[Transcriber's Note: While transcribing these pieces, I took the liberty of correcting the occasional typographical error. Two of the essays presented here are not in the public domain, and are reproduced without permission. Should I receive an authoritative request to remove this work from my web site, of course I shall do so.]

Lois Waisbrooker
by Lois Waisbrooker

Power through Print: Lois Waisbrooker and Grassroots Feminism
by Joanne E. Passet

The Rhetorical Reputation of Forgotten Feminist Lois Waisbrooker
by Wendy Hayden

[from Workers in the Vineyard, by Julia Schlesinger (1896), pp. 173-175.]

That Mrs. Schlesinger desires to put me into her book as one of the workers in the vineyard of reform, is of itself sufficient honor, and as I desire to live more in my work than in my personality, and further, as I shrink from having my name go to posterity coupled with the too partial estimate of friends who are inclined to enlarge virtues and forget faults, I will myself say what needs to be said, but it will necessarily be more of my general than of my California work.

As to myself, I made my entrance into this life on the 1st day of February, 1826, in the town of Catharine, Schuyler County (then a part of Tioga), N. Y., as the first of seven children born to Caroline and Grandisen Nichols.

My mother's maiden name was Reed, and though their children were all Methodists, her father and mother were among the first Universalists of the country. It was my talks with my grandfather the summer of his eighty-first year, which helped to break me from the bondage of church teachings.

The death of a brother-in-law, with the circumstances attending, had prepared the way for his words to take effect. This brother-in-law, who was a good husband, son and brother, died believing he was going to hell, because he had never been converted.

The first links broken, the investigation of Spiritualism in 1856 completed the work so well begun. Among the first evidences received was a communication from that brother-in-law.

My parents were poor, uneducated, hard-working people, my father supporting his family as a day laborer—a wage slave—and as a matter of course my advantages were but few. It is the memory of my father's unrequited toil, of how much he did and how little he received, which intensifies my opposition to an economic system which so robs the toiler.

My parents gave me the name of Adeline Eliza, but when at twenty-eight years of age I began to write over the signature of "Lois," my friends commenced calling me that, and I soon adopted it; so it is now nearly forty years since I discarded my baptismal name, as I have since discarded Christianity in all its forms. The good connected with it belongs to universal humanity, not to a sect of people who have shed rivers of blood to enforce their propaganda.

I was always called peculiar. How much of that peculiarity belongs to myself, and how much of it comes from the influence of those who were once denizens of earth, and who now hold me to the work for which they have helped to prepare me, I cannol say, but I have always wanted to write. The school composition, as it was called, while a terror to many, was a pleasure to me.

My second book, "Alice Vale," was written to illustrate Spiritualism. It is now out of print, as is "Mayweed Blossoms," a collection of fugitive pieces, of which I thought more than did others, as the meagreness of its sale proved, and also, as is "Nothing Like It; or, Steps to the Kingdom," an earnest but somewhat crude effort to give a glimpse of purity in freedom, in the relation of the sexes.

Those will probably never be reissued.

"Helen Harlow's Vow" was written to show that woman should refuse to submit to the injustice which condemns her, and accepts the man for the same act—the heroine determining that she will not sink because she has foolishly trusted; that she will be just to herself if others are unjust to her. She maintains her self-respect, and in the end commands the respect of all who know her.

"Perfect Motherhood; or, Mabel Raymond's Resolve," does not trench upon the province of the physician, but takes up the conditions of society which make it impossible that mothers shall transmit, through the law of heredity, the elements of character which, unfolded, would give the world a superior race of men and women.

"The Occult Forces of Sex" is a work which is more valued each year, in proof of which I will state that the year after the last part was written, something over five years since, there were less than 200 sold with my personal effort, added to what was done by others; but during the last two years the sales have been encouraging in the extreme.

This little book consists of three pamphlets—one written in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1873, and called "The Sex Question and the Money Power;" the second at Riverside, California, in 1880, and called "From Generation to Regeneration," (and really the most valuable of my California work), and the third at Milwaukee, Oregon, in 1889, and called "The Tree of Life Between Two Thieves."

I have good evidence that Alexander von Humboldt, his brother William, Mrs. Hemans, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and two or three others whose names I have forgotten, assisted me, not only in writing the work prepared at Riverside, but they are still with me when I attempt to get clearer, purer views of the finer forces of the sex. I received the communication with the names given through Dr. J. V. Mansfield, and signed by Von Humboldt. Permission was given to use the names in connection with the work, but the letter being lost in my attempt to send it to Dr. J. Rodes Buchanan for psychometrization, I have never before given the name to the public. This second pamphlet is put first in the book.

"A Sex Revolution" was written in 1862. It puts motherhood to the front, demands that "women take the lead" till the conditions for a higher grade of motherhood are obtained.

Another work issued recently is the "Fountain of Life, or the Threefold Power of Sex."

I have also essayed the newspaper business or method of scattering thought. "Our Age, Ours—the Peoples'," was issued at Battle Creek, Michigan, till forty-two numbers were sent out. Then the financial crisis of 1873-4 forced a suspension.

"Foundation Principles," issued from Clinton, Ia., in 1884, and afterwards removed to Antioch, California, was carried into the fourth volume, when it suspended for a time, but was finally resumed after I had located in Topeka, Kansas.

I do not know what the future of this life has for me, but this I do know—that I shall never consider my work done so long as I have the strength to do, and the privilege of doing more—and—

Whenever I'm called, I gladly will go,
My lessons of wisdom to learn over there;
Then back I will hasten, to help lift this earth
Out of its ignorance, sorrow and care—
Will aid it to cast off its sorrow and care,
For I could not remain in a world filled with bliss
While rivers of sorrow were rolling thro' this.

Yours, for the Work,
LOIS WAISBROOKER.

P. S.—I have forgotten one thing. So many will ask: Was she ever married? I have been twice married, have two children and six grandchildren, but I have lived so long alone, and there is so much questioning if marriage be not a failure, that married or single scarcely ever enters my thought.

L. W.

[from Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand (2006), pp. 229-250.]

"A Queer Old Woman Thinks She Has a Mission to Perform," announced a headline in the State Journal of Topeka, Kansas, in August 1894. Indeed it must have seemed so to the editors of the newspaper. Defying the Comstock Act, passed in 1873 to prohibit the mailing of "obscene" material, an aged Lois Waisbrooker had since the mid-1860s devoted herself to publishing books and periodicals containing information about female sexuality and women's rights. Active throughout five decades characterized by periodic economic depression, political corruption, industrialization, immigration, and spiritual turmoil, Waisbrooker joined ranks with anarchists, freethinkers, and Spiritualists to critique an economic, legal, and social system that gave some men unfair advantages over other males—and over virtually all females. Only a thorough understanding of themselves and of institutionalized sources of inequality, she believed, would prepare women to claim their rights. Her frank prose did not result in an arrest until 1894, when a federal postal inspector charged her with publishing allegedly obscene content in Foundation Principles, the biweekly she published from her Topeka residence. Undaunted, Waisbrooker declared: "If prison will advance the work I am ready."¹

Beginning in 1868 with the publication of Suffrage for Woman: The Reasons Why, this itinerant author wrote twelve novels, printed countless tracts and pamphlets; edited three periodicals (Our Age, Foundation Principles, and Clothed with the Sun); and served as acting editor of an anarchist free-thought weekly titled Lucifer, the Light-Bearer.² A regular contributor to such Spiritualist publications as Banner of Light, Religio-Philosophical Journal, Hull's Crucible, and Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, and to such anarchist weeklies as Free Society and Discontent, Lois Waisbrooker represents one of a small number of nineteenth-century women willing to link their names to the cause of sexual freedom. Yet though she represented a tiny minority, and a much-maligned viewpoint, many others read and responded to her words. Like historian of print culture Elizabeth Long, who challenges the hegemonic image of reading as a solitary act, I would argue that Waisbrooker's printed words facilitated the construction of an interpretive community of marginalized readers, many of them women alienated from white-gloved, middle-class suffragists, and separated from one another by geography. Empowered through print, Lois Waisbrooker and her readers stood on the periphery of power, where they contested male-prescribed definitions of freedom and claimed their rights as women.³

Waisbrooker's early life—punctuated by poverty, poor health, and marital failure—provided a foundation for her feminism. Born Adeline Eliza Nichols in Catharine, New York, on 21 February 1826, she was the daughter of Grandison Nichols, an impoverished day laborer, and Caroline Reed Nichols, a consumptive mother of seven who died at age thirty-six. From an early age, the girl recognized inequality and injustice, and sided with the oppressed. "I remember," she later wrote in a remembrance of her father, "the continuous toil, the coarse fare, and poor attire that was thine, in order that thy children might have bread, and that . . . others grew richer for thy toil." Because the Nicholses lacked adequate resources to provide their children with formal education, they allowed daughter Adeline to roam her grandparents' orchard and fields. This early sense of independence and her observations of the natural world would inform her evolving vision of women's rights.⁴

During her youth in the "Burned-over" district of New York and in the Western Reserve of Ohio (where the family moved in the early 1830s), Adeline Nichols also learned to question the logic of religious-sanctioned, male-dominated institutions. As she grew in knowledge—of the world if not of books—she became increasingly resentful when having to "sit Sabbath after Sabbath under the ministrations of an ignorant man" in order to avoid being branded an infidel. At times the family remained home from church "for want of proper clothing." Like other Christians who later left the church, the young girl believed in Jesus and his teachings but rejected "what is called the religion of Jesus." She cited two reasons: those calling themselves Christians who treated her in a condescending manner, and the hypocrisy of those who committed immoral acts even after they claimed to have achieved sanctification.⁵

Autobiographical references in Waisbrooker's speeches and novels suggest that she struggled to reconcile sexual desire with society's moral code. Pregnant at seventeen and forced to marry George Fuller on 12 April 1843 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, she "rued her haste" and "the blighting desolation which bowed me to the very earth" after being legally bound to "a comparative stranger." The stigma she felt as a "fallen woman" (because she gave birth to a daughter only five months after marrying) fueled her nascent interest in women's rights and awakened her to the need for sexual reform. It also provided her with the narrative strand for such later works as Helen Harlow's Vow (1870), a novel she dedicated "TO WRONGED AND OUTCAST WOMAN ESPECIALLY."⁶

In 1846, when she was widowed shortly before her twentieth birthday, Adeline Fuller quickly discovered the consequences of women's economic dependence on men. Lacking the financial means to support her son and daughter, she placed them with other families. Given the few employment options available to an uneducated widow at mid-century, Fuller chose to become a live-in maid. The sympathetic woman for whom she worked, she later reflected, "seemed to understand me better even than I understood myself," and she encouraged the young widow to seek education in order to become a teacher. Although it took two years to acquire six months' worth of schooling, Fuller recognized that this mistress had given her a far more valuable gift than money: "the encouragement which enabled me to use my own resources." Thus equipped, she set out to help another oppressed group when she accepted a position teaching African-American children in a rural Muskingum County, Ohio, school.⁷

At age thirty, familial and social pressure led Fuller to relinquish her independence on 9 August 1856 when she entered into a brief and unhappy second marriage to Isaac Snell. Her father, she later recalled, pressured her to wed a man "for whom she had no attraction" because the marriage offered social and economic advantages. Such reasoning, and subsequent unhappiness, further informed her critique of this patriarchal institution. By 1860, Adeline Snell had left her marriage, moving to Miami County, Ohio. Her children, census data confirm, remained in the families with whom she had placed them; however, she appears to have maintained cordial relations with them, visiting both periodically for the remainder of her life, and at times making her home with them.⁸

In the late 1840s, Spiritualism, a belief in the possibility of communication with the dead, began spreading throughout the nation. This religious and reform movement, argues historian Ann Braude, "helped a crucial generation of American women find their voice" because it freed their minds from artificial constraints and provided a venue in which they could speak freely without fear of censorship. An alternative to paternalistic Christian denominations, it empowered women to reject externally imposed laws and social codes of behavior. Saying goodbye to her unhappy past, Adeline Nichols Fuller Snell joined many other Americans in discovering the liberating power of Spiritualism. By 1863 she also had chosen a new name—Lois Waisbrooker—to go with her new identity. Over the course of the next five decades, this movement challenged Waisbrooker's worldview, provided a marketplace for ideas, and offered a national network through which she could generate an income and cultivate relationships with reform-minded women and men.⁹

As a Spiritualist trance speaker—a vehicle through which spirits spoke—Waisbrooker drew upon her experiences as an impoverished child, widow, and unhappily married woman to critique the men who controlled the nation's purse strings, pulpit, press, politics, and women. By addressing such topics, she soon became branded by the press a "free lover." As Waisbrooker learned through her journey as a woman alone, men often expected independent women to have loose morals. In the early 1860s, while riding on a train, a soldier boarded the car and sat beside her. After a few minutes he proposed that they should spend the night together. "He had," Waisbrooker recalled, "but one idea of a woman who traveled." The seriousness of such subjects notwithstanding, Waisbrooker tried to retain her sense of humor. On one occasion, after hearing an enthusiastic woman in the audience exclaim "The Lord sent you here," she quickly rejoined: "Most of the people think the devil sent me."¹⁰

Tempered by her youthful struggles and subsequent experiences as a wife, widow, and divorcee, Waisbrooker fearlessly lectured on such controversial topics as illegitimacy, free love, motherhood, and women's rights. Like members of the National Woman Suffrage Association (organized in 1869 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony), she repudiated male spokesmen and women who thought like men, maintaining that only free women like herself could speak on woman's behalf. The survival of the human race, she asserted, depended upon women's liberation from social and economic constraints; only then could they conceive "a god-like race" and claim their birthright: freedom. One of the first steps toward perfect motherhood, she wrote late in the century, "is to secure to woman freedom from intrusion upon her person, even by a husband."¹¹

Spiritualism provided a supportive network that sustained Waisbrooker and other self-supporting women financially. Such Spiritualist periodicals as Boston's Banner of Light and Chicago's Religio-Philosophical Journal contain numerous announcements of women's availability for speaking engagements and advertisements for their services as clairvoyants, psychometric readers, and healing mediums.¹² The Spiritualist network also served as a safety net for aging or infirm colleagues. During one of her periodic bouts with illness, Waisbrooker in the late 1860s took refuge with a Spiritualist and friend in Buffalo, Missouri. During that time, she devoted herself to writing, producing her first novel, Alice Vale: A Story for the Times, and a series entitled Spiritual Tracts. Her host, eager to aid Waisbrooker's work, announced the availability of the modestly priced tracts (bearing such titles as "What is Spiritualism," "Hell," and "The Laws of Mediumship") and urged readers to support the author by purchasing them. "These are documents which should be scattered broadcast over the land," wrote E. Hovey, a Spiritualist from Buffalo, Missouri. "They do lasting credit to the head as well to the heart of woman." In addition to praising the tracts' merit, Hovey encouraged readers also to "Remember the widows and fatherless in their inflictions, especially, such as do not wish to be numbered on the lists of " 'The Indolent' or the 'Superannuated.' " While Waisbrooker disliked being categorized as "superannuated," she did not object too strenuously when her works began to sell.¹³

Many of the didactic novels and polemic tracts Waisbrooker wrote after 1868 portray young women victimized by the sexual double standard, and employ frank language to describe woman's sexual enslavement in marriage. Informed by her unsatisfying marital experiences, and those of women she had met while lecturing, she proclaimed: "If there is one act in heaven more criminal than another it is the crushing of a young and innocent girl into a loveless marriage." It was, she elaborated, "prostitution of the worst kind. . . ." Her readers concurred. While they found Waisbrooker's Alice Vale: A Story for the Times (printed by the Banner of Light publishing office in 1869) "interesting," their enthusiasm for Helen Harlow's Vow (1870) ensured that the latter would remain in print for most of the century. Recounting the story of a young woman's seduction and desertion, and her subsequent efforts to raise a son while coping with societal prejudices, Helen Harlow's Vow tackled the issue of the sexual double standard. Waisbrooker's message—that woman must free herself because no one else would—struck a responsive note with mothers who, like Mrs. Lavinia Woodard of Fruitland, Illinois, encouraged other readers to "place it in the hands of your daughters." They would, she explained, learn from the title character's example "that if woman respects herself, she will always command the respect of others." "There are few families in the land," observed a reader in Laona, New York, "that cannot apply some part of Helen Harlow's experience."¹⁴

On the lecture circuit and in her writings, Waisbrooker urged female listeners to claim the power inherent in their reproductive role. "How shall this power," she asked in a pamphlet based on a speech she had given before the Michigan State Association of Spiritualists in 1872, "be made to serve instead of ruling us?" Blaming women's economic dependence on men for their sexual bondage, she advocated that at eighteen every woman should receive a monthly stipend from the public treasury in recognition of her contribution to the reproduction of the race—and to free her from dependency on men. Society's problems, she believed, "must be finally solved through an application of the laws of maternity, woman having the power . . . to make proper conditions for her highest work." However, the use of contraceptives did not fit into Waisbrooker's scheme. Regarding them as "unnatural," she observed that such devices rendered women subject to men's desires, not their own. Until such time as women could experience sexual satisfaction without fear of the consequences, they would have to exercise the self-control that men could not. As she declared: The "quickest way to raise the human [race] . . . is to thoroughly respect sex and sex relations . . . leaving woman to decide when, where, and with whom these relations shall be held, holding her responsible for the results."¹⁵

In the 1870s, with the nation caught in the grip of a devastating economic depression, questions of economics and power resonated with many working-class women and men. As they began to debate such issues, Spiritualists splintered into two factions: the many middle-class adherents who preferred to define Spiritualism as a religion, and those who, like Victoria Woodhull and Moses Hull, envisioned it as a broad social reform movement. That Waisbrooker sided with the latter camp is evident in the increasingly political focus of her publications. She explored causes of the nation's economic depression in a pamphlet titled "The Sexual Question and the Money Power" (1873) and in an introduction to Joel Densmore's Economic Science; or, The Law of Balance in the Sphere of Wealth (1875). Moving to Battle Creek, Michigan, a haven for health reformers and Spiritualists, she in 1873 began publishing Our Age, a short-lived Spiritualist reform periodical devoted "to the interests of Spiritualism in the broad sense of that term." No issues are extant today, yet editors of other radical reform periodicals of the era preserved some passages when they excerpted from its content. From the fragments of excerpts that survive, it is possible to discern Waisbrooker's sympathy for farmers and workers who contended with railroad monopolies and the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, prompting her to call for a national economic restructuring based upon a new, cooperative social order: "This present unjust, unbalanced condition of things must break in pieces of its own weight, and then we shall want something lasting upon which to reconstruct."¹⁶

Abandoning Our Age in 1874 because of her recurrent poor health and inadequate funding, the forty-eight-year-old editor attempted to express her views on such subjects as monetary reform and monopolies in the Spiritualist press. Rejecting her contributions, editors of Boston's Banner of Light and Chicago's Religio-Philosophical Journal sided with those who envisioned Spiritualism as a religious impulse, not a reform movement. They not only silenced her ideas but also sealed off a crucial outlet by which she supported herself by refusing to advertise her works. As Waisbrooker confided to free lover, Spiritualist, and Greenback Party supporter Moses Hull, the editors did not want to discuss the "bread and butter question."¹⁷

Physically and economically depleted, Waisbrooker traveled to California in 1874 and sought temporary refuge with her son Abner Fuller, who in the mid-1870s had moved from the Midwest to Contra Costa County. Using the small community of Antioch as a home base, she established herself in that region by connecting with reform-minded Spiritualists up and down the coast. During the next two years she sustained herself by visiting friends and lecturing in their communities. In San Francisco by 1876, Waisbrooker attempted to unite her geographically dispersed colleagues in reform who, like her, saw the questions of property and legal marriage as inextricably linked. Through the pages of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly and Hull's Crucible, two reform-minded Spiritualist publications, she invited men and women who were "free" and "ready and willing to assert their freedom" to join her in a ring of personal correspondence.¹⁸ (She also may have seen this venture as an outlet for the sale of her books and pamphlets.)

After the cessation of both Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly and Hull's Crucible in 1877, radical social reformers like Waisbrooker still could turn to Ezra Heywood's The Word, published with his wife Angela from their home in Princeton, Massachusetts, since 1872. In the eyes of some midwestern and western readers, however, Heywood's East Coast publication did not devote enough attention to the plight of rural laborers in the western half of the nation. Still, Heywood and Waisbrooker shared an avid interest in the relationship between the sex question and economic matters, and a belief that any meaningful discussion required the use of plain language. After Heywood was convicted and jailed in 1878 for publishing and distributing a free love treatise titled Cupid's Yokes, Waisbrooker was prompted to write The Plain Guide to Naturalism (1879), a tract in which she articulated her belief that sexuality would provide the human race with the key to immortality.¹⁹

In 1883 Waisbrooker returned to the Midwest and settled among longtime Spiritualist friends in the farming community of Clinton, Iowa. Home to a water-cure resort and the Mount Pleasant Park Spiritualist camp meeting (which is still in existence), Clinton served as headquarters for her new endeavor, an 11 x 17-inch bimonthly journal first issued in 1885. Foundation Principles, "the rock upon which Motherhood Must Rest," circulated to several hundred subscribers who paid fifty cents a year for the four-page publication. To make ends meet, Waisbrooker often set the type and operated the hand press herself. A typical issue contained her opinions on current affairs, especially as they related to women and economics; her own works in serialized form; printed excerpts from reader correspondence; and advertisements for radical books, pamphlets, and periodicals, many of them her own. Thus, Foundation Principles became an important avenue through which Waisbrooker disseminated her feminist message while earning just enough to sustain her body. In 1886 yet another bout of poor health interrupted her editorial career. Turning over management of her publication to anarchist, freethinker, and Spiritualist Jay Chaapell, she returned to her son's California home.²⁰ Although she later resumed publication of Foundation Principles from Antioch, Waisbrooker lacked the resources to print more than an issue or two.

Until 1886, Waisbrooker found the thought of anarchy "hateful" or discomforting, but Chicago's Haymarket Riot (4 May 1886) and the subsequent execution of four anarchists caused her to reconsider and then embrace this cause. With other reform-minded Spiritualists, she looked to the anarchist press as an outlet for exploring the social and economic problems that plagued rural and urban working-class women and men during the economically tumultuous late-nineteenth century. Her readership did likewise. Many subscribers to Foundation Principles also read Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, an anarchistic free-thought weekly published in the rural community of Valley Falls, Kansas. Begun by Moses Harman in 1883, it advocated woman's emancipation from sex slavery and encouraged readers to engage in vigorous print-based discussions of sexual and economic topics. Like his counterpart, Word editor Ezra Heywood, Harman challenged Anthony Comstock and his army of postal inspectors by publishing frank words and "obscene" subject matter. Lending her support to Harman's endeavor, "Sister Lois" contributed frequent letters for publication and relied on Lucifer to advertise her publications.²¹

The Panic of 1893 and the ensuing years of economic depression created a receptive audience for socioeconomic critiques of society, especially in the nation's heartland, and provided a reinvigorated Waisbrooker with reasons to resume her role as an editor. Moving to Topeka, she resurrected Foundation Principles and continued lecturing to fund her endeavor. Supportive of her efforts, Harman gave Waisbrooker the use of his subscription list and arranged a "club" (reduced) rate for subscribers who wished to receive both publications. Additionally, Harman invited her to serve as acting editor of Lucifer in 1892–93 while he served a prison sentence after one of his four convictions for sending "obscene matter" through the mail. After his conviction, Waisbrooker decided that it was time for a female editor to challenge the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal crime to send obscene material through the mail. As she anticipated, postal inspectors banned from the mail the issue of Lucifer in which she reprinted part of a government document discussing the horse's penis. However, the postal authorities decided not to press charges against her, perhaps because they may have regarded her as Harman's puppet, or did not wish to prosecute a woman.²²

Stepping down from her acting editorship in 1893, Waisbrooker remained in Topeka, where she continued editing Foundation Principles. She also established the Independent Publishing Company because she knew that few publishers elsewhere would associate their names with "sex books." She whetted people's appetites for such of her works as The Wherefore Investigating Company, The Occult Forces of Sex, A Sex Revolution, and The Fountain of Life, or, The Threefold Power of Sex by publishing them serially in Foundation Principles. Typical advertisements contained endorsements from such well-known Populist speakers as lecturer Mary E. Lease, who praised A Sex Revolution (a small book about women who, as a sex, went on strike) for giving "expression to my thoughts so clearly that it almost startled me," and from the Nonconformist of Tabor, Iowa, which proclaimed: "Helen Harlow's Vow: Buy It. Read It. Then Lend it to your Neighbor. It will do more to kindle hope, revive the heart, and stimulate ambition . . . than the bible has ever done."²³

No subscription list for Foundation Principles survives, yet it is possible to reconstruct some information about its readership by analyzing reader correspondence. Waisbrooker's publication circulated widely, with correspondents living in at least twenty-four states ranging from Maine to California. The largest numbers, however, resided in rural Kansas, Illinois, and Iowa, where the population had for years suffered the consequences of prolonged drought, unfair working conditions, and economic depression. A female reader from Lily Dale, New York, wished that the fifty cents she sent could be fifty dollars "to help fight woman's battle which she doesn't know enough to know needs fighting." Many struggled to accumulate enough money to renew subscriptions and purchase the radical books and pamphlets for which they yearned. "Of course I desire to help on all reforms," wrote Harriet from Chicago in 1894, "but what good does it do when you have no money in your pocket." Signing herself "Not a Nickel," another reader confided that after selling cattle, paying debts, and taxes, her family only had five dollars left. "We need so many things I don't know what to get first, but it seems as if I could hardly live without some good paper. My papers are about the only real company I have." Although Waisbrooker carried subscribers after their subscriptions lapsed, she had a low tolerance for readers who claimed they could not pay for subscriptions or publications, accusing them of refusing to make sacrifices. "Do you not believe that if your soul went out to the cause of woman's emancipation as earnestly as your words seem to imply," she admonished, "you could save that much a week toward sustaining a paper devoted to woman's cause?"²⁴

Women comprised slightly more than half (52 percent) of the ninety-four individuals whose letters appeared in Foundation Principles from mid-1893 through November 1894, making it one of the few, if not the only, sex radical periodical in which women's voices outnumbered men's. (Indeed, the percentage may be even higher if one considers that some correspondents disguised their gender by using initials when they wrote.) Correspondents ranged from young girls of ten to octogenarians, and included anarchists, dress reformers, free lovers, freethinkers, Spiritualists, and advocates of women's rights. Little-known women like Mattie E. Hursen, a Michigan dressmaker who earned her living by sewing for prostitutes, Kansas farmwife Ada Starke, and Chicago anarchist Lizzie M. Holmes joined such well-known figures as California social reformer Caroline Severance and dress reformer Mary E. Tillotson in airing their views. Mothers and daughters like Mrs. Annette and Loretta Nye of Northwood, Iowa, eagerly ordered and discussed books and pamphlets.²⁵

Readers who corresponded to Foundation Principles and its sister periodical, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, developed and sustained a sense of community that spanned both distance and time. Some knew each other from their earlier involvement in antebellum reform causes. Regular contributors included lapsed Quaker author Elmina Drake Slenker, who conducted a correspondence bureau for radical men and women in search of their spiritual affinities. Siblings Lillie D. White, Lizzie M. Holmes, and C. F. Hunt had lived as children among the Berlin Heights Free Lovers in north-central Ohio. Holmes, who served as assistant editor of The Alarm (published by Haymarket anarchist Albert Parson), remained dedicated to radical social reform for over forty years. Spiritualism served as the connecting link for several editors who read and commented upon Waisbrooker's works. One of them, English-born James Vincent, a farmer of Tabor, Iowa, evolved from Spiritualism to free thought and edited a periodical titled The American Nonconformist. Another, Chicago-based dress reformer and member of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) Lucinda B. Chandler, found supportive colleagues among readers of Foundation Principles and Lucifer, the Light-Bearer after NWSA members shunned her for printing works about sexual topics at her deceased husband's publishing firm. Many others found similar comfort in the sense of community Lois Waisbrooker's publications afforded them. "I cannot do without your paper," wrote Ellen H. Taylor in August 1894. "Its arrival is welcomed as I would receive an old friend whose thoughts are congenial with my own."²⁶

In addition to connecting with one another, many of Waisbrooker's subscribers came to regard her as a trusted friend and confidante. "There are near me very few lady friends," wrote one woman, "who are not astounded and mortified when I approach such a subject as sex slavery." "You seem nearer and dearer to me than many of my blood relations," confessed a correspondent from Junction City, Washington. "I never write what I feel to any of them."²⁷ Readers credited Waisbrooker with awakening them to their constraints as well as their potential. "I am not the only one that your books have saved from the insane asylum," wrote a devotee in 1898. Others concurred. "I don't know what would have become of me but for reading [Waisbrooker's books]," confided a young teacher. "I have realized the hell of a broken home, but with the knowledge I have gained by reading The Occult Forces of Sex, The Fountain of Life, and My Century Plant, I have learned how to live and am happy in my second marriage."²⁸

Those who shared Waisbrooker's reformist zeal supported her work by sharing copies of Foundation Principles with their friends and relatives. A woman wrote from Council Bluffs, Iowa, "I wish every mother in the land could have it to read." Some, in their eagerness to proselytize, sent Waisbrooker money and asked her to mail Foundation Principles to distant friends.²⁹ Others attempted to recruit subscribers in their communities but discovered that not everyone was receptive to its content. "The trouble is," complained E. H. Underhill of Elmira, New York, that "so few people are intelligent or progressive enough to appreciate thoughts on such an advanced plane." Undeterred, George McNinch of New Basil, Kansas, promised to "keep right on distributing the papers" even though people thought they dealt "with spiritualism and immoral topics."³⁰

During her seventeen-month-long editorship of the revived Foundation Principles, the "small woman with a pleasant and intellectual face" insisted on maintaining an uncompromising stand on free speech. Consequently, in June 1894, one of Anthony Comstock's agents named McAfee entrapped her by posing as a sexually dissatisfied husband in search of marital advice. Waisbrooker published his letter verbatim in Foundation Principles, someone forwarded the issue to Washington, D.C., and on 1 August 1894 a postal inspector arrived in Topeka to arrest her. She did not flinch; indeed she relished the prospect of martyrdom, declaring that "if Prison will advance the work I am ready."³¹

Readers of the 1 September 1894 issue of Foundation Principles learned of the arrest in an article titled "Arrested! Noticed at last!" Rallying to her defense, they sent words of encouragement and enclosed small donations—ranging from fifty cents to one dollar—in support of the legal battle that ensued. Eliza H. Fales of Tonawanda, New York, could not send money but declared that in the past fifteen or twenty years that she had read Waisbrooker's publications, she "never saw a word or sentence that ever reminded me of anything that was obscene." Writing from Madrid, Iowa, Abbie C. Culver declared that "every fiber" of her soul vibrated "in sympathy with your efforts to inform woman and elevate the standard of social purity." Some viewed Waisbrooker's case as part of the class struggle. "We never hear of any great and wealthy papers," observed W. A. Wotherspoon from Abilene, Kansas, "being prosecuted under this infamous statute. It is only poor and struggling advocates of social reform . . . that are selected as victims."³²

Federal officials were determined to stop Waisbrooker's defiant actions once and for all. "Mrs. W.," wrote U.S. attorney W. C. Perry in 1896, "has been a cause of serious complaint for a number of years. The Post Office Department has no desire to be severe with her, but desires that the case be so disposed of that she be made to cease her filthy publications for all time to come." Because of her age, Perry offered Waisbrooker's attorney, Populist Ben S. Henderson, a deal: if she would plead guilty, the sentence would be suspended "on account of ill health and extreme age during good behavior." Upon learning of this offer, Waisbrooker declared that she would never confess herself guilty to save herself from the consequences. "No! not to escape the gallows. If I have so long been a cause of serious complaint why have I not been informed?"³³

Waisbrooker printed her last issue of Foundation Principles in mid-November 1894, but she remained in Topeka until 1896 because of her legal battles. The numerous delays in the prosecution of her case, which finally ended in a dismissal in the spring of 1896, heightened her hostility toward government.³⁴ Returning to San Francisco, home to the anarchist publishers of the periodical Free Society, she rented a room on Market Street from a German-born family whose other boarders included factory workers and mining experts. Waisbrooker thrived in the midst of this supportive group of working-class radicals who read voraciously and met frequently to engage in vigorous debate. Increasingly politicized, her articles addressed such socioeconomic issues as Chicago Mayor Carter Henry Harrison's plan for poor relief in Chicago, polygamy in Utah, conditions for working women everywhere, and prostitution. The solution to these and other problems plaguing the nation, she asserted, was "to set woman wholly free and secure her in her right to her own person. . . . Give us anarchy here, secure woman self-government, and all else will follow as a matter of course."³⁵

Despite financial struggles and ill health, Waisbrooker remained determined to continue her agitation on behalf of women's social and economic independence. The Panic of 1893 and its lengthy aftermath, however, had had a disastrous impact on the rural and urban working-class women (and men) who consumed her works. "I am receiving no orders for books," she lamented in 1897. "Have the friends forgotten that I need bread, shelter and street car fare—yes and postage and paper? I could speak every Sunday to good audiences were I able, but there is no pay in it. . . . The landlord gets what is collected." Determined to advance the cause, she freely gave pamphlets to her radical colleagues, much to the chagrin of Lucifer editor Moses Harman. "Cost," he observed, "is a ploughshare which opens the soil of people's mind." People will read "contraband truth," he elaborated, "when they would not use it free."³⁶

In January 1900, on the eve of her seventy-fourth birthday, Waisbrooker announced plans from her rented San Francisco quarters to begin yet another small monthly, this one to be titled Clothed with the Sun. Although she was a freethinker, Waisbrooker took the title from Revelations 12:1 because it celebrated woman as the giver of life and underscored the importance of embracing light, or truth, if women wished to achieve their destiny. Contributors sharing this sentiment included the poet and author Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Calling for the scientific study of woman's sexual desire, Waisbrooker remained determined to awaken women to their sexual and economic enslavement: "Oh, woman, WOMAN! Wake up and demand your Liberty!"³⁷ From the onset, however, Clothed with the Sun was plagued by such obstacles as a small base of subscribers and postal rulings that denied her affordable postage rates. The subscription list of a publication mailed as second-class matter, she explained to readers, must be approximately 50 percent of the copies issued. Evidently Waisbrooker either gave away or sold in person more copies than she sent through the mail. Issuing an urgent call to her supporters, she informed them that the publication would be delayed until "those who are willing to aid me in paying this extra postage" stepped forward with cash donations or subscriptions.³⁸

In 1900 the publishers of Free Society decided to move their editorial offices to the supportive environment of Chicago, but Waisbrooker remained behind. She recalled the effect prior winters spent in the Midwest had had on her health. After issuing a few numbers of Clothed with the Sun from San Francisco, she moved instead to Puget Sound in Washington State where she joined comrades living at the small settlement of individualist anarchists known as the Home colony. According to historian Charles LeWarne, Home "tended to attract individuals united by their very differences and their receptiveness to new ideas."³⁹

Little known before 1901, Home became the target of attacks after the assassination of President William McKinley by the self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz on 6 September 1901. Short of vigilante action, one way to inhibit an anarchist community's functioning was to prosecute publishers of its periodical, Discontent: Mother of Progress (begun in 1898) for violating the Comstock Act. Like Free Society, it provided anarchists and freethinkers with an open forum for views on a wide range of topics, including sex and economics. The judge in the case found in favor of Discontent, but the grand jury next indicted Waisbrooker for publishing an allegedly obscene article entitled "The Awful Fate of Fallen Women" in Clothed with the Sun, and Home postmistress Mattie D. Penhallow for mailing it. Supporters across the country rallied to the septuagenarian Waisbrooker's aid by sending money and words of encouragement to Home for her legal defense. Penhallow was acquitted, but the jury found the editor guilty. A sympathetic judge assessed Waisbrooker the minimum penalty: a fine of one hundred dollars.⁴⁰

Waisbrooker returned to Home, where she continued to subsist by publishing intermittent issues of Clothed with the Sun, selling her works, and providing consultations through the mail. She promised to respond privately, for a fee of one dollar, to readers who did not wish to have their inquiries about sex and marriage appear in print. Additionally, she offered a service known as "name reading." For fifty cents she would "read the character" of a correspondent's name. Charging less than the usual price of one dollar, Waisbrooker explained that she was "not proficient." At age seventy-seven, she also continued to lecture on her reform ideas, both at Home and in other states. Longtime supporters like Spiritualist Olivia Shepherd expressed admiration for her determination: "Ever earnest in the cause of woman's full emancipation, she continues to pour solid shot into the reactionaries." Readers recalled hearing her as children, and commended her for the new ideas she had awakened in them.⁴¹

In 1903 Waisbrooker informed readers of Lucifer that she had "put up another number of the magazine on the little press." She actively involved readers in the production of Clothed with the Sun, informing them "Only two more numbers and then another volume. Think how much the paper depends upon PROMPT RENEWALS." Additionally, she promised to give as many copies as readers wished, "for distribution," to all who contributed to the paper's cost. And if this was not enough, she reminded them of her sacrifices: "I am glad to give MYSELF to the work. Please help to furnish needed tools." Such pleas prompted concern and a measure of pity on the part of her friends, who expressed sadness to know that the fiercely independent woman "should feel the sting of making a personal appeal for the sale of her books."⁴²

Discontinuing Clothed with the Sun in the spring of 1904, Waisbrooker moved to Denver, Colorado, where she boarded with friends and continued to lecture and issue books and pamphlets. By then, however, her readership had begun to shrink. Some of her ideas about women's economic self-sufficiency now appeared in mainstream publications, but many "New Women" of the 1890s and early 1900s did not share her uncompromising view of men as destructive and [utterly?] lacking in self-control. Nor did they share her belief that contraceptive devices enslaved rather than liberated women. Some supporters had grown uncomfortable with her embrace of anarchism; others, aged like herself, struggled to remain financially solvent. Dependent upon subscriptions and sale of her books and pamphlets for a livelihood, Waisbrooker's plaintive pleas for support gradually diminished her power as an editor. It pained friends and colleagues in reform to see the woman they had called "the mother of coming generations" making personal appeals for the sale of her books so she might have bread and shelter.⁴³ Penniless and dependent upon others for sustenance, she returned to her son's home in Antioch, California, where she died on 3 October 1909. Active to the end, her last article, "The Curse of Christian Morality," appeared posthumously.⁴⁴

Reflecting on her editorial career, Lois Waisbrooker in 1903 concluded that Foundation Principles had accomplished "a work for the Freedom of Mothers and for the right to be Born Well that is quite impossible to estimate in words or figures."⁴⁵ Through her periodicals Our Age and Foundation Principles, and in the publications to which she contributed—the spiritualistic Banner of Light and Religio-Philosophical Journal and the anarchistic Free Society, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, and Discontent—she joined with like-minded readers to construct an interpretive community devoted to the discussion of woman's freedom. Because of her role as an author and editor, Waisbrooker played a central role in this network, which collectively preserved an alternative strand of feminist thought as it evolved from antebellum Spiritualistic roots to a more anarchistic phase by the close of the century.

By the time of her death in 1909, Lois Waisbrooker had spent over forty years promoting assertive womanhood and the positive power of female sexuality. Her rural roots, her poverty, marital experiences, and exposure to Spiritualism all informed her critique of woman's status in society, and her writings resonated with rural and urban working-class women and men. A believer in progress—the idea that imperfect beings had the potential to advance to a higher plane of development—she regarded the demystification of sexuality as a necessary first step. As she achieved higher levels of understanding—of sexual politics and economics—she grew disillusioned with Spiritualism's increasingly cautious tendencies. Aligning herself with oppressed groups against the monopolies of business, church, and state, she also agitated on behalf of currency reform, free thought, and freedom of expression.

A competent, if not charismatic, speaker, Waisbrooker reached out to women through the printed word. Poor for much of her life, and largely self-taught, she wrote both to inform others and to support herself. Personal circumstances led her to focus on the economic roots of sexual inequality and to align herself with impoverished individualist anarchists and experimental cooperatives. With them she tested the limits of government tolerance by publishing material deemed obscene by Anthony Comstock and his army of postal inspectors. The venue of print enabled this editor to reach geographically, economically, and intellectually marginalized readers. After digesting her works in the privacy of their homes, those women and men interacted with one another by means of the letters that Waisbrooker reprinted in Our Age, Foundation Principles, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, and Clothed With the Sun. The interpretive community they formed not only sustained Waisbrooker ideologically and economically but also helped to make sure that her radical vision of what women's rights must entail would endure after her death.

[from Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work, by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey (2019), pp. 189-205.]

The Rhetorical Reputation of Forgotten Feminist Lois Waisbrooker

WENDY HAYDEN

The nineteenth-century forgotten feminist Lois Waisbrooker (1826–1909) once thought a woman should not speak in public (Waisbrooker, Suffrage for Woman 12). Fifty years later, she had several arrests for obscenity. What happened to transform this woman into the feisty octogenarian rhetor she became? What happened to make Waisbrooker, whose ideas about women's issues remain relevant, not even a footnote in most discussions of nineteenth-century women? This essay tells the story of Waisbrooker's unique rhetorical career to reveal the complicated issues of agency and reputation for communities of women outside mainstream women's rights movements.

A prolific writer on suffrage, religion, economics, birth control, and sexuality—among other topics—Waisbrooker challenges our conceptions of ethos and agency for nineteenth-century women in several ways. First, she subverts traditional ways women established reputations. While other nineteenth-century women rhetors highlighted their respectability in their ethical appeals, Waisbrooker contradicted this strategy. Rather than the "good [and chaste] woman speaking well" appeals to ethos that the scholars Patricia Bizzell, Susan Zaeske, and Nan Johnson found in their work on nineteenth-century women, this essay depicts a woman who cultivated a reputation as the antithesis of the respectable woman. Second, she embraced a reputation imposed upon her and created an ethos that addressed the marginalization of women who lacked class privilege. Waisbrooker's reputation was partially imposed by others and partially constructed by her. Her lower-class background, lack of education, and forced marriage because of pregnancy led to her status as a "fallen woman." This reputation allowed her to engage with topics other, more "respectable" women avoided.

Scholarship on nineteenth-century women rhetors highlights how women had to conform to gendered norms in order to cultivate an ethos that would protect them from censure for speaking in public. The movements that saw women taking on public roles—abolition, suffrage, and temperance, for example—allowed women to show how these activities did not negate their femininity, an argument Waisbrooker would also endorse in the early stages of her writing career. Scholarship on women's rhetoric has emphasized how women increasingly used what Arlene Kraditor has called the argument from expediency to justify their presence in the public sphere, highlighting their moral influence, rather than equal rights or the argument from justice. The participation of women in the suffrage, abolition, and temperance movements defined these as "feminine" enterprises.

But speaking and writing about women's sexuality—Waisbrooker's most common topic—could not often be framed as a moral duty, like other women's rights topics. Some women's rights advocates, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard, critiqued women's lack of status within marriage—in Stanton's February 8, 1861, speech to the Judiciary Committee of the New York Senate and Willard's 1890 "A White Life for Two," for example—but did not discuss women's sexuality explicitly, only alluding to it. Nineteenth-century women physicians addressed sexual topics more explicitly and used their medical ethos—as well as their feminine moral duty—to protect them from accusations of impropriety (Skinner 106). Other women, though, found themselves outsiders to organized women's rights movements because of their interest in discussing sexual relationships between men and women. In addition to Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, Angela Heywood, and Elmina Slenker, Waisbrooker became a target of the 1873 Comstock law banning "obscene" material from the mail (Hayden 52). And it is these women's careers that highlight agency and ethos as more than individual attributes.

Finally, Waisbrooker adds to our discussions of ethos, agency, and reputation because her rhetorical techniques were community-based. Discussions of rhetorical agency can lead to viewing it as an individual trait, with stories of heroic women overcoming strictures against public speaking to assert their rights. Scholarship in women's rhetoric has always been conscious of the need to refrain from creating a "great woman rhetor" canon. Recent scholarship on women's rhetoric has challenged us to interrogate the factors involved in rhetorical agency, revealing that examining these attributes as individual traits is limiting. For example, the editors of the recent collection Feminist Rhetorical Resilience adopted the definition of agency as "a strategic rhetor marshalling the available means of public action and responding efficaciously to the demands of immediate circumstances and larger historical-structural forces" (Flynn et al. 7). However, in adding their concept of rhetorical resilience to the concept of agency, they showed that both attributes are not "[qualities] of the heroic individual but . . . relational, not only because individuals learn moral qualities and derive social and material support through 'a web of relationships' but because resilience is in itself a form of relationality. Resilience . . . entails an ongoing responsiveness" (7). Sarah Hallenbeck similarly theorized that agency should not be ascribed to individuals but described within changing relationships and networks (19). She proposed "a posthuman theory of agency that rejects the human agent as the primary source of change but redeems that agent as a participant in the larger network of which he or she is a part" (19). Debra Hawhee and Diane Davis also endorsed this model because of the need to move beyond what Hawhee called "the hero-centric tendencies of feminist historiography" (123) to what Davis described as a "nonheroic notion of rhetorical agency" (88).

The subject of female reputation seems a natural fit for challenging an idea of the heroic woman rhetor. Reputation, after all, is not often something a speaker assigns to herself but is often ascribed to her. That is not to say, however, that examining female reputation in this manner relegates women to passive roles. Waisbrooker, for example, capitalized on a reputation first ascribed to her. Even then, we must view her actions not as part of a heroic narrative because she did not undertake them in a vacuum. Waisbrooker's rhetorical career, spanning the breadth of topics and techniques of nineteenth-century women, illustrates a narrative on women's agency celebrating not individual women who rose above restrictions on their rights but analyzing how communities of women outside mainstream women's rights movements responded to and empowered one another to capitalize on their "bad" reputations. She claimed several outsider identities, such as anarchist, spiritualist, and free-love advocate. These identities made her part of communities with similarly maligned reputations that aided her development as a rhetor. Examining Waisbrooker's rhetorical career in this way fits Royster and Kirsch's model of feminist historiography that makes "more visible the social circles within which [women] have functioned and continue to function as rhetorical agents" (24). Therefore, this essay reads Waisbrooker's agency and reputation not as individual attributes but as products of her radical communities.

Waisbrooker's Reputation and the "Respectable Woman"

Born Adeline Eliza Nichols in 1826 in Catharine, New York, Waisbrooker would not rename and reinvent herself until the 1860s. Her father, a day laborer, pressured her to marry at age seventeen. She was widowed by the time she was twenty, and her father pressured her into another marriage at the age of thirty. Waisbrooker bore two children from her first marriage whom she could not raise because of her financial circumstances. She then gained employment as a domestic servant with a family that encouraged her to become educated, an education she used to teach African American children in Ohio in the 1850s (Passet, Sex Radicals 114; Waisbrooker, Mayweed Blossoms). She later rose to prominence as a writer of spiritualist, anarchist, and free-love tracts, beginning in the 1860s and ending in 1907. By the 1900s, she earned all of her money through the sale of her writing, which was not enough to sustain her through frequent arrests for obscenity. She died penniless in the home of her son in Antioch, California, in 1909.

Waisbrooker had her own heroic narrative surrounding her call to speak. Describing herself as from the "the lower strata of life" (qtd. in Sears 231), she would say, "I did not come of a literary stock. . . . My parents worked hard for daily bread, had but little education, and less time to use it; consequently I grew up with . . . little idea of the world's greatest literary riches" (Suffrage for Woman 12). In a quest to educate herself, she attended public lectures in the early 1850s, and it was at one of these lectures, listening to a man "of scholarly attainments," that she was "cured . . . of [the] folly" of the "[prejudice] against woman's speaking in public" (12). She described her thinking this way: "I was a teacher of children, he of men and women; but while listening to the platitudes that fell from his lips, the conviction would force itself upon me that I was better qualified to teach the people than he was [and] 'Why should the fact that I am a woman be a reason that I should not?' " (13) Yet without the education and class status of many suffragists, Waisbrooker lacked the ethos to establish herself as a speaker and writer on women's rights until she identified with spiritualist, anarchist, and free-love communities. These identifications, while aiding her rhetorical agency, led to her erasure from women's rights history. She is not included in any publications by first-wave feminists preserving their movement, and she has gone mostly neglected by historians as well.

Waisbrooker earns only a brief mention in most historical accounts of nineteenth-century women activists. For example, Linda Gordon's comprehensive history of birth control advocacy in America mentions her only three times, each time in only a single sentence (100, 113, 124), despite Waisbrooker's prolific writing on the topic. Many histories of free-love advocacy in America ignore her (Stoehr, Spurlock), with Hal Sears's The Sex Radicals and Joanne Passet's work being notable exceptions. Pam McAllister, who recovered and wrote the introduction for Waisbrooker's 1893 novel, A Sex Revolution, in 1985, attributes the lack of critical attention paid to Waisbrooker to the difficulty of categorizing her interests (3). Historians have described her as an anarchist (Sears, Marsh), a sex radical (Sears, Passet), a freethinker (Gaylor), and "a feminist novelist and moral reformer" (Gordon 113), but, as McAllister accurately observed, "Researchers stumble over themselves when trying to name her primary area of concern" (4). Other historians have struggled with what they deemed Waisbrooker's confusing views on sexuality, describing them as so radical, yet "so Victorian" (Marsh 75; Willburn 73). Her concerns with spiritualism and other esoteric topics have also led to contemporary critics' confusion. Indeed, Margaret Marsh's history of anarchist women describes Waisbrooker's novels as "lacking literary merit" (73) and also calls her religious writings "bizarre" (74). Recent work has read her in the context of spiritualism (Willburn) and characterized her as a "grassroots" feminist (Passet, "Power through Print"). It is not a mystery why her current reputation is as an obscure and unique feminist since her areas of concern went beyond the topics we usually expect from women of the time. According to McAllister, "Waisbrooker was almost doomed to obscurity by her dedication to the odd integration of anarchism, feminism, free love, and spiritualism" (3).

During her own time, however, Waisbrooker provoked more interest. Though she was dismissed by organized women's rights movements because of her views on sexuality and even often marginalized within anarchist communities (Marsh 118, 172), she did have a following. In these accounts, she earned unique and flowery descriptions. Her contemporaries describe her as "the ablest champion of woman's cause . . . the still undaunted, unflinching and determined pioneer heroine and prophetess of the better time coming" (qtd. in McAllister 3–4). One person wrote, "I believe that future state will reveal that Mrs. W. has done more to elevate the standard of pure morality, has done more to help bind up the broken heart, and to show men and women how to live and bless the world than nine-tenths of the clergy have done in the past forty years" (qtd. in McAllister 4). The British birth control journal New Generation described her as "the strongest personality among American feminists" (qtd. in McAllister 3). Ezra Heywood, a famous anarchist and labor reformer, recollected: "I . . . met what seemed to be a Roman Sibyl, Scott's Meg Merrilies, enacted by Charlotte Cushman, Margaret Fuller, and Sojourner Truth rolled into one. . . . She rose, went up the aisle, mounted the platform, and the tall, angular, weird, quaint kind of a she Abraham Lincoln was introduced to the audience as 'Lois Waisbrooker' " (qtd. in McAllister 4).

Waisbrooker served as a leader in several reform organizations, including acting as president of the anarchist colony in Home, Washington, for a time (Marsh 118) and holding office in labor reform leagues (McElroy 83). She was respected within these communities as an activist, and they described her work as "philanthropic and ill-paid" (qtd. in McAllister 43). Moses Harman, writing to his readers in 1897 and asking them to buy Waisbrooker's books to help support her through a time of financial hardship, noted, "If any one of our many reform writers and lectures deserves to retire from active service on a life pension it is she" (301). These communities reveled in Waisbrooker's lack of respectability and called her work "pure" and "noble," even as she was called "vile" and accused of "corrupting and ruining the youth of this fair country" (Waisbrooker, "The Wail of Ignorance" 59), was depicted as "a wanton, frivolous, impure woman" by those attempting to prosecute her for obscenity (qtd. in McAllister 42–43), and was publicly accused of trying to break up a marriage in 1893 (Waisbrooker, My Century Plant 85–86). Such characterizations of her often helped rather than hindered her rhetorical reputation. When Moses Harman sought a woman to serve as editor of his periodical, he was advised by a contributor, "I regard pugnacity as a [requirement] and Lois Waisbrooker has it. . . . Don't call a 'respectable' woman to your aid" (qtd. in Sears 229).

Waisbrooker's Feminine Rhetoric

These depictions of Waisbrooker seem incongruous with the persona she adopted early in her rhetorical career. Though she did not share the same educational and class privilege as the most prominent female rhetors addressing these topics, Waisbrooker threw her voice into discussions of suffrage, temperance, and religion—topics popular for female speakers and writers by the time Waisbrooker began her rhetorical career, in the late 1860s. In these arguments, Waisbrooker departed from some of the more respected speakers on these topics, taking unpopular arguments. However, she first found her voice through an argument not seen as particularly groundbreaking today because it relies on a premise seen as essentialist: the inherent difference between men and women and women's higher morality. Yet, she offered something new to our understanding of such arguments because of her unique ethos.

In Suffrage for Woman: The Reasons Why, a pamphlet published in 1868, Waisbrooker made what by then was a popular argument: that women would exert a moralizing influence on politics if granted suffrage and that advances for women had not made them "less womanly" (10). She began the pamphlet with a defense of women entering the public sphere, which included their public speech; it is here that she related the story of how she had changed her view on women's public speech. This defense noted the accomplishments of women who had lectured in public and added herself to these voices as she maintained that these accomplishments had not taken women out of their "proper" roles: "But could I for a moment believe that I had retrograded, that I was less a woman in the high and holy sense of that term, I would never stand before an audience again. . . . I have not belied my nature as a woman by cultivating my talents, and lifting up my voice in behalf of justice, liberty and human fraternity" (13). Her arguments—both for women's speech and for woman suffrage—relied on the premise of separate spheres. In fact, she admitted a belief in an inherent difference between men and women but used that premise to assert women's rights:

I am only reiterating what you have so often asserted, but with the intention of making an entirely different application thereof. You assert that there is an essential difference between man's work and woman's. I agree with you most fully. You claim this difference as a sufficient reason for excluding her from the ballot-box, from having a voice in those laws by which she is to be governed: I, on the contrary, claim this difference as one of the strongest reasons why she should have the ballot and all its attendant rights. If her work was the same as man's she could easily be represented by him; as it is not, of course she cannot thus be represented; and, as carrying on any work whatever without the balance of power of the positive and negative, the male and female forces, God himself has never attempted it, as the sexuality of all nature abundantly proves. Is it a wonder, then, that man does not succeed, does not inaugurate perfect governmental relations so long as he excludes woman therefrom? (22)

Waisbrooker appealed to more conservative values here and seemed to blend the argument from expediency (based on women's difference) with the argument from justice (based on women's natural rights). Like earlier suffrage advocates, she asserted motherhood as women's highest calling (29). These types of arguments explain why Waisbrooker was often ignored in the early days of feminist recovery, since, as Carol Mattingly noted, early efforts often recovered women whose feminism was similar to our feminism (100–101). Susan Zaeske and Lindal Buchanan have emphasized the popularity in the early days of women's rights of arguments that relied on a "gendered morality" (203; 109). However, most arguments asserting women's higher morality often came from a place of more privilege than Waisbrooker was able to claim. Her lengthy introduction to Suffrage for Women defending her right to discuss the topic despite her having less education and fewer advantages than some other suffragists, shows that she added more of a working woman's voice into the suffrage debate but did so in a way that was unthreatening because it appealed to the same arguments as those made by women with more privilege.

Suffrage for Women is one of the early examples of Waisbrooker's rhetoric. Her other early works include didactic fiction. Again, she honed her voice in an acceptable venue for women while also reworking the genre for more marginalized women. From Alice Vale: A Story for the Times, published in 1869, to 1870's Helen Harlow's Vow, Waisbrooker offered stories of "fallen women" deserted by the fathers of their children, yet triumphing despite their perceived downfall. As a novelist, Waisbrooker experienced little success, though her 1893 feminist utopian novel, A Sex Revolution, received attention from twentieth-century literary critics. Her early novels are now digitally available through the Wright American Fiction database. The novels she produced throughout the 1870s led her to cultivate the voice that would find more success in nonfiction genres. She would later self-publish these novels and advertise them in the pages of periodicals catering to the radial communities she joined in the later decades of the nineteenth century, where she gained a wider readership and praise for the novels. In 1897, Moses Harman called her 1870 novel Helen Harlow's Vow "a pioneer work, and one of the very best yet written, to show what woman can do to free herself, and to conquer opposition when she resolves that she will not be crushed by man nor yet by her own sex" (301). Waisbrooker dedicated this novel to "Woman everywhere, and to wronged and outcast women especially." Her attempt to revise a popular women's genre to find a place for the "wronged and outcast" woman with whom she identified added to her ethos in discussing sexuality.

Finally, Waisbrooker began to write and speak about religion, which led her to even more controversial topics. Many feminist scholars have shown how women speakers used religion, particularly Christianity, to take a more active part in religious worship, which often transformed into rhetorical agency and the development of activism for women's rights. Waisbrooker found her religion not in Christianity but in spiritualism, a popular religious view in nineteenth-century America often ignored in discussions of women, rhetoric, and religion. Spiritualism was born in 1848 in New York, the same year and state that gave birth to another important women's rights cause. The central tenet of spiritualists was their belief in the ability to communicate with the dead. It was a philosophy that fit well with women's rights, since they believed women were more appropriate mediums. In fact, many spiritualists played into stereotypes about women as weaker, more sensitive, and more pious, which they used to argue that women made better mediums (Braude 83). Women's public speech and writing could then be justified by spiritual guidance (Braude 84), in a move one critic has described as contradictory, since it depicted women as "passive receptacles" (Guiterrez 190). Spiritualists welcomed those shunned by other circles because of their strong beliefs in equality. In her history of spiritualism and women's rights, Ann Braude has even claimed that spiritualism could be the ticket to the upper classes for many lower-class women (30–31). Examples are Woodhull and Claflin, who made money off their "mediumship" that funded their entry into the more prominent classes of New York City. Spiritualism was compatible with other radical ideologies of the time, including anarchism—based on their dislike of organized religion and government interference in religion—dress and health reform, feminism, and free love, or the belief that men and women should be able to exercise their sexuality free of government, church, or public mores. Though not all spiritualists advocated free love—in fact, some were adamantly against spiritualists using the religion to promote it—most free-love advocates were spiritualists (McGarry 11). The appeal of spiritualism had waned by the 1860s (Braude 98); by the time Waisbrooker found spiritualism, it was more about social reform than trances or mediumship (Passet, "Power through Print" 235).

Rather than focusing on communication with the dead, Waisbrooker defined the "spirit world" as "simply that state of existence correlated to soul and intellect" (Waisbrooker, My Century Plant 42). She credited her rejection of Christianity and her embrace of spiritualism with empowering her critical stance and recalled how forsaking her Christianity had led her to overcome her fears of what was appropriate for women. She appealed to other women to look within themselves and to critically examine every "institute of society" "free from the bias of previous teaching," rather than "measure [themselves] by man's measure" ("An Appeal to Woman" 2). To her, spiritualism represented a way to promote equality, which for Waisbrooker meant a higher spiritual state. Her embrace of spiritualism also nurtured her interest in discussing women's sexuality.

In the late 1870s Waisbrooker produced speeches and pamphlets that merged spiritualism with the topic of women's sexuality. She explored this connection in From Generation to Regeneration, or The Plain Guide to Naturalism, a speech she gave that she printed as a pamphlet in 1879 and 1890. Waisbrooker used the spiritualist belief in "regeneration," or life after death, as a starting point to discuss women's sexuality and sexual rights. The goal of her inquiry was to find the "purifying" use of sex (35), that is, to show that sex is more than physical and is also spiritual (43). She also critiqued how marriage had precluded this inquiry into what she called "higher uses" of sex because women lacked rights within marriage (29, 15). She argued for women's "right of sex association" and asserted that men who recognized women's needs and who saw sex as more than a means for procreation would help both men and women reach a higher spiritual state (53–59). It was the first of her many nonfiction works, including Three Pamphlets on the Occult Forces of Sex (1890) and The Fountain of Life, or the Threefold Power of Sex (1893), that posited the "purifying" uses of women's sexuality.

Though her work on suffrage and didactic novels created space for a working woman's voice within these debates, it did not show the kind of groundbreaking arguments for which Waisbrooker would later earn a reputation. It was her embrace of spiritualism that brought her to the topic of women's sexuality, the topic she would spend the rest of her rhetorical career examining. But it was not just the ideology of spiritualism that brought her to the feisty rhetorical persona she would adopt but the community of spiritualists. Her early works, though interesting, probably did not get read extensively. Once she began to write about spiritualism, she found a new and captive audience. She published her later works through spiritualist presses and periodicals, using spiritualist platforms exclusively to promote women's rights causes (Braude 80), particularly free love and women's sexual rights. Did spiritualism bring Waisbrooker to the topic of sexuality, or did her interest in sexuality bring her to spiritualism? Whichever way it happened, we can say that joining spiritualist communities aided her development as a rhetor.

"Don't Call a 'Respectable' Woman to Your Aid"

As she began to embrace radical philosophies, Waisbrooker participated in vibrant, opinionated discourse communities that published their ideas in several periodicals. In fact, many of these groups disdained formal organization, so they shared their ideas through periodicals, creating and sustaining communities exclusively through reading and writing practices. Though many spiritualist periodicals began to distance themselves from free love, those who subscribed to the radical idea that women should be able to express their sexuality with or without marriage found other forums. In the 1870s periodicals such as Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, Hull's Crucible, and The Word spread free-love ideology among small, dispersed groups of radicals. In the 1880s, the most popular, Lucifer, the Light Bearer began publication. Waisbrooker became a regular contributor to all of these periodicals. She served as editor of Lucifer in 1892 during Moses Harman's imprisonment for obscenity. She also produced two periodicals on her own: Foundation Principles from 1893 to 1894 and Clothed with the Sun from 1900 to 1902. These communities exchanged ideas on topics like free speech, birth control, and economics, and Waisbrooker's voice often became a dissenting one in these debates. Even as an insider to these communities, she held some ideas that caused her to be an outsider as well.

Free speech became a concern to these communities because at the same time these periodicals emerged, conservative factions sought to suppress "obscene material," leading to the 1873 Comstock law, which banned obscene material from the mail. The self-appointed—and then government-appointed—obscenity watchdog Anthony Comstock arrested all of the editors of these periodicals during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The periodicals then became spaces to debate issues of free speech, especially speech about sex. Moses Harman, editor of Lucifer, served several sentences for obscenity for publishing discussions of marital rape and birth control. Waisbrooker also became a target of Comstock. Her first arrest, in 1892, was for reprinting a Department of Agriculture book titled Special Report on Diseases of the Horse. Waisbrooker pointed out that its descriptions, if applied to humans, would be considered "obscene" literature (Sears 229–30). Another arrest, in 1902, was occasioned by an article called "The Awful Fate of Fallen Women," which appeared in Clothed with the Sun (McAllister 44). Defending what she called the "The Indicted Article," Waisbrooker said the essay, "Has not a sentence in it that I am not ready to defend, with my life if need be. I said that there are no fallen women in the sense the world understands the term—that they are knocked down. . . . I feel so deeply the wrong done to my sex, and see so clearly that any abuse of the sex functions, no matter how law-protected, is a most bitter curse, that I cannot be silenced. If imprisoned, I will go out in my astral body and control others to talk—multiply my power" (1). Fortunately, however, Waisbrooker was never imprisoned for these transgressions. Her advanced age and ill health at the times of these court cases worked in her favor ("Mrs. Waisbrooker's Case" 2). She continued to defend freedom of speech, equating "the medieval charge of 'heresy' [to] the modern charge of 'obscene literature' " ("The American Inquisition" 3) and naming Comstock "a chosen medium for the church hierarchy in spirit life" that insists on mandating an "arbitrary code of sexual morality" that goes against nature (My Century Plant 63, 48). Anarchist organizations rallied behind Waisbrooker, even helping to fund her defense (Clothed with the Sun 1). These communities were aligned with her goals of free speech, sex education, and frank discussion of sexual matters.

But Waisbrooker often became a polarizing figure in these communities, particularly because of her views on economics and on birth control. For example, when Waisbrooker suggested that women in sexual relationships should receive economic compensation, other free-love feminists attacked her for advocating a system as similar to prostitution as they believed marriage was. Waisbrooker clarified that a woman should not demand money from her partner but that the partner should be kind enough to realize that she needed it ("A Word to Lillian Harman" 269). She believed it was acceptable for women to accept money from men for the home if she controlled the home ("Woman and Economics" 238).

Though many feminists in these communities criticized Waisbrooker for her views on women and economics, it was her views on birth control that caused the most contentious debates. Women's right to birth control became a central tenet of the free-love and anarchist communities, and their discussions of contraception often brought them to the attention of Comstock. But Waisbrooker added an important voice to these debates. She dissented from the majority of these radicals with her objections to contraception. Her chief objection was that it placed the sole responsibility for birth control on women. In debating Moses Harman on his views, she asked, "Does not Mr. Harman know that no woman will bear a child unless man has first begotten it? It lies with him to limit the family, not with her, and when Mr. Harman . . . and others who advocate contracepts, will practice continence and rouse their brothers 'to a sense of their responsibility,' there will be no need for scientific, and so-called harmless appliances to prevent conception. I cannot speak for other women, but were I thirty instead of seventy, and life's strong tide demanded expression I would seek self-relief before I would enter into a sex relation with a man and scientific appliances between" ("Woman's Power" 125). Waisbrooker had proposed male continence or refrain from orgasm as the best option for birth control, and the "scientific appliances" she names were certainly unsafe but necessary options for women. Responding to Waisbrooker's views, the free-love feminist Amy Linnett objected that there might not be men willing to practice continence. She attributed Waisbrooker's rejection of contraception to an inferior view of sex. She elaborated: "many of our younger radical women [an obvious dig at Waisbrooker] are among those who are not ashamed to avow the deliciousness of their sex, as Walt Whitman puts it" (139). Finally, Linnett noted that "contracepts are the only means whereby some women can avoid having children, and should be recognized by our 'continence' advocates" (139). Another free-love feminist and Lucifer contributor, Elsie Cole-Wilcox, responded to Waisbrooker's objections to contraception by accusing her of adhering to the view that women were "devoid of sexual passion" (114). Waisbrooker replied, "I believe sex-association the natural right of the race" ("A Last Word" 150). She would continue to emphasize that women are not "less passionate than men" ("Who Protects the Wife" 385).

Criticisms by those who stood with Linnett led Waisbrooker to produce a book-length treatise on the subject in 1895, the sarcastically titled Anything More, My Lord? In this piece, Waisbrooker presciently pointed out that the discussion of birth control should be a discussion of economics. She showed that advocates of birth control often highlighted its benefits to the poor, since they could limit the number of children in poverty, an argument later used by Margaret Sanger. Waisbrooker argued, "Contracepts and charity are both efforts to cover up the wrongs of our present economic system by trying to fit people to conditions instead of conditions to the people" (8). She rejected the logic behind family limitation because it seemed to apply unequally according to social class. She pointed out that if the poor were being told to limit their families, why not limit the family size of the Queen of England, since the poor "are the real supporters of the queen's children" (12). She continued, "Has not the miner's wife as good a right to be a mother as the wife of the millionaire? Certainly she has, and a moral right to enough of the world's wealth to make her comfortable as a mother, but after having robbed her of this right, it is now proposed that it be made the basis of still further robbery. When woman's place and work, together with the higher uses of sex come to be rightly understood no prospective mother will lack any possible comfort" (14). Waisbrooker inserted an important qualification to this debate. Instead of rejecting birth control because of morality or advocating birth control with natural-rights arguments, as many anarchists and free lovers did, Waisbrooker showed that economic equality would correct the wrongs that others thought birth control would do. Like other radical feminists and anarchists, Waisbrooker noted how conversations on sexuality often neglected economic issues. Indeed, many of her later works focus on economic issues, including a book criticizing temperance advocates for ignoring the economic imbalances that lead people to become drunkards.

In The Temperance Folly; or, Who's the Worst, Waisbrooker lambasted temperance advocates for "dealing with effects instead of the causes which produce them" (1).¹ Her rejection of temperance also contradicted the views of her contemporaries. Many spiritualists supported temperance, and free lovers often highlighted drunk husbands as one of the many abuses of marriage. Waisbrooker, though, found temperance advocacy misguided because it unfairly disadvantaged the poor. Drunkenness, she claimed, was an effect of the wrongs of society—especially economic inequality—not the cause (13). She characterized temperance advocates as the upper class trying to control the poor: "You who think yourselves so exempt from the vices of others, had you been born under the same circumstances would be just what they are; and to deal with this subject intelligently means that you stop trying to suppress effects while causes remain untouched. It means that you must go to the root not only of this evil, but also of the most if not all the other evils of which you complain—the root is the economic system which permits a few to absorb and control the wealth that the many produce" (11). She refuted an argument that prohibiting liquor sales would lead the poor to have more money since they would not spend it in saloons: "The accession to the labor market that would be thus produced would tend to lower wages and this would be another of the ways by which the money previously spent on beer or poor whiskey would be stopped on the way to his pocket" (10). Her views on birth control and temperance correlated with her views on eugenics.

While many anarchists and free lovers supported eugenics because they believed that women's sexual freedom would enable them to produce "better" children, Waisbrooker was one of the few dissenters. Though she endorsed eugenics with the belief that "no well born child,—one born of a happy, satisfied, well-conditioned mother—will ever become a drunkard" (Temperance Folly 2), she disagreed with the many anarchists and free lovers who had moved from supporting women's sexual freedom to supporting eugenics as a way to free women (Hayden 207). Waisbrooker made many statements that seemed to support eugenics. For example, she often emphasized that the proper treatment of women during sexual relations and during pregnancy would enable them to bear healthier children. But she focused such arguments on the rights and equal treatment women should receive, with "better" children being one of the outcomes. To the anarchists who placed eugenics at the center of their women's rights arguments, she replied, "We want no money, time, nor talent 'applied to the production' of children, good or bad. What we need to do is to develop ourselves, to unfold and round out our own natures, to surround ourselves with all that tends to do this, and this not for the sake of children but because of the love of so doing, and we need to take no thought, to have no fear that our children will not follow the law of like producing like" (Anything More, My Lord? 8). She recognized that women's rights arguments would be in the service of supporting eugenics, not the sole focus of calls to improve women's condition. She would say, "The transformation from sex slavery to living for the next generation is not freedom" (Waisbrooker, Eugenics 65), an apt characterization of the ways free-love advocacy had subsumed women's rights in favor of eugenics.

Although communities of spiritualists, anarchists, and free-love advocates supported her, her ideas diverged from theirs in almost all cases, leading to a struggle among historians to place her within these movements and ultimately to her erasure. Waisbrooker's writings on free love, free speech, birth control, temperance, and eugenics help us to show the importance of what Diane Davis called the "responsivity" of rhetorical agency (3). She embraced a reputation as disreputable not only within mainstream movements but also within the communities that celebrated the lack of respectability that empowered her. She alienated anarchists with her spiritualist views (Marsh 71, 172; Waisbrooker, My Century Plant 41), free-love advocates with her views on the purifying power of women's sexuality, and free-love feminists with her views on economics and birth control. She pushed against some of their most cherished ideals of reform and heartily asserted, "I claim the right to think and act for myself independently of the arbitrary control of any personality or set of personalities in the universe" ("Woman's Power" 125).

Conclusion

Waisbrooker's disagreements with her associates did not stop them from rallying around her when she was arrested by Comstock for obscenity or from viewing her as one of their pioneers and leaders (Harman 301). Though she would claim to disdain any organizations and by 1901 rejected invitations to join spiritualist or anarchist organizations ("Organized Spiritualism" 2; "Organization" 1), these communities helped her to expand her ideas, distribute her writing, and become both a valuable leader and an important voice of dissent within them. Her inclusion within these communities allowed her to, in her words, "[scatter] liberalizing thought" ("Letter from an Old Contributor" 30). Royster and Kirsch noted the importance of social circulation to feminist rhetorical practices (24). The social circles of sex radicals and spiritualists, who conversed with one another as a community mostly through their writing in periodicals, help us to redefine the types of social circles women participated in. Waisbrooker can be seen as both an insider and an outsider to her intellectual circles—and both of these positions strengthened her rhetorical skill and reputation.

If ever we could tell the story of a heroic woman rhetor, one certainly could be told about Waisbrooker, but I don't think that is what is going on here, on the basis of my reading of her rhetorical career as a whole. She certainly had progressive ideas in the early days, but she did not express them wholeheartedly until she joined communities of first spiritualists and then anarchists, labor reformers, and free-love feminists. We could say she finally found the right audience for her ideas, but I think that takes away from her audience's role in her development as a rhetor and reputation. Finding the right community isn't just about finding a like-minded audience; it's about finding those who will push one to develop one's ideas and give one the strength to offer even wildly divergent views. Waisbrooker acknowledged the importance of these communities in a 1901 piece titled "My Critics Are My Friends," where she mused, "they help me to think, prompt me to review my ground and to explain my thought more fully if not understood" (2).