This early works is a comprehensive and informative look at the subject. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Francis Galton is said to have founded eugenics with an 1864 magazine article. But a single article does not make a movement and Galton, by his own admission, did little to promote the idea before 1901. This book demonstrates that eugenists have given us an inaccurate history of their movement, assigning credit to Galton, the eminent half-cousin of Charles Darwin, when the real credit belongs to a woman who was perhaps the most radical nineteenth-century American feminist. That woman was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President and, with her sister, the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street. This book contains all her major speeches and writings on eugenics to demonstrate that she was the first of either sex to take to the road and, in hundreds of speeches across the U.S., champion the idea of creating a "perfected humanity" by breeding "perfect children." She even beat Galton in his own land, moving to England in 1876 and introducing eugenics there. Woodhull was not a shy about her role. The title for this book comes from the headline of a 1912 London newspaper article proclaiming her "Lady Eugenist." In 1927, shortly before she died, the New York Times would carry an article in which she praised eugenic sterilization and claimed to have "advocated that fifty years ago in my book Marriage of the Unfit."

Suffragist, lecturer, eugenicist, businesswoman, free lover, and the first woman to run for president of the United States, Victoria C. Woodhull (1838-1927) has been all but forgotten as a leading nineteenth-century feminist writer and radical. "Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull" is the first multigenre, multisubject collection of her materials, giving contemporary audiences a glimpse into the radical views of this nineteenth-century woman who advocated free love between consensual adults and who was labeled "Mrs. Satan" by cartoonist Thomas Nast. Woodhull's texts reveal the multiple conflicting aspects of this influential woman, who has been portrayed in the past as either a disreputable figure or a brave pioneer. This collection of letters, speeches, essays, and articles elucidate some of the lesser-known movements and ideas of the nineteenth century. It also highlights, through Woodhull's correspondence with fellow suffragist Lucretia Mott, tensions within the suffragist movement and demonstrates the changing political atmosphere and role of women in business and politics in the late nineteenth century. With a comprehensive introduction contextualizing Woodhull's most important writing, this collection provides a clear lens through which to view late nineteenth-century suffragism, labor reform, reproductive rights, sexual politics, and spiritualism.