About this Event
Join us SSB & author Eden Collinsworth to celebrate the publishing of her new portrait of Victoria Woodhull, a celebrated and maligned 19th-century businesswoman and activist, and a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage and labor reforms.
This in-person event will be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE. Don't miss out!
From the acclaimed author of What the Ermine Saw and Behaving Badly
In 1894, a remarkably self-possessed American woman, with no formal education to speak of, stood before a British court seeking damages for libel from the trustees of the British Museum. It was yet another stop along the unpredictable route that was Victoria Woodhull’s life.
Born dirt-poor in an obscure Ohio settlement, Woodhull was the daughter of an illiterate mother entranced by the fad of Mesmerism—a therapeutic pseudoscience—and a swindler father whose cons exploited his two daughters. It was through her mother, though, that Woodhull familiarized herself with the supernatural realm, earning a degree of fame as a clairvoyant and her first taste of financial success. Woodhull’s life would continue to turn on its axis and then turn again.
Despite a deeply troubled first marriage at the age of fourteen, countless attempts by the press to discredit her, and a wrongful J*il sentence, Woodhull thrived through sheer determination and the strength of her bond with her sister Tennie. She co-founded a successful stock brokerage on Wall Street, launched a newspaper, and became the first woman to run for president. Hers was a rags-to-riches story that saw her cross paths with Karl Marx, Henry Ward Beecher, and Frederick Douglass.
In an era when women’s rights were circumscribed, and the idea of leaving a marriage was taboo, she broke the rules to carve out a path of her own.Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Collinsworth tells the story of a woman truly ahead of her time—a radical visionary who made defying mores a habit and brought to the fore societal and political issues still being addressed today. Neither a saint nor a villain, Woodhull emerges as an iconic, complex woman: an entrepreneur; lover of freedom; and a fiercely loyal family member whose political activism and suffragist legacy will cement her in history.
Eden Collinsworth is a former media executive and business consultant. She was president of Arbor House Publishing Co. and founder of the Los Angeles–based monthly lifestyle magazine Buzz, before becoming a vice president at Hearst Corporation. She served as the chief of staff at the EastWest Institute, a global think tank; in 2011—after writing a best-selling book in China for Chinese businesspeople on Western deportment—she launched Collinsworth & Associates, a Beijing-based consulting company, which specialized in intercultural communication. The author of I Stand Corrected: How Teaching Western Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson, she currently lives in London.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Solid State Books, 600F H Street Northeast, Washington, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 34.44
