The More Things Change . . .

Consider the following:

* A powerful public figure is accused of extramarital sexual liaisons.

* A sensational trial says less about the defendant and more about social mores.

* Headlines scream and social reformers agitate over problems stemming from racial prejudice, gender inequity, abortion, child abuse, corporate expansion, public hypocrisy and private deceit.

* The public bewails the all-powerful, sometimes demonizing nature of the media.

Odd as it may first appear, this is a picture of important controversies from a little over a hundred years ago, as social historian Barbara Goldsmith uncannily demonstrates in “Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull” (Knopf).

Using the magnetic Victoria Woodhull as a lightning rod (she was an opportunistic reformer, chiefly remembered as “the prostitute who ran for president,” who championed spiritualism, women’s suffrage, free love, communism and capitalism), Goldsmith conjures a panoramic vision of the post-Civil War era that weirdly mirrors our own. This is at least partly because these issues were treated as serious topics for public discourse for the first time in the 1870s, and one might say that the debate has simply continued into our own time.

“Actually, that was one of the main themes of the book,” Goldsmith says quietly over lunch at the Bel-Air Hotel, where she is staying on a brief visit from New York to promote her book but also to see her two sons who live in Los Angeles. “I just had to decide if I wished to make the parallels to today, or hope the reader would. I decided for the second. But the issues are all there.”

Instead of President Clinton and O.J., there is Henry Ward Beecher, the charismatic preacher, said to proclaim the Gospel before 20 of his mistresses in church every Sunday--leading to a sex scandal, exposed by Victoria Woodhull in her radical weekly New York newspaper and prompting a suit by cuckolded journalist Theodore Tilton.

The Beecher-Tilton case, to which the Associated Press assigned 30 reporters, brought into focus issues of free love, the inequalities of gender, the constraints of marriage and enough scandalous gossip to dominate a hundred talk shows--if they had existed.

*

But Goldsmith is no scandal monger. At 67, she exudes the Old World charm of her upper-class New York background. In fact, such is her lack of pretension, one tends to forget she is a veteran journalist--a founding editor and writer for New York magazine and currently a contributor to the New Yorker as well as the author of three other works of highly regarded social commentary.

“Other Powers” resembles Goldsmith’s earlier work in its use of a court case as a steppingstone for a broad survey of another era or a particular group. “Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last” (Knopf, 1980) is a nonfiction account of the sensational 1934 custody battle over Gloria Vanderbilt, who later gained renown as a designer of jeans. “Johnson vs. Johnson” (Knopf, 1987) is a carefully documented yet ultimately mythic tale of family wrangle stemming from the 1986 court battle over the estate of J. Seward Johnson, the pharmaceutical magnate.

Goldsmith says it’s important for readers to see “Other Powers’ ” sexual shenanigans in the context of all the upheavals of the age, from feminism to radical reconstruction, from censorship to the opening up of the West. Though the work appears to be a portrait of the fascinating Victoria Woodhull, Goldsmith says, she is “simply the locomotive that pulls all the social history,” especially her involvement in the beginnings of women’s empowerment with its strange incubator, spiritualism.

“When I first read that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was empowered by the raps of the spirits to write the Seneca Falls Declaration [of rights for women]--Stanton who was such an intellect!--I began to realize that even the strongest women needed to feel that they had guidance,” Goldsmith says.

And women gained real power through spiritualism. Railroad magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt told a newspaper reporter that he had made his millions from consulting the spirits, and he was especially grateful to Woodhull for advising him to buy stock in the Central Pacific Railroad. (Woodhull was also friendly with many prostitutes, who shrewdly extracted financial information from their clients.)

*

It took Goldsmith 10 years of research and 400 pages of computerized chronology, which she pored over in the New York Public Library (of which she is a trustee), to blend a giant mass of information into a densely argued yet almost novelistic narrative, enlivened by dialogue and colorful anecdotes culled from diaries, letters and other documents.

“I always feel there are two cardinal rules when I write. One is something I call ‘enter my world.’ If by Page 3 you’re not living in the world of that era and that subject, I haven’t done my job. The second thing is, I believe desperately in narrative drive. I want you to turn that page. And that’s why my books take so long, because I can amass thousands of pages of facts, but I have to throw away 90% of them in order to get the pertinent detail that will move the narrative forward, and make of all these lives and the era a Gordian knot that you can’t get apart.

Thus, the chilling portrait of Woodhull’s abused, poverty-stricken Ohio childhood and her quack father’s scheme to use lye to burn cancer out of sick, credulous women may be as shocking as any tabloid story, but it also says a great deal about the oppressed status of women, not to mention the get-rich-quick attitudes that still drive many Americans today.

Goldsmith believes that what really makes the book timeless is Woodhull’s complicated humanity as a reformer--and an opportunist.

*

Clearly, Goldsmith says, Woodhull believed in helping women. Her speeches and letters are filled with passionate pleas on behalf of abused women, and she is also to be admired as a groundbreaking feminist, newspaper editor and union organizer, as the first woman to found a brokerage firm and to run for president, on a platform of free love, female suffrage and the right to divorce--”If I want sexual intercourse with 100 men, I shall have it,” she declared.

But she was also an operator, a survivor and a blackmailer who used men to enrich herself and was, Goldsmith says, “one of the first people who could manipulate her image.” Exhausted from the media blitz of the Beecher trial, the divisions in the women’s movement and by relentless attacks by infamous morals crusader Anthony Comstock to censor her newspaper for indecency, Woodhull fled to England. There she married a wealthy banker and renounced her reforming principles in the interest of respectability. (She’s said to be the model for the socially ambitious Nancy Headway in Henry James’ novel “The Siege of London.”)

Despite her ambivalence about some of Woodhull’s beliefs and behavior, Goldsmith connects deeply with her heroine’s activism. “She wrote at one point, never accept anything you find to be unfair, unkind or impossible, and I thought if I could live by that I’d probably have a pretty fabulous life. So I do try to go to the barricades when I really believe in something.”

Like Woodhull, Goldsmith uses her family money--inherited from her father, Joseph I. Lubin, who became board chairman of the Pepsi-Cola company--for good causes. And, like Woodhull, she understands how to influence the media.

The mother of three dyslexic children, she founded a center for research and treatment of dyslexic children in New York. And after being horrified at the way historical documents crumbled in libraries where she did her research, she was instrumental in the 1980s in securing legislation to change the acid content of paper, better ensuring the preservation of books. She’s also endowed the Barbara Goldsmith Freedom-to-Write Award with PEN, which has been responsible for the release of imprisoned writers around the world.

“People always put the media down,” she says, “but if you can turn the spotlight on imprisoned writers in places like Nigeria so they don’t disappear. . . . That’s the great side of what the media can do today.”

Goldsmith’s first marriage ended in divorce, but she enjoyed 20 years of “good companionship” with her second husband, Frank Perry, a filmmaker (“Diary of a Mad Housewife,” “Last Summer” and “Play It as It Lays”), before his death in 1995. Currently, she lives alone in an apartment near the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“It’s a nice life,” she says. “I’m sometimes amazed at how much I’ve been able to cram into it.”