Who was Victoria Woodhull -- and what were the connections between feminism and spiritualism -- that Stanton would turn to her and her spirits in hopes of uniting a fractured political movement? These are the questions Goldsmith sets out to answer in ``Other Powers,'' and their answers involve not only Woodhull's racy biography but several other interlocking narratives of Gilded Age high finance, political corruption, and sexual scandal. The result sometimes reads more like soap opera than like grand opera, as Goldsmith (the author of ``Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last'') sprints from subplot to subplot among her tangled stories. And she takes Woodhull's own accounts of her life at face value more wholeheartedly than I can. But Goldsmith's research into Woodhull's milieu is prodigious, and the story she has to tell is never less than fascinating.

Born in 1838 into a hardscrabble family that drifted from small town to small town in Pennsylvania and Ohio -- one step ahead of the law and irate neighbors -- the young Victoria came to spiritualism through her mother, Roxy Clafin, whose enthusiasm in revival meetings, coupled with her taste for her husband's alcohol- and opium-laced ``Life Elixir,'' put her into trances in which she claimed she could read her children's minds and heal them with mesmeric ``electric energy.'' Victoria's childhood spiritualist trances both allowed her an escape from her violently chaotic family and helped keep the family afloat. Knowing a profitable thing when he saw it, her father began taking his mesmeric 8-year-old daughter on preaching tours. When Victoria's younger sister, Tennessee, also began to read her neighbor's thoughts and see visions, Buck Clafin first took Tennessee on the road as a solo attraction, then joined her with Victoria as a spiritualist team -- imitating the success of the Fox sisters, who in 1848 had electrified Rochester, N.Y., with mysterious rappings from the spirit world.

It was also in 1848 that a group of women and men, many of them also attracted to the emerging spiritualist movement, met near Rochester in the town of Seneca Falls to hold the first women's rights convention in the United States. The conjunction of 19th-century feminism and spiritualism, as Goldsmith observes, was not entirely coincidental: Spiritualism and feminism both asserted for women the right to speak with public authority. Unlike feminism, of course, spiritualism borrowed that authority from the voices of the dead rather than claiming it for women in their own right; female mediums channeling ``the wisdom of spirits as diverse as Socrates and Benjamin Franklin'' often heard those great spirits advocating women's rights.

``Other Powers'' probes the seamier sides of women's association with 19th-century spiritualism. Born social worlds away from the largely middle-class activists who organized the Seneca Falls convention, Victoria eloped at age 15 with a seedy physician, Canning Woodhull, only to return to her family a few years later, destitute and with husband and son in tow. She joined her sister in keeping the itinerant Clafins together by a combination of spiritualist mediumship, patent-medicine peddling, faith healing, casual prostitution, and occasional blackmail of prosperous clients.

Woodhull reached the apogee of her career in this line when her father moved the family to New York City, where he managed to get Victoria and Tennessee an audience with railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Tennessee was soon installed as Vanderbilt's mistress and mesmeric healer, while Victoria transmitted messages to Vanderbilt from the spirit world -- as well as messages from the New York demimonde, where Victoria had friends happy to pass on what they overheard from their clients about deals in the making. Asked, after an especially daring business coup, for the secret of his financial acumen, Vanderbilt replied, ``Do as I do. Consult the spirits.'' Vanderbilt was grateful enough for the services of both sisters to give them a cut of his profits as well as set them up in their own brokerage firm.

The publicity around the firm of Woodhull, Clafin & Co. attracted a visit from suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, who reported in the suffrage newspaper The Revolution that she had ``found two bright, vivacious creatures, full of energy, perseverance, and pluck.'' Initially recruited into the suffrage movement by male supporters, Woodhull was soon taken up by influential women as well. Stanton had been seeking a charismatic leader for the movement, a ``new evangel of womanhood''; with the support of her spirits, Victoria Woodhull declared herself that evangel.

Throwing herself into her new role, Woodhull announced her candidacy for president of the United States in April 1870, and in January 1871 became the first woman to address a joint session of Congress. Conservative suffragists, however, shied away from Woodhull's past. Worse, it was common knowledge that two male leaders in the rival suffrage organizations were embroiled in a sexual scandal that only a delicate balance of mutual interest and near-blackmail had kept from erupting into the public eye: Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church and officer of the conservative American Woman Suffrage Association, was involved with Elizabeth Tilton, wife of editor Theodore Tilton, a supporter of Woodhull and author of her campaign autobiography. The women's movement sat atop more than one powder keg of scandal.

When Woodhull delivered a flaming speech in Steinway Hall advocating ``free love,'' the New York newspapers pronounced that not only her presidential campaign but the suffrage movement as a whole had ``Died of Free Love.'' Cut loose by most of her supporters, Woodhull vowed to take Beecher down with her, and in November 1872 printed the story of his adulterous affair in her newspaper.

The outcome sounds painfully familiar even now. Beecher denied any guilt, in the teeth of extensive documentation and contradictory testimony, and was acquitted first by an investigating panel at Plymouth Church and later, more narrowly, at a civil trial. His supporters, like President Clinton's today, framed the story as an encounter between irresistible male charisma invested in a powerful office and a woman who was swayed by that charisma into fantasizing about the powerful male. While Stanton and other feminists agonized over coming to Woodhull's aid, Beecher found an ally in Anthony Comstock, who had Woodhull and her sister repeatedly arrested and jailed on obscenity charges for publishing the Beecher story and other exposes aimed at prostitution in New York City.

Abandoned by her spirit voices, Woodhull fled to England and the safe harbor of a respectable marriage. Her brief turn as feminism's inspired ``evangel'' had exposed contradictions the movement was unprepared to resolve: ``the moral hypocrisy of domestic society that Woodhull clearly illuminated through her views on free love, marriage, and divorce had completely split an already divided movement.'' Barbara Goldsmith ends her complicated dissection of the complicated forces -- let's call them ``spirits,'' in deference to Woodhull's own vocabulary -- that intersected in Woodhull's life by calling her ``a woman before her time in a world that was not ready to receive her.'' Yet the example of Hillary Rodham Clinton suggests that ``public women'' (the 19th century's revealing phrase, used both of politically active women and of prostitutes) are still not entirely received. And the example of Clinton's husband suggests that Henry Ward Beecher's temptations are still being replayed. Woodhull's spirits, if they can watch CNN, may even now be having the last laugh.