Saturday 30 March 2024

The Husband Hunters 8 - The End (Pages 263 - end)


 Chapter 15 is about two sisters Tennie and Victoria Chaflin.

Lady Tennessee Celeste Claflin, Viscountess of Montserrat (October 26, 1844 – January 18, 1923), also known as Tennie C., was an American suffragist best known as the first woman, along with her sister Victoria Woodhull, to open a Wall Street brokerage firm, which occurred in 1870.


Victoria Claflin Woodhull (born Victoria California Claflin; September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election.


Victoria's first husband was Dr Canning Woodhull, who turned out to be a drunkard, so Victoria left him. 

The two sisters became close with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Commodore, especially Tennie. In the Fall of 1868, Buck visited business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt who Buck had heard was interested in massage and magnetic healing. Buck pitched Victoria as a spiritualist and Tennessee as a healer. Tennessee and Cornelius began to spend a lot of time together and an affair was strongly rumored.


The two sisters started a stockbroker office, and they also were very active in the suffrage movement. That caused them problems with justice. Woodhull and Claflin used their newspaper to advocate for Free Love, a movement which in the nineteenth century pushed to separate sex from marriage.They eventually went to England. Victoria married John Biddulph Martin. John Biddulph Martin (10 June 1841 – 20 March 1897) was an English banker and statistician.


Francis Cook hired Tennie as a clairvoyant to contact his late wife, and Tennie told him that the message of his wife was that he should marry Miss Chaflin. Sir Francis Cook, 1st Baronet, 1st Viscount Montserrate (23 January 1817 – 17 February 1901) was a British merchant and art collector.


The book mentions women who had bad experiences in their marriages to British noblement.

One was Alice Thaw, who married the Earl of Yarmouth, as she didn't realise he was a homosexual, and the marriage lasted 3 years. Alice Cornelia Thaw (January 2, 1880 – May 8, 1955) was an American philanthropist and, upon her marriage to George Seymour, Earl of Yarmouth, the Countess of Yarmouth.



Frances Ellen Work married James Boothby Burke Roche, and Jim was a philanderer and a gambler. Her father was very vocal about the unsuitability of a woman marrying a foreign fortune hunter. Frances was isolated in English society because he didn't pay his gambling debts. She ended up leaving him and filing for a divorce. 

After the divorce, she got interested in coach-driving, and she married her instructor, Count Aurel Batony, in secret, which angered her father. The marriage also ended up in divorce. 


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