Politics & Power Quote by Victoria Woodhull

Woodhull’s line is a quiet demolition of democratic self-congratulation. “Controlled” does the heavy lifting: it frames the state not as a neutral referee but as an apparatus of domination, a force applied to bodies and lives. Then comes the surgical precision of “in the inauguration of which we had no voice.” She’s not pleading for benevolence; she’s issuing an indictment rooted in first principles. If legitimacy comes from consent, a government built without women’s consent is, by its own logic, defective.

The phrase “I and others of my sex” is strategic, too. Woodhull anchors the claim in personal testimony while refusing to let it stay personal. She speaks as a singular political subject who simultaneously represents a class that has been deliberately rendered voiceless. That dual move matters in a culture that loved to treat women’s political opinions as either improper or merely private.

Context sharpens the bite. Woodhull was a radical suffragist in a post-Civil War America loudly redefining citizenship while quietly narrowing who counted. The Reconstruction amendments expanded constitutional language, yet political power remained aggressively male. By invoking “inauguration,” she points to founding moments - constitutions, elections, offices sworn in - and exposes the trick: women are expected to obey outcomes of rituals they’re barred from performing.

Subtext: taxation, laws governing marriage and property, sexual double standards, reproductive autonomy - all enforced under the banner of “the people.” Woodhull calls that banner a fraud unless “the people” includes her.