The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unstoppable: The Victoria Woodhull Story by Kate Danaher

Unstoppable: The Victoria Woodhull Story by Kate Danaher https://www.amazon.com/Unstoppable-Victoria-Woodhull-Kate-Danaher/dp/1970157828 Katedanaher.com “A compulsively readable portrait…a genuine pleasure…deftly paced and meticulously researched…full of rich characterization and well-observed historical detail.” — Kirkus, GET IT “With strokes of vivid emotion and lively dialogue…Danaher gives heartfelt humanity to WoodhulL…a rousing portrait of a forgotten, sometimes maligned figure.” — BookLife, EDITOR’S PICK VICTORIA WOODHULL AND THE COUNTRY THAT TRIED TO CRUSH HER. In 1872, in an America that denied women the right to vote, Victoria Woodhull dared to run for president. From a difficult childhood to the center of New York’s political and financial elite, Woodhull battles scandal, ridicule, betrayal, and impossible odds as she fights to claim power in a world determined to silence women. Alongside her brilliant and fiercely loyal sister Tennessee, she challenges the establishment, reveals the sexual exploitation of women and young girls by wealthy, powerful New Yorkers, and risks everything to demand equality. Unstoppable: The Victoria Woodhull Story is a sweeping historical novel about ambition, resilience, and one woman’s determination to change America long before the nation was ready to listen. HONORABLE MENTION, HOLLYWOOD BOOK AWARDS ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ WHAT READERS ARE SAYING * Wonderfully written and magically told * Love, love, love this book! * Fascinating history * Thoroughly enjoyable, can’t wait for the sequel * A great novel about a great American: Victoria Woodhull AVAILABLE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED! *Book Club Discussion Questions available on website, http://katedanaher.com* EARLY PRAISE Kate Danaher’s novel Unstoppable is a revelation—and I say this having written a biography of Victoria Woodhull myself. In her fictional account of this extraordinary character, Danaher combines the work of a skilled researcher with the flair of a poet to resurrect Victoria as she was, not as she has been incorrectly depicted for a century. This Victoria, Danaher’s Victoria is the true Victoria, and she is an inspiration. — Mary Gabriel, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of Ninth Street Women. Kate Danaher is an exceptional researcher, writer and storyteller. Right from the opening scene, the reader is swept into the world of American’s most famous woman of 1872. Danaher writes stirring dialogue, and her use of short, active scenes moves the book along beautifully. Historical fiction has a new starring voice, and it is that of Kate Danaher. — Marion Roach Smith, The Memoir Project Danaher accomplishes what the finest historical novelists—from Hilary Mantel to Geraldine Brooks—understand instinctively: the past becomes meaningful not when it resembles the present but when it reminds us how different intelligent, courageous people once understood the world. — Robert Rivenbark, Amazon bestselling author of The Cloud. About the author This is Kate Danaher’s first novel. She holds a Ph. D. in English Literature from the University of Delaware and is a former professor of English at Rosemont College, Pennsylvania. She is an Irish storyteller, fiddler, and a founder and emeritus board member of the Irish Heritage Theater in Philadelphia. She also performed with and served on the board of the Delaware Shakespeare Festival, and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London. Under the name Danaher and Cloud, she and her music partner, Amy Cloud Chambers, produced four Americana albums: Portraits, Late Bloomers, The Holiday Album, and the multi-award-winning album for kids, Just Kiddin’. All available on popular streaming services. An avid tennis player, she lives in Bonita Springs, Florida, with her husband, Bill Parks. They spend their summers in Troy, New York. Kate is currently working on Volume II, Shattered, of The Victoria Woodhull Story. Volume III, Victorious, will follow that.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in, keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Cause you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now here's your host, Chris Voss.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Hi folks, Chris Voss here from the Chris Voss Show dot com, the Chris Voss Show dot com. Welcome to this big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate having you guys. For 18 years, we've been here the most amazing podcasts in the world. The oldest podcast still in existence that still broadcasts one to two new shows a day. So be sure to further show to your family, friends and relatives, all that good stuff. Today we're talking about one wonderful young lady about her book called Unstoppable, The Victoria Woodhull Story by Kate Danaher. We're going to get into it with her stuff and all the stuff she's up to there. Welcome to the show, Kate. How are you?

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Fine, thank you. Great, great.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Great to have you. Give us a dot coms, websites. Where do you want people to get to know you better on the internet?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Oh, katedanaher.com. This is my name and check out the, the, the site. I have a nice little trailer there you can watch a one minute summary of the, of the movie and my latest reviews and story of a little background on Victoria and background on me and oh, big books, book, book club questions for anybody that wants, I'd be happy to do book clubs with anybody that in person or virtually. I'm available in New York and sometimes Pennsylvania area and, but in Florida also on the west coast. So I'm happy to do, uh, in person wherever I can.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  And they can reach out to you on your website. So give us a 30,000 over you, please, of what's inside your new book?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Inside my new book is the story of Victoria Woodhull, who was the first woman to run for US president in 1872, and she was jailed on election day. So that is the gist of it. It takes, it take, the book takes you, it's a kind of a epic, a bit of an epic, a beginning of one of her, her family. You see her at age 14, then by 15, she's, she's married and by 16, she has a severely disabled child. So she's in for some rough going because the husband is an alcoholic. That she starts out on a, on a very rough road and she learns on that rough road, what life is like for women, what few options they have.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Then she becomes a kind of, five years later, she, she gets the idea in her twenties that she got the idea from her sister that she could become a, a kind of what we would call a life coach, but a kind of healer. People would come to her for, if they had mental things they wanted to talk about or things they want to talk about their health and she would advise them because her husband was a doctor. So when he was in good shape, he could, he could help out. And, and so anyway, she did that. So she learned all through her twenties, what life was like for women in the country because they traveled, they were itinerant doctors, which wasn't uncommon back then.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  By the time she's 30 something and she lands in New York in the middle of Wall Street and the, all the comings and goings of the suffragists movement and, and she, she enters a new world. And so it, it, it opens up worlds for her and she thinks, I'm gonna, I could, I could maybe help out here because she went to a meeting and she heard, we need a new evangel. We have, we have been Elizabeth Cady Stanton says, we are still supplicants at the feet of men. And she's like, what the heck? They'd been working since 1848 is when they had their first women's rights convention. And we're talking now it's 1868.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  So 20, when Victoria's in New York, 20 years later, and she's like, what? They have, they need some help. And the funny thing was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she was one of the, she was the, one of the big women up there at the time, like doing important things. She and Susan B. Anthony, you may have heard those names, maybe not, but those were the two names. Elizabeth Cady Stanton did start that first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. And so anyway, Victoria heard the call and she followed it. She said, I, I could do this and, and she did. And then, so this is when the story really picks up speed because she's in the middle

• 4:54Speaker 02

  of, of a, of a really fast moving world and, and, and actually she, she wasn't poor when she got there. She had bought property along the way and things like that, but she in 18, a year after she got there, she made money because she had also become friends with Cornelius Vanderbilt. And she, he, he says that she advised him, her spirits told him what to do, but of course he probably could tell her also, here's what you need to do. Anyway, she made a lot of money on, on a day that was known in history as Black Friday. There was a big gold, gold crash, a kind of, and she bought in low, it went up high

• 5:39Speaker 02

  and she sold high and then it dropped. But she made her money. And so she was all of a sudden really more wealthy than she had been. She maybe wasn't wealthy before, she wasn't suffering, but, but she was now wealthy. And so that opened up some wonderful possibilities for her to, yeah. So she, she leased a beautiful home, started Sunday salons, started her own newspaper, started a, a Wall Street brokerage, started her own newspaper. She, yes, she and her sister became the first brokers on Wall Street. They couldn't go in, they had to send the men in to do the.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Serious.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, seriously. They weren't allowed in, but she had, then she, she started her own newspaper, she and her sister, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. And then she, then she declared herself a candidate for the US presidency. She thought, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna ask, can I do these things? I'm not gonna ask, can I, can I be on Wall Street? I'm just gonna do it. So she was very bold that way. And then, and then of course, as soon as you announce that you're a candidate for something, then all the knives come out and oh, she did this and she was that. And can we trust her? Who are, who are her antecedents? Where did she come from? And then they.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  They do all that background research and.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  And then she ends up being arrested, arrested on election day because people ask me that. Why? Why'd she get arrested? I said, she knew too much and she put what she knew in her newspaper. She knew, yes, she knew that powerful and wealthy New Yorkers were exploiting young girls and women sexually. And she, she put that in her paper.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And we kind of found that with the Epstein files that you.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yes, I know. It's very, it's so similar to today. She put that in the paper and of course they want, what do you have to do then? They gotta bring her down.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, they gotta bring her down. They don't, they can't be.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  So that was the effort. The effort was to bring her down and they got her in jail on election day. They managed to do that.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Did she get the votes? How did the votes turn out for her?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  They didn't, they didn't record all the votes like, and they, and they wouldn't. Yes, people did vote for her. We know that because there are newspaper articles that say, I voted for Woodhull and blah, blah, blah. So people did vote for her, but they didn't save the votes of the losing third and fourth parties and things like that. They just didn't save them. So there was no, no recording of how many actual votes she got. And then there's a question of whether did she really even think that she was going to win? It was more of performative art. Let's just say I'm going to do this. Let me just, let me just start the ball rolling here. When I have an, an argument and not really an argument where the sister says, oh, here we are, and we could be out there voting or, or looking at the votes. They couldn't vote, of course, only men could vote.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  So they, they, they weren't allowed to vote, although she did try in a local election. And she emboldened Susan B. Anthony, who tried, who voted in the, and got arrested, who voted in the national election or, or, and, but she said, it's, it's a shame that we're in jail on this day and, and you never know. And she said, and then I have a scene where Victoria says to the sister, I, I never really thought I was gonna win. Did you think? And she said, you could have fooled me. You went about it like you really were gonna win. And she said, no, don't you remember a year ago, I wrote, if I really wanted to win, I would go about this in an entirely different way. So that's an interesting thing to think about too. Would she have been so bold, so out there, so brave and courageous in the things that

• 9:23Speaker 02

  she exposed?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  And this was, so this is a historical novel.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  The first woman to ever run for the presidency. Do I have that correct?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  She could not vote for. In 1872, she couldn't even vote for herself because this is 50 years before women could vote. And what, what drew you to the story? How'd you find it? What drew you to it?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  That's another story. I was a screenwriter back in the day and I had a screenwriting partner. We did very, we did well. We, we won screen competitions in, when film festivals and things for our screenplays. And, and we were looking for a new, a new topic and my partner's wife said, why don't you write about Victoria Woodhull? We're like, who's that? What they, she said, oh, the first woman to run for president. And we're, oh my gosh. So this is back in. 2008, we started writing this. And we were off and on for a couple of years, trying to get, get a producer interested, but writing different versions of it, trying it one way, trying it another way, and entering it into competitions.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  And it was great fun because you'd get feedback and, and you'd get congratulations, you won best period drama and things like that. But then we weren't getting any traction and he had some opportunities to go elsewhere to work on other projects. I'm like, that's fine. And I kept thinking, I'm, I'm just gonna keep working at it. Maybe, maybe we need to start it in a different way. And I do that. Then I did get a producer interested.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  She called me one day and said, oh, I'd, I'd like to option your script. Where are, and where, where are you? I said, I'm in Sacramento. And she said, oh, do you ever come to LA? I said, I am going to LA and as soon as this festival is over, I'm going down there to see my son. So she said, I'd like to option it. I'm like, I don't know though. And she's like, what? No? And I'm like, yeah, no, not this script. It's not there yet. It's not there yet, I said, where it needs to be. And she's like, come down and work on it. But after saying it's not there yet, I won outstanding drama that night.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Oh, congratulations.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I know, it was very exciting. So that was, I know this well because I took the T-shirt and, and made it into a, it's in my basement, in my, my basement art, 2016. So this is eight years after I'd first started working on her, on her. So I go down and we're working on the script and, and this producer, she said, I, I wanna make sure that we're true to the spirit of Victoria and I, and I wish we could get somebody else to, to read it, cause I said, I feel like I can't quite capture. And I said, I know this lady, Mary Shear. And I met her years ago and she has a website called Victoria-Woodhull.com. Anybody wants to know about Victoria Woodhull? Anything you wanna know?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  That's where you go there and a website called Woodhull Rising.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Those two groups know everything, so much. There's never, there's always more to learn about her, but that's where you should go. Anyway, I got Mary Shear to agree to read the script. She said, she was very reluctant. She said, mm, I don't know, I don't wanna do, I don't know, I didn't know why. I'm like, why? And I, I thought, maybe she's busy. She said, no. Alright, I finally talked her into it. And she comes back and said, it's, it's a good, it's a good story. She's like, hesitant. I'm like, oh gosh, what's the matter? And she, I said, and? And she said, and the trouble is, it's all wrong.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I said, wrong? What do you mean wrong? Where, what? And she's like, let's start with the first scene. I said, that first scene, I know, I read it in, in this very well-respected book by Barbara Goldsmith called Other Powers. It says in there, according to her own account. She said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't trust that, she said, because according to her own account is not really true, because it's, it's according to the account of somebody who said it was her own account.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  And I'm like, what?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  What?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  And what else? And then she said, let's go to the second scene. You see, that didn't really happen either, because there's no evidence that there, there's a lot of myth that she, Victoria was like a child clairvoyant and she went around in a wagon with her father. Everybody loves these stories, these myths. She said, there is no evidence. I've checked all the newspapers. He advertised, the father did, when the young, younger sister was doing, she was selling, they, they sold a patent medicine. People say, oh, that was a snake oil. But that wasn't uncommon in those days to, to go around and, and go and sell medicine like that. It wasn't, a traveling salesman was not unusual. And it was also sold by wholesalers, drug wholesalers for $2 a bottle, which was very expensive back then.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  They had a, they had a, a salve that they believed in and a, and an elixir that they, they worked on. They did that because he lost, he lost everything in a fire. And then he, yeah, the father did. And then they had to pull up roots and figure out what to do with their lives. He still had children at home to, to educate and didn't worry so much about education, but just to feed.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  But anyway, that Victoria, Mary said, there's no evidence she did this. It's, you look at the advertisements, it's Tennessee, Tennessee, it's the younger sister. There are no advertisements for Victoria. She was not a child going around as a fortune teller with her father in the back of a wagon with tassels and things like that. That's all myth. And so you can't have that, you can't have this. She was not the, and then there's other things. Oh, she was the prostitute who ran for president. Oh, you can't believe that one either. Not that we had that part in our script, but there's so much out there. So I was like, okay. She said, yeah, basically you can't use that. You can't use what you have.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  So then after, after eight years of doing that, I thought, I'm, I'm just gonna start all over. I'm start all over. I was mad at that point. I thought, I, I'm gonna find out, where did these myths come from? She started educating me and then I started digging myself and finding out, why did this get said? Why? This book that I relied on, I have a PhD and I know how to do research, but I trusted this woman that wrote Other Powers. She had 42 pages of footnotes. I thought, she knows what she's doing. Oh, actually not. Actually not.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Oh geez.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and guess what? I found. So I thought, how could she have put this in? Why did she put this in? It doesn't make sense. There's no evidence for this, there's no, or, or, and then also the stuff that she did have evidence for, it came from books that were written that were salacious scandalous gossip type things and, and she repeated it as truth and people believed it as truth and still to this day believe it. I've seen historians that are, that are well-known or just journalists writing books and professors writing books and they repeat the myths that she has repeated also.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  It's like Whisper Down the Lane, except it's Whisper Down the Century. But it was, and then so I was like, I have to do this. So I'm like, I'm gonna find out. So I said to Mary, she said, there's things I don't know the answers to. And she said, that they're in that book, that I wanna know where they came from, why, how? I said, alright, listen, what, what do you need still done? And she said, I need to go to the New York Public Library and I need to look at all the pa, the files of Barbara Goldsmith and see if there's any evidence in there to explain why she said the things that she said. And I said, look, I have a train ride from New York City, I'll go. Oh, I went. I photographed file after file after file, hundreds of boxes she has.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  And then I found the Holy Grail. Well, I was taking the pictures and sending them to Mary and Mary goes, here it is. I'm like, what? In box 88, file 14, the confession that was never published, where Barbara Goldsmith says that how she got her information about Victoria is that she channeled her.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  And she wrote at breakneck speed with a, with a pencil and page after page after page, writing everything that, that came to her about Victoria and, and she looked for the footnotes afterwards.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, like that's not, you can't do that if you're, if you're writing something that claims to be meticulously researched.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  And so it is full of error and people repeat that error as if it were truth. And so I thought to myself, when COVID hit, what should I do with myself now? And I thought, I, I know all this stuff now about Victoria and all the misrepresentation and the, the legends that are, that she, that she's made into this kinda like Paul Bunyan figure. Even the first person that wrote a biography about her said, she's only half-real. She's admitting that she's making up, well, she's, she's things. She wanted to write about a wild woman, first biography about a wild woman, so everything had to fit that. But I thought, I'm gonna do it. I think on my deathbed, I'd be saying to myself, what would I be saying? I have not, what can I, right now, what can I do?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  What would I be saying on my deathbed I wish I did? And I thought, on my deathbed, I wish I had, I will say, I know I will say this. I wish I had done something for Victoria.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Because I know all this, it's all in my head now. I found the things, I found the answers. Mary is a wealth of information. She has been studying Victoria Woodhull for thirty years. She is actually currently writing a biography. But I said, Mary, how about I'm gonna write a novel? Get the ball rolling here. She's still doing research. Oh, but when I said to her, I said to her, okay, why don't you send me your questions about the things you you have doubts about in that book? She said, okay. I said, I'll go look for them. I'll go look. Because there was this one thing that that that the whole family operated, this cult of love. She said, I just can't find evidence for this thing at all. I said, I'll go look for it.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Anyway, send me your other questions besides that. Guess what she sent me? Fourteen single-spaced pages of questions that she had about that book. I was like, what?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  That is crazy.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Oh my god. So, anyway, Mary and I are a, we're a pair now. We're, we're, we're always digging. Yeah. She, we did, we did the book launch together. She did a, a, a, a presentation about the whole myth about Victoria's father, that he was a con man and that he, he burnt down the mill just to get the insurance money and that he was driven out of town and all this stuff, all this stuff that was, is, is, is wrong. All, all wrong. She went to the court records, she found evidence of this and that, and he's, he turned out to not be the bad guy at all. He never got the, it took him seven years before he got any money. And, and he wasn't driven out of town, like, he lived there for years afterwards.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  And so, a lot, a lot, a lot goes wrong. But then people repeat it. There's a book out now, somebody says, oh, not only that, oh, he was a con man and he whipped his children and starved them and whatever, stuff like that. And, and the book has that he said this, that she said this about her father, under oath.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  And it's not true.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  It's not true. Because I said, no. Mary, Mary, Mary's like, this is, this is says, it's, it's, it's like a history. It's not, it's not fiction, it's a history. And it's just recently out. I said, how, how, this is not possible, Mary. She, she wouldn't have said this over in England. She's trying to pull herself together and clear up her reputation. Why is she gonna go over there, badmouth her father under oath, in a, in a trial? She, she sued the British Museum to get some of these salacious stories off their shelves. I said, why is she gonna add to the fuel to the fire? She's not gonna do that, she said. And Mary's, yes, but I don't have the evidence. I'm like, oh, what evidence don't you have, Mary? You have everything else. She said, I don't have that.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Because it was ten dollars a page to copy it from the British Museum, or to photograph it, right?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  And I said, why didn't you tell me that? I was over in Ireland two years ago. I'd have, I'd have flown over and taken the pictures myself over to London. I didn't wanna ask you, she said. I'm like, oh, come on. I said, all right, we got it. She said, I just don't feel comfortable. I wanna see her testimony. It was a hundred and twenty-five pages and I didn't have a thousand dollars to spend. The whole trial is nine thousand pages, so that would have been a nine thousand dollars.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Really? Wow.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  That's quite expensive.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Yes, I know. It was a big, a big trial. I said, Mary?

• 22:37Speaker 02

  And she said, yeah, I, I do have a couple pages. There's a lady, I can, I got it from the, the Rare Books Room. They sent me a few pages. I said, I'm calling the, I'm, I'm calling the Bri, I'm calling the British Museum Library. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get to the bottom of this. I called up, I told the story, and she said, well, see if I can find somebody to photograph the pages for you or whatever. And the next thing, I got a call the next day, said, I, I, I was so driven by your story and, and curious about it. And I, because I sent her the words. I said, do these words appear? And she called me the next day, they're not there. And then, nope, they're not there. And then, on top of that, I found somebody.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  I found somebody to photograph the pages and send them to us. All, all, all nine thousand of them.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a lot of process.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Never heard S.A.S., right?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Sounds like you want some people over to the cause of getting this story out there and getting it published and such.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  What do you hope people come away with when they read the book?

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Oh, what I hope they come away with, and I was so thrilled that Kirkus, what Kirkus came away with, that it was compulsively readable, a genuine pleasure, deftly paced, full of rich characterization and historical detail. And that you finish it and you go, that was enjoyable. And I have gotten a lot of reviews, and that's one of the things that people say over and over, that was an enjoyable read. And I learned a lot of history, because I, I weave in the history. It's always, I don't do separate chunks of history. It's always a kind of, how are the people that are living at that time? How are they reacting to the history around them? So that it's, it feels integrated, like a tapestry into their lives.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Not just chunks of the long historical, whatever. I put, I put it in there like, we, we, we need to get out of here. There's a war gonna start, that kind of thing. Because it's set, it's set during the Civil War. And the, and the John Brown's raids and, and, and all that, this, this, the fighting over slavery with the Lincoln and Lincoln-Douglas debates and the election of Lincoln, the assassination of Lincoln, it's all in there. And so, people say, oh, I, I really reminded me of all the things that I learned years ago and it was great to have it, have it again. And I'm, and the Publishers Weekly loved it too, gave me great, gave me editor's pick.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Very, yeah. I read that, it's very rare.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty, that's a wonderful honor.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Two to four percent of books they read, they get editor's pick. And, and then, and Kirkus gave it a get it. So it was, that's, that's not easy to get either. So, I'm happy with that. But I think people will, I wanted the book to be a good read, to be enjoyable. Now, it's, it's all the main things that ha, that happened in Victoria and all the, the marriages. Because she finally left the husband after eleven years. She did have another child. And then she went out on her own, but then she met somebody else and, but the, I don't wanna give too much of the story away. It's very interesting what happens with the two husbands. Because they end up in New York together and so, you have to read that to find out what, because that, that became a big problem in a way.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  But not, not by, not because of Victoria, but other people that caused trouble in her life. She, she had, her, her mother became difficult and her life got very complicated. So, all the, those complications are in there, things with her family and her sister and, and then the things that she fought for. See, she had forgotten. And you know, people, when they get through the book, I hope they'll say, how do I see now why she was forgotten? Do you know, because there was so much to talk about her, so many what, so many stories they could make up about her, try to find out about her, and, and those stories got carried on.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  So between that, and then the men that wanted to bring her down and squash her, so that, that pushed her down. And then she had a run-in, basically, I don't know if you call it a run-in, but it's a, it was a, a parting of the ways with some of the major movers of the suffragist movement, particularly Susan B. Anthony, was concerned with the vote. We need the vote, the vote, and only the vote. But Victoria wanted more than that. She said, it doesn't ma, we need social, economic, freedom. We need more than that. We need, we need to, to move forward as, as women, the individual needs sovereignty. It's not just about the vote.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  And so, Susan B. Anthony felt that pushing that hard for too much, like that, pushing for social freedom, would be detrimental to getting the vote. Which, you see, because you're asked for too much, you're not gonna get it. But Victoria just felt driven, I guess because of the life she lived. And also because of the, the attacks that were being made on her.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Um, because people found out about the two husbands and they were actually living in the same house. So that was part of the problem.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  A little bit odd, yes.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  That PR move there.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, back then, like, that was huge. And so then, when, when she would give speeches, like, one time somebody calls out, are you, are you a free lover? Because back then, there were movements, free love movements, where people would say, yeah, that, but they started back in the, there's been free love movements throughout the history. But there, there was a big push, even in the eighteen forties. People that wanted to live in, say, similar to communes, you know how the, only not so, not so much like the communes of San Francisco and Hayth Ashbury and that kind of thing. But there were different alternative, alternative ways of living and, and they called them, those people free, they were free lovers.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  But for Victoria, free love only meant to her, the freedom to choose yourself, what you were gonna do with your life and your body. That's all.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's what most of us want too, right?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Yes, and that we take for granted, that that's, that's the things that we want today, which we don't all have still. But she wanted that. She wanted sovereignty. She wasn't, she didn't believe in having extramarital affairs and, and just doing whatever you wanted to do. If you were having an affair, what she believed is that you should come, be upfront about it. Divorce the person you no longer love, marry the person you do love, do right by people.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  So that's what she was, that's what she was asking. And then people said, are you a free lover? Yes, I am a free lover and I have the right to love who I want for as long a period or short a period as I, as I wish. And neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  I'm gonna put that on my Tinder profile. I'm a free lover.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, free lover. Then they started calling her Mrs. Satan.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I've been called that, a Mr. Satan, uh, not Mrs. Satan.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So she had all this social conflict going on and, you know, and she's, she has to fight through it. She can't say, all right, all right, you're right. I'm Mrs. Satan. Bye. I'll, I'll go stick my head in the, in the sand and.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  I would have, I would have adopted. I would have been vote for Mrs. Satan, damn it.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yes, I know.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  We let the religious people on the right muck it up. It's time to vote for Satan. Satan will come in and balance everything out.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, balance it out.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  So we want people to be able to buy the book, read the book and, and get to know all the details. Future upcoming projects that you have, maybe extensions of this book. What, what's the future look like for you?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yes, the future looks like busy, busy, busy, because this book takes you up to right at the election. And then when she gets in jail and a little tiny bit afterwards, it's very exciting that happens when she gets out of jail. But then she gets rearrested again. So you're up to that point and how she gets to have her say before she gets rearrested, that's like the climax of the book. And it's very exciting. And, but the next part of her life. So that takes you up to the election was 1872, it can November and, and this book ends just in January. So we're in 1873 and the next book is going to be called Shattered.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  And I have started it for about a page. I have to do more. I've been so busy with marketing the book and getting it out there and getting the word out there. So it's, it's, it's hard to, you gotta find the time to market and write and do that kind of thing. But this book is going to be from just a four year period from 1873 to 77, during which time she gets arrested about 10 more times. So that book is called Shattered. It's volume two.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then at that point in 1877, she does leave the country. She moves to England and volume three, which will be victorious, will be the, the rest of her life, the story of that. Where she still continues to have trouble because she, she's in a suit with the, the British Museum, you know, we have all that, all that going on there.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  People can look forward to that. Do you have an anticipated release date?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I don't think, this book, from the time I started, so I started it during, at 2020, when COVID started. And that took me six years to write it because I still had a lot more, a lot of research to do yet and things like that. But I'm hoping that this one won't take me as long. And Mary has been extremely helpful. She has 220,000 documents about Victoria Woodhull on her computer, which I can have access to. So I don't even have to go, say, to the New York Public Library. We got, we got a lot of those materials, but you know, there, she has a lot on her computer. So I don't even have to travel to the libraries.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  That's wonderful.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Southern Illinois University has a lot of Victoria Woodhull stuff and Western Kentucky. But yeah, I can stay put. Mary's, Mary's done great work. So we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna get it. I hope I can get this out. I'm hoping in a year or two, maybe not a year, maybe two, within, yeah, yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  So as we go out.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Oh, by the next, I should do it. Guy should just get it done by the next election. Yeah, yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Assuming there is a next election. So we'll see how that goes. I'm, I'm hoping we can get past this one. Um, in November 3rd, 2026, folks, if you're watching this 10 to 20 years from your hovel, where the AI robots scour around, terminate your bots to kill us, you can enjoy that data. So Kate, thank you for your marriage for coming to the show. Give us your dot coms as we go out.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yes, katedanaher.com.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  All right.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Please visit and enjoy the, the site and call me, get, write to me. I'll, I'll be happy to talk at your, your book club and give you a shortened version of, of what went into getting this story right. There's so, yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Sounds good then. Sounds like you should maybe write a book about writing the book.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  I could. I could, let me tell you. Finding out everything was wrong after eight years. I'm like, what?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Crazy, crazy. Well, thank you very much, Kate, for coming to the show and thanks for shining a light on this story that got lost somewhere in history and, and bring it to the forefront. Thank you very much.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  It's a fun read. I promise you. Yeah. It's a good, all right. Thank you.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Thank you very much, folks, for listening to the show and being a part of everything we've been doing here. Be sure to pick up her book wherever fine books are sold, Unstoppable, The Victoria Woodhull Story. And you can check that out. There'll be a link for it on the Chris Voss Show. Thanks a lot for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss, YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and all those crazy places in it. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss Show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind.