convention in favor of the enfranchisement of Black women.Footnote 24

The alliance between former abolitionists and suffragists fractured during the 1867 Kansas electoral campaign. The Republican Party had committed itself to enfranchising Black men, while rejecting women’s suffrage. As Republicans attacked women’s suffrage, some suffragists in turn attacked former abolitionists on racist grounds, trying to rally the support of the Democratic Party. One faction of AERA, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, argued that suffrage should be extended to white women first.Footnote 25

After Stanton and Anthony failed to gain traction among Democrats, they turned instead toward the labor movement as a potential source of support. After the Civil War, the labor movement had grown considerably. Though not working-class women themselves, Stanton and Anthony attempted to build a base among women workers in New York City.

The war saw hundreds of thousands of women join the workplace that would have otherwise stayed home as men were drafted into the war effort. The abolition of slavery and the rise of free labor transformed the labor market during Reconstruction.Footnote 26 An unprecedented number of women joined the ranks of factory workers in the industrial North.Footnote 27 Women agitated and organized themselves into trade unions and cooperatives on a broad scale during this period.Footnote 28 As Emma Teitelman and Salar Mohandesi have shown, industrialization in the United States was accompanied by an “ideological separation between production in the workplace and social reproduction in the household,” creating an entire “entire category of ‘women’s work.’”Footnote 29 Working women of New York were mostly employed in domestic service, but were increasingly represented in trades such as cigarmaking and printing. In Northern cities, particularly in New York, industrialization was accompanied by a rising tide of immigration, and immigrant women were much more likely to work than native-born women. By 1870, nearly half of the city’s population was foreign-born, and around one fifth of the state’s workers were women.Footnote 30

The rising labor movement greeted women’s increased participation in the workplace ambivalently. In New York City, unions pushed against the rising tenement system, in which whole families worked to make goods such as cigars in their homes.Footnote 31 Women cigarworkers pushed for better working conditions throughout this period, while some labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers drew on language of republican manhood to argue against homework.Footnote 32 New York City’s major typesetters’ union, the National Typographic Union No. 6, had previously adopted a policy barring women from admittance after women had been hired as strikebreakers, which it only considered reversing after the war.Footnote 33

To combat exclusion from unions, women primarily from the printing trades established the Working Women’s Association in September 1868.Footnote 34 Founded in the New York offices of Stanton and Anthony’s newspaper The Revolution, the organization brought together hundreds of wage-earning women along with reformers drawn from the middle and upper classes.Footnote 35 A sharp cleavage between workers and reformers grew over the months. Working women, led by Augusta Lewis, rejected Stanton and Anthony’s call to put suffrage at the center of the organization’s demands.Footnote 36 Stanton urged women to form women-only typesetting cooperatives, which led to the creation of the Women’s Typographical Union (WTU), one of the first all-women labor unions in the United States.Footnote 37 This newly formed union successfully pushed National Typographical Union No. 6 to admit them.Footnote 38 This success had the paradoxical effect of hollowing out the Working Women’s Association, from which the WTU had split. Working women largely did not embrace the demand for suffrage, emphasizing workplace issues instead.Footnote 39

Stanton and Anthony pushed for women’s suffrage to be included in the NLU’s platform at its 1868 Congress, which some of the founders of the North American branch of the International also attended.Footnote 40 The NLU was increasingly interested in organizing working women, and the Congress passed several resolutions in favor of women’s unions, including a position on the eight-hour day. After a brief discussion, the assembly struck out a proposed clause urging women to “secure the ballot.”Footnote 41 Women’s suffrage surfaced again as a political issue when Elizabeth Cady Stanton sought admission to the Congress representing the Working Women’s Association.Footnote 42 Anthony, who was one of the three women already seated, signed Stanton’s credentials. An animated debate broke out on Stanton’s admission, with a motion allowing her to enter ultimately passing forty-five to eighteen. However, one delegate objected that any attempt at forming an independent labor party would fail if it supported women’s suffrage. In response, the Congress passed a resolution stating that the NLU had admitted Stanton as a representative of working women, and was not committed to women’s suffrage.Footnote 43 The Congress, however, tempered this view by endorsing Stanton and Anthony’s newspaper as “an able and well conducted advocate of [its] principles.”Footnote 44 Writing in The Revolution about the admission of women to the NLU Congress, Stanton used racist tropes about inferior levels of Black organization. She stated that:

If colored men had been as wide awake as the women, instead of idly waiting for republicans and abolitionists, now melted into one (their very apostle, Wendell Phillips, having given in his adhesion in last week’s Standard), they would have had their Labor Unions, and sent their delegates to this “National Labor Congress.”Footnote 45

The suffragists’ alliance with women workers was tentative, and short-lived. During the winter of 1869, National Typographical Union No. 6 went on strike, this time alongside the WTU. Anthony appealed to the employer to hire and train women typesetters to break up the strike. This move alienated her from both unions, who argued that she had weakened labor solidarity. The Working Women’s Association, already mostly composed of middle-class women, was moribund after Anthony’s actions.Footnote 46 In the next convention of the NLU, Local No. 6 laid charges against Stanton and pushed to deny her seating.Footnote 47

After the failure to bring labor on board, the fracture between the suffragists and the former abolitionists came to a head in the 1869 annual AERA meeting. Several abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, charged Stanton and Anthony, along with their newspaper, with racism in their appeal to the Democratic Party. Stanton and Anthony had explicitly campaigned against the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, arguing that white women should be given the vote before Black men.Footnote 48 In response, Anthony and Stanton formed the National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) on May 15, 1869. The organization at first adopted a strategy known as the “New Departure,” which involved women claiming that they were already enfranchised by the United States Constitution.Footnote 49 This argument was adopted in several corners of the International, including by members of Section 12 and Section 26.

The rise of Section 12

Women’s suffrage was debated in the International in the context of splits between suffragists, abolitionists, and the labor movement. Victoria Woodhull, who joined the International as part of Section 12 in New York, had already announced her plan to run for president of the United States on April 2, 1870, making her the first woman to run for the position.Footnote 50 Citing the Fifteenth Amendment, she argued that women were “the only unrepresented class in the republic.”Footnote 51 Along with her sister Tennessee Claflin, Woodhull founded the first and only brokerage firm led by women in the nineteenth-century United States and, by her own account, had amassed a sum of $700,000. Woodhull entertained close links with Cornelius Vanderbilt, who offered financial backing and advice to the brokerage firm.Footnote 52 Along with her sister Tennessee Claflin, Woodhull founded the newspaper Woodhull and Claflin’s on May 14, 1870. The paper’s emphasis was squarely on women’s rights, but it also covered a broad range of topics, from currency reform to spiritualism. The newspaper carried regular news on the International and became the first newspaper in the United States to publish the Communist Manifesto in English.Footnote 53 In November 1870, Woodhull made the argument that the United States Constitution already provided women with the right to vote through the Fifteenth Amendment.Footnote 54 Much like Stanton and the NWSA, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly drew on racist rhetoric in making its case for women’s suffrage, publishing an article deliberately contrasting an educated white woman’s disenfranchisement with a formerly enslaved man’s franchise.Footnote 55 Through Section 12, Woodhull and Claflin’s became a major, but controversial, publication for the International in the United States.

In fact, Section 12’s advocacy for women’s suffrage was tightly related to its other goals, which included creating an alternative government of the United States and supplanting the Central Committee of the North American branch of the International.Footnote 56 The section issued its own appeal to American workers written by William West, a veteran of the free-soil movement and social reformer who frequently wrote for Woodhull and Claflin’s.Footnote 57 According to West, the International’s goal was “to emancipate the laborer, male and female, by the conquest of political power.” He explained that this meant first and foremost the “Political Equality and Social Freedom of man and woman alike.” West understood “social freedom” as freedom from interference in personal matters, including religious affiliation, sexual relations, and “habits of dress, diet, and the like.” Political equality meant the right of all citizens to participate in the legislative affairs of the country, including administration and enforcement. The proposition also called for the “establishment of a Universal Government, based primarily on Equality of Rights and Reciprocity of Duties in the matter of Production and Distribution of Wealth.” This would extend to the “abolition of traffic in land, labor, and money.” West added to this a critique of marriage. He argued that love should cease to be “made the subject of trade, within or without the pale of matrimony.”

Alongside a new interpretation of the International’s principles, West’s appeal laid out a new plan for the formation of American sections based on electoral districts.Footnote 58 West envisioned this as culminating in an alternative form of government for the United States. The statement’s language suggested that the American sections’ support for the existing central committee of the North American Branch of the International was a marriage of convenience that would eventually be superseded by the new structure.Footnote 59 He conceded that “until the work is well advanced, the New York Central Committee must be recognized, and the election thereto by new Sections is indispensable.”Footnote 60 Section 12 sent a letter applying for the leadership of the North American branch of the International to the General Council in London.Footnote 61 After the letter was read out at the Council’s meeting, Marx wrote to inform Sorge.Footnote 62 Sorge sounded the alarm to the General Council and to other sections of the North American branch that Section 12 was trying to spread its own ideas about the International.Footnote 63

Meanwhile, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin escalated their suffrage campaign by attempting to cast ballots in the 1871 New York state election. Though they were turned away from several voting stations, they were eventually successful.Footnote 64 They were responding to the National Woman Suffrage Association’s call for women to register themselves as voters. The sisters refined a political strategy for the attainment of women’s suffrage, as opposed to the other currents of the movement, which relied on the courts to define citizenship. Alongside her agitation in the International, Woodhull testified to Congress about women’s political equality.Footnote 65

On November 19, Sorge and Section 1 moved to expel Section 12 and its sympathizers. The Central Committee ruled that sections would have to be composed of two-thirds wage earners to have a seat on the Central Committee.Footnote 66 Sorge promptly informed the other sections that the decision was made in self-defense to preserve “the character of a labor movement” as “an organization of workingmen.”Footnote 67 The split resulted in two groups that claimed themselves as the legitimate Federal Council of the North American branch of the International. Sorge and Section 1 are generally known as the Tenth Ward Council, and Section 12 as the Spring Street Council. The International’s Council in London eventually ruled in favor of the Tenth Ward Council. In reprinting the ruling, Section 12 criticized the requirements placed on joining their opponents in the International as being “an alien, of the masculine gender, and a slave.”Footnote 68

Woodhull had been quiet about her earlier plan to run for the US presidency, but the schism as well as the looming election of 1872 gave her an opening. The occasion for Woodhull’s candidacy was the National Woman Suffrage Association’s convention on May 9, 1872. Titled the People’s Convention, the event was organized by prominent suffragists, including Stanton, Anthony, Isabella B. Hooker, and Matilda Joslyn Gage.Footnote 69 Woodhull had advertised the meeting in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, hailing it as the first time that women would “discuss all the various subjects involved by political economy.”Footnote 70

At the Convention, Woodhull made a speech rallying supporters to form a new political party at a separate meeting at Apollo Hall.Footnote 71 She argued that she was fulfilling the People’s Convention’s call for political action and, in turn, called for a change to the American Constitution to recognize women’s right to vote.Footnote 72 The next day, delegates gathered at Apollo Hall, and after short deliberation, they decided on calling the new organization the “Equal Rights Party.” The name recalled the AERA to which Stanton and Anthony had belonged.

Like its namesake, the Equal Rights Party attempted to build a broad coalition of women’s suffrage activists, former abolitionists, and workers.Footnote 73 The party’s goal was to “erect a platform so broad and catholic that humanity, under whatever skin or name, shall there find representation.” The platform also referred to protections for Chinese immigrants, arguing for “the same protection [to] be afforded to the yellow-skinned Chinese as to the whitest Caucassian [sic].”Footnote 74 However, this new Convention had attracted no Black delegates, and had no policy specific to Black voters other than advocating for political equality, which had already been granted to Black men through the Fifteenth Amendment.Footnote 75 Moreover, the party’s platform abandoned the language of class entirely, limiting its appeal to workers.

Their goals included the passage of a new Constitution and the complete overhaul of government. They called for sweeping legal reforms, including the submission of important legislative proposals to a popular vote. The economic planks included the redistribution of land to settlers and the adoption of a standardized currency based on public credit.Footnote 76 It also entailed new expansive measures including government control of major industries; the abolition of charters and monopolies; a system of direct, gradual taxation; and a “government of the people” that would “manage all public enterprises for the common benefit of the whole country.” Finally, the party’s vision of a universal republic was based on the territorial expansion of the United States, explicitly endorsing manifest destiny:

That the destiny of our government is to extend its supremacy over the American continent, and that an universal government for all the people of the globe is the ultimate of government.Footnote 77

While the party favored equal rights, it had no stated plan on how to enforce them. Its platform was notably silent on Reconstruction policy, offering no policy toward the continued occupation of the South by federal troops after the American Civil War—that is, the platform had nothing to say about the main issue of the election.

The delegates nominated Frederick Douglass for the position of vice president in absentia, citing him as a symbol of Black equality and arguing that his “name […] represents a principal [sic] and an idea.”Footnote 78 There was little to indicate that any member of the Convention had consulted him beforehand. Emphasizing the symbolic nature of the nomination, one of the participants of the Convention proposed the Lakota leader Spotted Tail as an alternative. At the time, Douglass was actively campaigning for Ulysses S. Grant’s reelection, arguing that he was the only candidate that would enforce Reconstruction in the South. Douglass published a pamphlet in favor of Grant outlining how the Fifteenth Amendment had been “the most important event since the nation came into life.”Footnote 79 He commented that he would rather “put a pistol to [his] head and blow [his] brains out” than to contribute to the “destruction or defeat of the Republican Party.”Footnote 80 Douglass’s nomination seems to have been calculated to attract the Black vote necessary to win over the Southern states. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was optimistic about this prospect, citing that “they [Black voters] will vote with the party who have had the courage and the devotion to principle to place one of the race upon their Presidential ticket.”Footnote 81

The Equal Rights Party managed to alienate prominent representatives of each of the causes that they attempted to unite, including Black civil rights, women’s rights, and labor. Some of this reaction was hardly the party’s fault: These movements had suffered bitter fractures during Reconstruction that would have been hard to heal even absent the creation of a political party. Some of it, however, was caused by the party’s strategy. First, Woodhull’s hijacking of the NWSA Convention alienated key allies within the women’s rights movement, many of whom had already distanced themselves because of her advocacy for free love.Footnote 82 Second, failing to consult Frederick Douglass about the nomination and the party’s lack of policy toward the Southern states was unlikely to win over Black voters. Woodhull was also pulling from the NWSA, which had already severely alienated Black support through its rejection of the Fifteenth Amendment, its appeals to the Democratic Party, and its calls for the enfranchisement of Confederates.Footnote 83 Third, as for the labor movement, the NLU had already tried and all but failed to build its own party, and Woodhull had already been at the center of a split within the International. Even parts of the spiritualist movement denounced Woodhull, suspecting her of using their organization for political ambition.Footnote 84 The Equal Rights Party nomination virtually bankrupted Woodhull as investors drew away from her brokerage firm and many of her former supporters pulled away.Footnote 85 Woodhull and her sister were eventually arrested for indecency and spent a month in jail.

Woodhull’s run for president was only endorsed by a minority of sections, leading to a mass exodus from the Spring Street Council. Many of these sections had initially supported Section 12. Le Socialiste, the mouthpiece for French sections in the United States, published an article denouncing politicians but declaring itself in favor of women’s right to vote.Footnote 86 In short, Section 12 and Victoria Woodhull were embattled not by their advocacy for women’s suffrage, but in their manner of advocating for it.

The Congress at The Hague

In September 1872, the International Workingmen’s Association held the most consequential Congress of its history at The Hague. At the meeting, members of the International across Europe weighed in on the larger schism between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin’s factions, after which both began holding separate Congresses.Footnote 87 Though the American sections were secondary players in this larger drama, their inner politics became entangled in the broader split within the International, culminating in the General Council's seat moving from London to New York.

Prior to the meeting at The Hague, the Spring Street Council declared independence from the General Council and renamed itself the American Confederation. It held its own Congress on July 9 and 10, which it advertised as the first of the “American International Workingmen’s Association,” and indeed the sections that attended were almost entirely American.Footnote 88 The Confederation cautioned that it would continue to participate in and obey the resolutions of the Congresses of the International. Following Section 12’s earlier plan, the Confederation outlined a new structure for the organization based on municipal, state, and national divisions.Footnote 89 It likewise opened admission to the International to anyone who would want to join and defined the term “citizen” as referring to any resident of the United States, regardless of nationality or condition.Footnote 90 The Confederation elected a Federal Council for a term of one year, whose members included five women. Hoping to appeal to the International in Europe for its legitimacy, the American Confederation appointed three delegates to attend the organization’s upcoming Congress at The Hague, though ultimately only William West attended.Footnote 91

The Congress’ representatives wrote an address to American workers advertising the purpose of the International as the seizure of political power through direct legislation by the people. Their membership was open to “[e]mployers and employes [sic], all professions and all classes.” The Address cautioned that the term “workingmen” in the name “International Workingmen’s Association” referred to its goal of emancipating the working class rather than any obligation for its membership to be made up of workers.Footnote 92

At The Hague, the International’s Congress ruled on the mandates of representatives, which was the primary mechanism to determine the eligibility of each section’s membership in the organization. The representatives of the Tenth Ward Council, Friedrich Sorge and Simon Dereure, supported Marx’s side of the split with Bakunin.Footnote 93 William West traveled to The Hague to represent the American Confederation and attempted to visit Marx at his home. Marx “curtly” refused him.Footnote 94

Undeterred, West appeared before the General Council to plead Section 12’s case. Speaking for the Credentials Committee, Marx immediately moved to nullify West’s mandate, arguing that his “credentials are signed by Victoria Woodhull, who for years had an eye on the presidency [of the United States]; she is president of the spiritists, preaches free love, has a banking business, etc.” Moreover, Section 12 “consisted almost exclusively of bourgeoisie.”Footnote 95

Marx moved into the main allegations against Section 12, which hinged on its rejection of working-class organization. He described how Section 12 had scoffed at Section 1’s two-thirds wage-worker proposal, which it answered by asking rhetorically “whether it is a crime not to be a wage slave but free.”Footnote 96 Section 12 had prioritized women’s suffrage over the conflict between labor and capital, and introduced “talk of personal liberty, social liberty (free love), dress regulation, women’s franchise, universal language, etc.”Footnote 97

West’s defense was ill-conceived to win over the International. In a speech that lasted more than an hour, he attempted to refute the three charges made against Section 12. He cited Section 12’s right to rebel against the General Council due to the workers’ membership rule. He invoked class reconciliation, telling the Congress that they were “men before we are workers or bourgeoisie.” He outlined a stageist view of human development, in which man was at first a “commodity,” then “a wageworker, then he becomes a bourgeois—middle class man, etc. and then man, who has advanced to bourgeois status by means of his higher intelligence, enters into general co-operation, that is, the substitution of society for individual work.” In other words, West’s social theory emphasized class ascendancy through intelligence and personal achievement rather than the exploitation of labor or one’s relationship to the means of production. As for women’s rights, West argued that “the emancipation of women must precede that of the workers.” He specifically referred to free love, arguing that women should be entitled to sexual liberation. West directly invoked the Paris Commune in making his claim, since it had called for “universal (women’s franchise), for direct legislation,” both of which should be the basis for a new government in the United States.Footnote 98

In response, Sorge emphasized the political nature of the dispute between Section 12 and the General Council. For him, it was not merely a question of the authority of the Council over the sections, but an ideological split between the factions in the International. While members of Section 12 could certainly “hold all sorts of opinions about the women’s question, religion, etc.,” they did not have the right to speak for the International in those matters. He pointed out when Section 12 applied to be part of the Central Committee, “he had assured him [Sorge] that its members were all wage-paid members like himself (West).”Footnote 99 According to Sorge, Section 12 had attacked French Communists and German atheists and, perhaps more glaringly, had been in touch with Bakunin’s camp and questioned the International’s leadership in the United States. He added that the International demanded “discipline, not submission to persons but to principle, to the organization.” Sorge’s arguments won the day. One of the delegates motioned that any predominantly bourgeois section should be denied membership in the International, which passed unanimously. The Congress similarly denied West his mandate in a vote of forty-nine to zero.

Meanwhile, Marx and Engels took definitive action to keep Bakunin’s influence in the International at bay. In a move that took the Congress by surprise, they presented a motion that the General Council’s seat should be moved to New York for the years 1872 to 1873 and that its members should be drawn from the Federal Council in North America.Footnote 100 The International could not relocate to other major urban centers in Europe because of the persecution it faced. New York was thus the safest option. As for the Federal Council, it was a “loyal, strong organization,” which consisted of “Irish, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and Swedes, and soon [it] will count among its members native Americans also.”Footnote 101 One member objected on the basis that the splits within the International in North America were too great, one part of which was “even entangled in bourgeois politics.”Footnote 102

Writing in a circular distributed to all the sections of the North American Federation in 1873, the secretary of the Federal Council of the International, Frederick Bolte, quipped that the “late Presidential election absorbed the interest of the people to such an extent that many members of the I.W.A. could not resist the excitement and were drawn […] into the whirlpool of political agitation.”Footnote 103 Part of the ambiguity in the interpretation of these events lies in the fact that both support for women’s suffrage and bourgeois politics were cited in opposition to Section 12. West’s comments made clear that Section 12 and their supporters privileged women’s suffrage as a goal ahead of the emancipation of the working class. His defense of the actions of the Spring Street Council, or American Confederation, betrayed an enormous condescension toward workers. His expulsion from The Hague Congress was definitive and set the dissident sections on a trajectory away from the organization from which they had been inspired.

The fight in Philadelphia

After the London split, sections of the former Spring Council or American Confederation continued to campaign for women’s suffrage. Of all the sections that adhered to that body, only the minutes of Section 26 in Philadelphia have been preserved.Footnote 104 The section’s membership included both men and women, bourgeois and working-class.Footnote 105 The section’s minutes show that its members pursued both the goal of organizing women workers and women’s suffrage. Though the section’s tactics were far less explosive than Woodhull’s run for the presidency, it was nonetheless unsuccessful in its goal of enfranchising women in the state of Philadelphia.

In its first months of existence, the section was primarily concerned with the peace movement and the eight-hour day, pronouncing itself in opposition to the privileges of money and caste.Footnote 106 Caroline Burnham, a law student and an active suffragist, signed on to the rolls of Section 26 on November 6, 1871.Footnote 107 She had attempted to vote the same year that she joined the International.Footnote 108 Burnham joined the International along with Damon Kilgore, an attorney whom she eventually married in 1876.Footnote 109 Over time, the section was increasingly interested in the cooperative movement. They were inspired by utopian feminist Marie Howland, who gave a lecture to the section. Many of the section’s discussions afterward concerned the cooperative housing and labor community set up by Jean-Baptiste Godin in Northern France.Footnote 110

Unlike the Tenth Ward Council, Section 26 supported Woodhull’s nomination for the Equal Rights Party. On May 13, 1872, George D. Coleman, a twenty-five-year-old clerk, reported back on the event, calling it “remarkable,” and claimed that it had been misrepresented in the American press.Footnote 111 He argued that it was not “a foregone conclusion to place Victoria C. Woodhull before the nation as the candidate for the Presidency,” and that “her nomination was the outgrowth of the whole body there assembled.”Footnote 112 Coleman elaborated that the labor movement was well represented at this convention. On June 17, 1872, a long debate transpired within the section over whether to send a delegate to the New York Congress organized by the Tenth Ward Council. In the end, the section did not, arguing that the views espoused by the organizers of the Congress were too “narrow.”Footnote 113 At a later meeting, Coleman would say the “communism sinks the individual entirely, and in this it is a failure.”Footnote 114

Section 26 took an active role in organizing women workers. That summer, New York City was hit by a massive wave of strikes for the eight-hour day which saw large-scale participation from Section 1 and the Tenth Ward Council.Footnote 115 On June 24, 1872, Burnham reported on the growth of women’s organization within the movement for the eight-hour day in Philadelphia. Isaac Rehn, a photolithographer, replied that “he was in favor of recommending an organization of women as a primary step to be taken.” He added that he thought that while he was in favor of strikes as they were “the best immediate means towards giving more time and means to the workers,” he believed that they ultimately did not “accomplish the work required,” privileging instead “associated labor.”Footnote 116 In response, Mary Byrnes defended strikes, declaring that “[s]he was of the opinion that the only means now to reach the question was through strikes and the strikes did not necessarily lead to destruction.” After a resolution “of the sympathy of this section, in favor of the question of women’s labor” was debated and withdrawn, the delegates of the International to the Eight Hour League were “requested to bring the question of woman’s labor before that body—and use men’s influence to further the rights of woman.”Footnote 117 Shortly after, Byrnes and her husband attended a meeting of women’s workers, and Burnham reported back to the section that a women’s committee was accepted in the Eight Hour League. She urged members of the section to “send as many women as they could” to the meeting.Footnote 118

West’s expulsion at The Hague Congress caused Section 26 to disaffiliate itself with the International in Europe.Footnote 119 Their decision to contact the other English-speaking sections to form a counterpower to Marx took on a chauvinistic tinge. At a meeting on November 4, 1872, Jacob Byrne expressed the view that “the Emancipation of Labor would be affected sooner by the Unity of the Anglo Saxon or English speaking nations that could be effected by any nation or nations.”Footnote 120 Two weeks later, the section formally seceded from the International, claiming that a “change of masters is not what we wish—neither is it what we are willing to submit to, since it is against masters of whatever form that we are contending.”Footnote 121

Afterward, the section threw itself headfirst into the campaign for women’s suffrage. The section saw an opening to advertise the goals of the International in an upcoming convention to change the Pennsylvania state constitution, assembling several committees to speak to the representatives assembled there. In January 1873, a delegation from Section 26, including Caroline Burnham and Mary Byrne, spoke to the state convention. One member read a declaration that outlined women’s enfranchisement as one of the goals of the International. Burnham spoke of the ballot as necessary for a “Republican form of government.”Footnote 122 Debriefing on the events at a meeting of Section 26, Burnham echoed Woodhull and West, stating her belief that no labor reform could be achieved until women were given equal rights to men.Footnote 123 In April 1873, Burnham made a case in front of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in favor of women’s suffrage after being denied the right to vote in Pennsylvania, arguing among other things that the word “freeman” applied to women, and that women’s industrial rights were lessened because she lacked the franchise.Footnote 124 Mary Byrne noted at a meeting of Section 26 how little attention Burnham’s argument had gotten from the press.Footnote 125 Burnham ultimately lost her case, and the State Convention did not enfranchise women. The question of women’s suffrage did not feature prominently in the organization’s discussions afterward.

By the end of September 1873, the section’s perennial financial problems caught up to it. They ceased their public meetings because they could no longer afford to rent out their regular meeting hall. Whether they continued meeting afterward is hard to say: Their minutebook ends there.Footnote 126 In the annual report of the Federal Council that year, Bolte charged that “The American Secessionists, the so-called Spring Street Council, came to dead by too much talking, rest and [sic] peace on its grave.”Footnote 127 Section 26, like other parts of the International, came apart as a massive financial crisis hit the United States. The campaign for women’s suffrage within the International fell with it.

When the International dissolved into the Workingmen’s Party of the United States in 1876, the only remaining women’s section within the International, Section 3 (Milwaukee)—of which we unfortunately know very little—pushed for a resolution that would acknowledge the social and political equality of women.Footnote 128 The resolution called for women to participate in labor struggle and for the absolute equality of the sexes within the organization, entreating men to assist them in this task. At the same time, the resolution dismissed the movement for women’s suffrage, arguing that the “emancipation of women will be accomplished with the emancipation of men, and the so-called women’s rights question will be solved with the labor question.”Footnote 129

This resolution is intelligible within the broader line of political abstention that the International developed through the 1870s. Its attack on women’s suffrage, however, also relates to the history of Reconstruction in the United States. It was the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of Black men after the war that led to the development of an independent women’s suffrage movement. However, this women’s movement, which drew mostly from middle-class and upper-class women, had difficulty relating to working women’s issues, which it tended to relegate as secondary to earning the right to vote. Woodhull’s run for presidency, therefore, was only the most explosive manifestation of a difficult relationship between the women’s movement, which purported to speak for all women, and a labor movement that spoke for the workers of the world.

Within the International, the question of women’s suffrage was difficult to separate from bourgeois electoral politics. This association was partly built by the advocates of women’s suffrage within the organization itself, who bristled at the introduction of class-based membership rules and often placed the struggle between labor and capital as secondary to women’s suffrage.

References

Notes

1. The author would like to thank the generous reviewers for this article, as well as the support of the editors of this Special Issue. Special thanks also to Joshua Pineda for his patience and excellent advice throughout this process.

2. For an account of the International’s role in organizing for the eight-hour day, see Philip Foner and David Roediger, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (London: Verso, 1989), 113–16.

3. The association modeled itself after the International in Europe, though it did not at first directly affiliate. After the failure of the Social Party, the German General Workers’ Association was reconstituted on January 20, 1869, under the leadership of August Vogt, a veteran of the Communist Club. Documents of the First International: General Council of the First International, 1868–1870 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 463n276; Hermann Schlüter, Die Internationale in Amerika (Chicago: Herausgegeben von der Deutschen Sprachgruppe der Sozialistischen Partei der Vereinigten Staaten, 1918), 108.

4. While there are no comprehensive biographies of Sorge available in English, he wrote a history of labor movement edited by Philip Foner and Brewster Chamberlin. Philip Foner and Brewster Chamberlin, eds, Friedrich A. Sorge’s Labor Movement in the United States: A History of the American Working Class from Colonial Times to 1890 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1977).

5. Justine Randers-Pherson, Adolf Douai, 1819–1888: The Turbulent Life of a German Forty-eighter in the Homeland and in the United States (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 289; Friedrich Adolf Sorge, Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F. A. Sorge und Andere (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1906), 10; Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the N.Y. State Workingmen’s Assembly, held in the City of Albany, NY, January 26, 27, 28, and 29, 1869 (New York: Lafaye & Troup, 1869), 1; Commons, Documentary History, vol. ix, 27.

6. The NLU tended to see the International as a potential partner for labor immigration regulation. Samuel Bernstein, The First International in America (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1962), 30–1; G. M. [Yuri] Stekloff, History of the First International (London: Martin Lawrence Limited, 1928), 136–8.

7. Alexandra Kollontai wrote in the “Social Basis of the Woman Question” that “however much the bourgeois feminists try to repress the true aim of their political desires, however much they assure their younger sisters that involvement in political life promises immeasurable benefits for the women of the working class, the bourgeois spirit that pervades the whole feminist movement gives a class colouring even to the demand for equal political rights with men, which would seem to be a general women’s demand.” Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 72.

8. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 20.

9. These accounts also gloss over the American sections’ hostility toward immigrant workers.

10. He noted that Section 12 and its supporters had taken with it nearly all of the International’s American members and its newspaper. Bernstein, The First International in America, 118, 122–3.

11. At times, Montgomery’s good judgment wanders by calling Woodhull and Claflin “dazzling beauties.” David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 249–50, 418–20.

12. According to Montgomery, the relationship between “labor reformers and Sentimentalists […] played a crucial part in fitting the workers’ movement into the new balance of social forces that was emerging in the Reconstruction era,” the most prominent example of which was the greenback movement.

13. Buhle helpfully charts the divergent trajectories of immigrant and native-born women within the socialist movement, and notes the fragmentation of the abolitionist, labor, and women’s movements in the 1870s. Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 1–105.

14. Timothy Messer-Kruse, Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3, 188–9.

15. Mark Lause and Timothy Messer-Kruse, “L’AIT et les États-Unis,” in L'internationale sera le genre humain! De l’Association internationale des travailleurs à aujourd’hui, ed. Thierry Drapeau (Montréal: M Éditeur, 2015), 105.

16. Nimtz has convincingly addressed Messer-Kruse’s charge that Marx and, by extension, the Tenth Ward Council’s critique of bourgeois politics was “undemocratic.” August H. Nimtz Jr., Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic” (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 233; see also August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards, The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024).

17. Michel Cordillot, “Socialism v. Democracy? The IWMA in the USA, 1869–1876,” in “Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth”: The First International in a Global Perspective, ed. Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 274–5.

18. Robin Blackburn, Marx and Lincoln: An Unfinished Revolution (New York: Verso, 2011), 78.

19. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 20.

20. Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, New York (New York: Robert J. Johnson Printer, 1866). The New-York Historical. This event is recounted in Jean Humez’ biography of Harriet Tubman. Jean Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 71.

21. See the New-York Tribune for an account of the first annual meeting. New-York Tribune, May 10, 1967.

22. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 76–104.

23. Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 9 and 10, 1867 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, Printer, 1867).

24. Ibid., 22–3.

25. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 107.

26. While single women were much more likely to work than married women throughout the 1870s, a recent study has found that the wives and daughters of soldiers disabled in the war were significantly more likely to work outside of the home. As Claudia Goldin found in her study, single Black women in Southern cities were more than twice as likely to work than white women. This difference was especially strong for married women, with nearly a third of married Black women working and 4 percent of white women. Claudia Goldin, “The Work and Wages of Single Women, 1870–1920,” The Journal of Economic History 40, no. 1 (1980): 81, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2120426; see also Claudia Goldin, “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 and 1880,” Journal of Economic History 37, no. 1 (1977): 95; Madison K. Arnsbarger, Andreas Ferrara, and Paige Montrose, “The U.S. Civil War’s Impact on Women’s Work and Political Participation,” NBER Working Paper 35287 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35287; Margaret Walsh, “Women’s Place in the American Labour Force, 1870–1995,” History 82, no. 268 (1997): 563, Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010 [1985]), chapter 2; Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Tera W. Hunter, To’ Joy my Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

27. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Right Movement in the United States (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 131–2.

28. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out To Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 [1982]), 76–7.

29. Emma Teitelman and Salar Mohandesi, “Without Reserves,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 37–67.

30. Goldin, “The Work and Wages of Single Women,” 81–2; U.S. Census Office, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870: Occupations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 596; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State 1875–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 121–86.

31. Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 22, 27–9.

32. Gwendolyn Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp: Gender, Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 93–4.

33. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 131.

34. The Revolution, September 24, 1868.

35. Newspaper articles indicate the presence of many members of Sorosis, the first professional women’s club in the United States, at these meetings. Sorosis opposed women’s suffrage, but called for women to have a separate political system including a women’s parliament. For a map of the links between women’s organizations during this period, see: Naomi Rosenthal, Meryl Fingrutd, Michele Ethier, Roberta Karant, and David McDonald. “Social Movements and Network Analysis: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Reform in New York State,” American Journal of Sociology 90, no. 5 (1985): 1040, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780088; New York Herald, November 23, 1868; Chicago Tribune, September 20, 1868; The Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia), November 13, 1868; Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Gordon 65.

36. Augusta Lewis argued that women’s suffrage was not necessary for the “comfort” of women, arguing to prioritize workplace issues, including wages, instead. New York Herald, September 22, 1868; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 133.

37. Diane Balser, Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 53–79; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 141.

38. Ava Baron, “Women and the Making of the American Working Class: A Study of the Proletarianization of Printers,” Review of Radical Political Economics 14, no. 3 (1982): 33–5, https://doi.org/10.1177/048661348201400303.

39. Several debates within the organization concerned the role of wealthier women within the organization, most notably Anthony. The New York Herald, September 17, 1869; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 131.

40. Charlotte Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 59; Schlüter, Die Internationale in Amerika, 50; Commons, Documentary History, vol. ix, 351.

41. Commons, Documentary History, vol. ix, 204–5.

42. The organization is listed as the Workingwomen’s Protective Association in the notes of the meeting. Commons, Documentary History, vol. ix, 204–5.

43. Ibid., 198.

44. Ibid., 227.

45. Sumner Eliot Matison, “The Labor Movement and the Negro During Reconstruction,” Journal of Negro History 33, no. 4 (October 1948): 437, https://doi.org/10.2307/2715920; The Revolution, October 1, 1868.

46. Ellen Carol DuBois notes that the Working Women’s Association’s membership was effectively reabsorbed into the National Woman Suffrage Association. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 157.

47. Commons, Documentary History, vol. ix, 231.

48. James M. McPherson, “Abolitionists, Woman Suffrage, and the Negro, 1865–1869,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 47 (January 1965): 40–7; Robert E. Riegel, “The Split of the Feminist Movement in 1869,” Journal of American History 49 (December 1962): 485–96; Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 31; Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61–4.

49. Later, the NWSA pivoted its campaign toward the passage of a Sixteenth Amendment that would enfranchise women. One of Woodhull’s close collaborators, Theodore Tilton, had started a petition in 1870 to unite NWSA and the American Woman Suffrage Association. Tilton supported the Liberal Republicans in the election of 1872. Ellen Carol Dubois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 99; Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 35.

50. Woodhull was nominated formally to the presidency by a secretive group named the “Victoria League,” widely presumed to be bankrolled by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Theodore Tilton, Victoria C. Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch (New York: Press of the Golden Age, 1871), 28.

51. Woodhull published a series of articles in the Herald from April to July outlining her plans for a “practical plan for universal government.” The articles were republished by Woodhull. Historian Lois Beachy Underhill helpfully cited the series of articles in the Herald’s publication dates as April 16, 25, May 2, 9, 16, 27, June 4, 19, July 4, and 11, 1870. “The Coming Woman. Victoria C. Woodhull, the Balmoral Broker, to Race for the White House,” New York Herald, April 2, 1870; Victoria Woodhull, The Origin, Tendencies and Principles of Government: or, A Review of the Rise and Fall of Nations from Early Historic Times to the Present: With Special Considerations Regarding the Future of the United States as the Representative Government of the World and the Form of Administration Which Will Secure This Consummation. Also, Papers on Human Equality, as Represented by Labor and Its Representative, Money: And the Meaning and Significance of Life from a Scientific Standpoint, with Its Prophecies for the Great Future (New York: Woodhull, Claflin & Co., 1871); Lois Beachy Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull (Bridgehampton, NY: Bridge Works Pub. Co., 1995), 327n82.

52. Amanda Frisken, “Sex in Politics: Victoria Woodhull as an American Public Woman, 1870–1876,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 1 (2000): 92; Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President, 51–9.

53. Woodhull and Claflin’s, November 5, 1870.

54. That month, Woodhull and Claflin’s criticized the Labor Party, particularly on the grounds that it had not endorsed women’s suffrage. “Labor and Capital,” Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, November 5, 1870; “The Constitution of the United States and its Amendments,” Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, November 19, 1870.

55. Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, January 14, 1871.

56. While the political content of the appeal was markedly different from the anarchist line taken by the Bakuninists in Europe, the problem that it posed for the International was similar, in that it called for a new organization that would eventually overtake the Central Committee.

57. Corey M. Brooks, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics, American Beginnings, 1500–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 176; Schuyler C. Marshall, “The Free Democratic Convention of 1852,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 22, no. 2 (1955): 146–67.

58. First, sections would be founded according to electoral districts, which would then report to municipal councils. State Committees would then be formed, which would in turn correspond to a United States National Congress. Distinct from a centralized, executive body, this Congress would then be limited by the “principal [sic] of the Referendum and qualified by that of the Popular Initiative.”

59. West specified that a centralized congress or committee would not be able to gather all State Committees under its aegis, and that even if it could, it would likely be undesirable.

60. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, September 23, 1871.

61. See Marx’s letter to Sorge. Documents of the International Workingmen’s Association, 1870–1871, 305; Sorge, Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen, 32.

62. Sorge, Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen, 32.

63. He attempted to dispel any idea that the manifesto signed by West was connected to the International, writing to Richard Josiah Hinton of Section 23 (Washington, DC) that it had been written without any approval whatsoever from the Central Committee. He wrote to a prospective American affiliate in Philadelphia that sections should be composed of workingmen who understand “their position towards Capital & modern society.” By November he reported a “lively and warm discussion” among the sections on the appeal. Letterbook of Central Committee, provis. Federal Council, Federal Council, General Council, and International Labor Union, Papers of the International Workingmen’s Association, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Box 1, Folder 6, 55, 60–5, 71. Hereafter Letterbook of CC, PFC, FC, GC, and ILU.

64. Le Socialiste, November 11, 1871.

65. Dubois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights, 100.

66. The measure was explicitly adopted to address the “dissensions and disputes” engendered by the publications and acts of Section 12. Since the Central Committee’s mandate was provisional and its term was set to expire at the end of 1871, they simply let the body dissolve with the goal of immediately reconstituting a Council without the offending sections. At the Central Committee’s final meeting, the majority of delegates voted to adjourn and meet again on the first Sunday of December. The vote passed nineteen to five, with the dissident sections effectively expelled. Those who voted against were American sections 9, 12, and 27, as well as French section 2 and German section 13. Letterbook of CC, PFC, FC, GC, and ILU, 15, 74; Le Socialiste, December 9, 1871.

67. Emphasis in original. Letterbook of CC, PFC, FC, GC, and ILU, 75.

68. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, December 2, 1871.

69. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, May 18, 1872.

70. Ibid.

71. While Anthony remained reluctant to embrace Woodhull’s plan for a new political party, Stanton has been sympathetic. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 61.

72. According to the report in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, her speech was well received, and the majority of attendees voted in favor of attending the Apollo Hall convention. When Woodhull voted to adjourn the convention to go to Apollo Hall, Susan B. Anthony turned the lights off, effectively ending the convention. Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 66; Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President, 205.

73. Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution, 55–9.

74. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, May 25, 1872.

75. Underhill, The Woman who Ran for President, 211.

76. These demands recall those of the National Labor Reform Party.

77. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, May 25, 1872.

78. Douglass had played a prominent role within Reconstruction politics, advocating for the Civil Rights Bill and for an integrated education system. Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution, 60.

79. Frederick Douglass, U. S. Grant and the Colored People (Washington, DC: Union Republican Congressional Committee, 1872).

80. Frederick Douglass quoted in James M. McPherson, “Grant or Greeley?: The Abolitionist Dilemma in the Election of 1872,” American Historical Review 71, no. 1 (1965): 49, https://doi.org/10.2307/1863035.

81. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, May 25, 1872.

82. The pro-suffrage Woman’s Journal chimed in that Woodhull represented “all that was evil” in womanhood. Woman’s Journal, January 18, 1873.

83. Moreover, as historian Amanda Frisken has argued, the “political coupling of one of the century’s most disreputable white women with one of its most respectable black men was more a provocative gesture than a bid for electoral success.” Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution, 56.

84. Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution, 64.

85. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998), 332.

86. Le Socialiste, May 18, 1872.

87. Stekloff, History of the First International, 243.

88. Notably, the Congress attendees included Thomas Phillips, the shoemaker, and Caroline Burnham, the lawyer. Only one French section remained, number 22, which was represented by Benoît Hubert. Le Socialiste, July 6, 1872.

89. Proceedings of the First Congress of the American International Workingmen’s Association, held in Philadelphia, Pa., July 9 and 10, 1872: Declaration of Principles, Platform and Plan of Organization of the American Confederation of the I.W.A. (New York: Federal Council, 1872).

90. Historian Hermann Schlüter pointed to several places in which the principles of the International had been watered down. For one, the resolutions called for a general reduction of working hours, rather than a law in favor of the eight-hour day. The call to nationalize the land was accompanied by a caution that it should be redistributed by the state through peaceful means. For Schlüter, this amounted to a concession to bourgeois interests. Schlüter, Die Internationale in Amerika, 169.

91. The delegates were William West, Harriet B. Burton (a social reformer from Section 12), and Isaac Rehn of Section 26 (Philadelphia), a photolithographer. While Burton did not make it to the Hague Congress, she was in France during the month of September, visiting a utopian community named Le Familistère in Guise. The Familistère was founded by Jean-Baptiste André Godin. National Republican, December 9, 1873; Valérie Gellion, “Godin, Jean-Baptiste, André,” Le Maîtron, July 1, 2020; “Le Livre des visiteurs et visiteuses du Familistère de 1864 à 1979,” https://livre-des-visiteurs.familistere.com/intro1 .

92. New York Herald, August 5, 1872.

93. Wolfgang Eckhardt, The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Workingmen’s Association (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 305.

94. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, March 22, 1873.

95. Hans Gerth, ed., The First International: Minutes of the Hague Congress of 1872, with Related Documents (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 194.

96. Ibid., 195.

97. The reference to universal language concerns Stephen Pearl Andrews, a prominent member of Section 12 who devised his own language. A dictionary of this language, named Alwato, is available at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

98. West’s defense of free love appears only in Maltman Barry’s report to the Labor Standard, generally seen as less reliable than the minutes of the Hague Congress. James Guillaume, who wrote from the perspective of the Jura Federation, decried William West’s expulsion, but did not report any of his speech. Gerth, Minutes of the Hague Congress, 194–6, 266; James Guillaume, L’Internationale; documents et souvenirs (1864–1878), vol. 2 (Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1907), 331.

99. Gerth, Minutes of the Hague Congress, 267.

100. Taking the floor, Engels argued that “allegations and accusations against the General Council have become so vehement and continuous that most of its former members are tired and are decided not to accept office again,” including him and Marx. Gerth, Minutes of the Hague Congress, 213–14.

101. The Belgian and Dutch federations supported the move of the General Council of the International to New York. Gerth, Minutes of the Hague Congress, 214; Bulletin de la fédération jurassienne de l’Association internationale des travailleurs (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), August 15 and September 1, 1872.

102. Gerth, Minutes of the Hague Congress, 215.

103. Letterbook of the Federal Council of the North American Branch of the IWA, 202.

104. Papers of the International Workingmen’s Association, Box 2, Folder B, Records of the Philadelphia Section No. 26, Minutes 1871–1873, Wisconsin Historical Society, hereafter Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1 and no. 2.

105. Among Section 26’s founding members were Mary Byrnes (a teacher), Elizabeth E. Murr (employed in a medical practice), Mary Gunther (a seamstress), and W. Emma Thorpe (a milliner). As Samuel Bernstein has noted, though “manual and white collar” workers were a majority, the “teaching, medical, and legal professions” were well-represented. Bernstein, The First International in America, 63.

106. The section’s first president, Thomas Phillips, was a shoemaker active in the cooperative movement. Clifton K. Yearley, “Thomas Phillips, A Yorkshire Shoemaker in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 79, no. 2 (April 1955): 167–96; Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 15–17.

107. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 12.

108. Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 637n8.

109. On November 13, 1871, at Kilgore’s suggestion, the section elected a committee of thirty to attend the meeting of the National Peace Society. This committee included several women, namely Byrnes, Gunther, Murr, Burnam, and Thorpe, as well as Ellen Goodell Smith. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 13–14.

110. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 237–8; F. Bernardot, Le Familistère de Guise, association du capital et du travail, et son fondateur, J.B.A. Godin (Guise: Dequennes et cit, 1889).

111. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 8, 76.

112. Ibid., 76.

113. Specifically, Mary Byrnes’s husband Jacob (a train station clerk) cited the exclusion of non-working-class members of the International from the organization. He argued that the abolitionist movement had gathered everyone who wanted to work for a same cause. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 99.

114. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 230.

115. Stanley Nadel, “Those Who Would be Free: The Eight-Hour Day Strikes of 1872,” Labor’s Heritage, no. 2 (1990): 72–4.

116. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 101.

117. Ibid., 108–10.

118. Ibid., 111–17.

119. Members of the section had even paid for William West’s travel to Europe. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 236b.

120. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 188.

121. By March 1873, Section 26 was in touch with Bakunin’s Jurassian federation. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 200; Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 2, 15–17.

122. Woman’s Journal, February 1, 1873; Tamara Gaskell, “A Citizen’s, Not a Woman’s, Right: Carrie Burnham V. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court,” Pennsylvania Legacies 8, no. 2 (2008): 24, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27765150.

123. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 1, 255.

124. Woman Suffrage: The Argument of Carrie S. Burnham before Chief Justice Reed, and Associate Justices Agnew, Sharswood and Mercur, of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, in Bane, on the Third and Fourth of April, 1873. With an Appendix Containing the Opinion of the Hon. George Sharswood and a Complete History of the Case. Also a Compilation of the Laws of Pennsylvania Touching the Rights of Women (Philadelphia: Citizens’ Suffrage Committee, 1873), 79.

125. Minutebook of Philadelphia Section 26 no. 2, 33.

126. Ibid., 115–19.

127. New York, August 1873, Annual Report of the Federal Council of the North American Federation of the IWA in Letterbook of CC, PFC, FC, GC, and ILU, 256.

128. It seems that there were women in a Boston section of the International, as noted in an article on the shipwreck of the Schiller in the Bulletin de l’Union Républicaine de la langue française. Bulletin de l’Union Républicaine de la langue française, June 12, 1875. The Formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, 6.

129. Bernstein, The First International in America, 286.