"For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity"
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The scandal here isn’t money; it’s permission. Woodhull compresses a whole regime of gender control into one vivid image: a woman thinking about finances triggers the kind of recoil reserved for sacrilege. “Shuddered over” is doing heavy cultural work. It signals not disagreement but contamination, the reflexive disgust of a society trained to treat women’s economic agency as a violation of the natural order. And “profanity” makes the point sharper: patriarchy doesn’t just police behavior, it sanctifies the boundaries it sets, turning economic dependence into a moral ideal.
Woodhull’s specific intent is to expose how financial ignorance was not an accident of “separate spheres” etiquette but an enforced vulnerability. If women are discouraged from asking about wages, property, debt, or investment, they’re easier to manage in marriage, easier to underpay at work, and easier to shame when they fail. The line reads like a diagnosis of an ideology that survives by making practical questions feel unladylike, then calling the resulting dependence “virtue.”
Context matters: Woodhull moved in the volatile post-Civil War world of suffrage agitation, labor unrest, and scandals that blurred sex, power, and commerce. She was one of the first women to publicly insist that politics and money were inseparable from “women’s rights.” The brilliance of the phrasing is that it doesn’t plead for inclusion; it mocks the taboo itself, showing how absurd it is that arithmetic could be treated like blasphemy.
Woodhull’s specific intent is to expose how financial ignorance was not an accident of “separate spheres” etiquette but an enforced vulnerability. If women are discouraged from asking about wages, property, debt, or investment, they’re easier to manage in marriage, easier to underpay at work, and easier to shame when they fail. The line reads like a diagnosis of an ideology that survives by making practical questions feel unladylike, then calling the resulting dependence “virtue.”
Context matters: Woodhull moved in the volatile post-Civil War world of suffrage agitation, labor unrest, and scandals that blurred sex, power, and commerce. She was one of the first women to publicly insist that politics and money were inseparable from “women’s rights.” The brilliance of the phrasing is that it doesn’t plead for inclusion; it mocks the taboo itself, showing how absurd it is that arithmetic could be treated like blasphemy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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