Love Quote by Victoria Woodhull

A line like this doesn’t just accuse; it booby-traps the moral high ground. Woodhull turns “judges” into a double-edged symbol: literal arbiters of law and stand-ins for the entire respectable class that polices women’s behavior. The verb choice matters. They “preach,” not argue. That frames public morality as performance - a sermon delivered from a bench. Then she flips it: what’s condemned “openly” is “practice[d]…secretly.” The adverbs do the work, exposing hypocrisy as an architecture of public shaming and private indulgence.

Woodhull’s intent is confrontational and tactical. She’s not begging entry into Victorian respectability; she’s indicting it as a racket. “Free love” in her era wasn’t a throwaway provocation. It was a radical claim about women’s sexual autonomy, divorce rights, and the idea that consent and choice should matter more than property-like marriage arrangements. By saying her judges secretly do what they punish, she reframes the debate from morality to power: the issue isn’t sex, it’s who gets to have desire without consequence.

The subtext is even sharper: these men don’t fear “immorality” so much as they fear women narrating it. When men do it, it’s discreet privilege; when women do it, it becomes scandal, evidence, a charge. Woodhull’s sentence compresses a whole political theory of repression into a neat public insult: the system isn’t prudish, it’s selective - and selection is the point.