A highly readable combination of history and biography, Other Powers interviews the stories of some of the most colorful social, political, and religious figures of America's Victorian era with the courageous and notorious life of Victoria Woodhull--psychic, suffragette, publisher, presidential candidate, and self-confessed practitioner of free love. It is set amid the battle for women's suffrage, the Spiritualist movement that swept across the nation in the age of Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the bitter fight that pitted black men against white women in the struggle for the right to vote. Peter Gay found Other Powers "Irresistible..this is a biography guaranteed to keep the reader reading." And Gloria Steinem called it "A real-life novel of how one charismatic woman..turned women's suffrage, the church, New York City, and much of the country on its ear." From The Critics BUST Magazine This illuminating book tells a story much larger than that of one woman, taking alively jaunt alongside the spiritual escapism that helped spawn the women's movement and the key figures and reforms of post-Civil War America..One is left wondering how history paved over such a remarkable and provocative individual. New Yorker [A]n often brilliantmulti-tentacled exploration of Victorian sexual politics. Washington Post What a great cast of mountebanks, lechers, spiritualists, sexual revolutionaries, and scheming politicians populate Barbara Goldsmith's fine portrait of an era that resembles the 1990's in America. Goldsmith tells a great tale of a time when the national ego and id collided: racial tensions, the politics of gender and identity, sexual license, and declarations of family values vied for domination as seen through the remarkable life of Victoria Woodhull and the determined women who followed her, and the determined men who pursued her. Los Angeles Times [Goldsmith] is a master of quotation, smoothly extracting from one after another lengthy letter or transcript the nub that captures the human heart of the matter being addressed. San Francisco Chronicle Goldsmith has woven the stories into a cohesive whole, smoothly cross-cutting between the personal and political..[M]assive, detailed and immensely readable. Published at Thirty Dollars, 531 pages!

 Knopf Publishing Group 0394555368 / 9780394555362
Hardcover Very Good Condition As New Book Jacket New York 

Price: 22.28 USD