The Strange Story of Victoria Woodhull, the First Woman to Run for President
Born in 1838 in Homer, Ohio, Victoria Claflin Woodhull was an outspoken and controversial figure whose legacy as a trailblazer for women’s rights, gender equality, and sexual freedom endures to this day. Not only was she a suffragist and women’s rights advocate, but she also was the first woman to run for President of the United States — at a time when women still didn’t have the right to vote. What’s more, she and her sister, Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin, became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street and founded a newspaper together.
Despite a tumultuous childhood and a first marriage at age 15 (to Canning Woodhull, a 28-year-old doctor with whom she had two children), Woodhull went on to carve her path in history by embracing unconventional beliefs, including spiritualism and free love, while advocating for the rights of women, laborers, and the poor. Her journey from her rural Ohio home to Wall Street and beyond is as unexpected as it is interesting. Here are five facts about America’s first female presidential candidate.
She Supported the Free Love Movement
After divorcing Canning Woodhull, who was an alcoholic and a neglectful husband, Victoria Woodhull kept her married name and became a supporter of the free love movement. She endorsed the idea that decisions about romance and sexuality should be left to the individual, and that women should be able to choose when, or if, to marry. The movement also supported destigmatizing divorce in order to make it easier for women to leave abusive marriages, a goal that aligned with Woodhull’s desire to escape her own difficult first marriage. In 1871, Woodhull gave a speech at New York City’s Steinway Hall called “The Truth Shall Set You Free.” In it, she said, “I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”
You may also like
She Worked as a Clairvoyant
Though she led a highly accomplished life, Woodhull received very little formal education as a child. Her father was a con man and the family made a living as traveling performers, selling homemade remedies and medicines and telling fortunes. During her marriage, Woodhull needed to earn money to supplement the household income and, in addition to more traditional jobs, she took work as a clairvoyant healer, claiming to be able to cure illness through a variety of natural and psychic remedies. It’s hard to know for sure how much of the business was an act and how much she really believed in her abilities; ever since childhood, Woodhull had claimed to be able to connect with dead spirits.
After her divorce, Woodhull continued to earn money telling fortunes and offering “magnetic healing,” often working and traveling with her sister Tennie. It was through her work as a healer during the Civil War that Woodhull met her second husband, James Harvey Blood, a Union Army veteran. While her marriage to Blood lasted only a few short years — “The grandest woman in the world went back on me,” Blood said after their divorce — another connection she made through her work as a clairvoyant, with railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, yielded a literal treasure.
She Was the First Woman Stockbroker on Wall Street
Thanks to valuable stock tips from Vanderbilt, Woodhull and her sister were able to amass more than $700,000 (around $16 million today), which they used to start their brokerage firm, Woodhull, Claflin, and Company, in 1870. As the first financial firm on Wall Street owned and operated by women, the company was a shocking novelty, and the press took to calling the sisters the “Bewitching Brokers” and “Queens of Finance.” The sisters went on to found a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which gave Woodhull another platform to support her causes of free love, political reform, and women’s rights. The paper also published the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Her Presidential Candidacy Boosted the Cause of Women’s Rights
Woodhull’s run for President in 1872, 50 years before women gained the right to vote, may have seemed like a publicity stunt to many. Lacking the financing to mount a proper campaign, she forged ahead anyway, running on the Equal Rights Party ticket. She campaigned on a platform of women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, welfare for the poor, the nationalization of railroads, the regulation of monopolies, and other reforms.
It was, in the end, a symbolic campaign more than anything. Woodhull’s chosen running mate, civil rights activist Frederick Douglass, never even acknowledged the nomination. Though Woodhull’s loss was all but a certainty, the fact that she hadn’t reached the minimum age of 35 required to run for President would have rendered her ineligible even if she had achieved a majority of the votes. Ultimately, the Woodhull-Douglass ticket received a negligible number of votes, and the race resulted in the reelection of incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant.
She Spent the Last Half of Her Life in England
Even though she was technically ineligible to be elected President, Woodhull stands as the first woman to declare her interest in running for the highest office in the United States. But by the time the 1872 election ended, her radical beliefs and brash actions had started to impact her political reputation. Despite their initial support of Woodhull, women’s suffrage leaders, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, began to distance themselves from her, signaling the end of Woodhull’s political aspirations. Twice-divorced and facing bankruptcy, Woodhull expatriated to England with her sister in 1877. The move may have been encouraged by the heirs of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who died the previous year. Woodhull built a new life for herself in England, where she married her third husband, banker John Biddulph Martin, and was generally welcomed into aristocratic society.
Woodhull spent the remainder of her life continuing to advocate for suffrage and women’s rights, but she distanced herself from spiritualism and the free love movement. From 1892 to 1901, she and her daughter, Zula, published the journal Humanitarian, which featured a progressive agenda that offered commentary on literature, culture, science, spirituality, and politics. Woodhull also promoted the popular Victorian-era idea of eugenics, selective reproduction designed to eliminate disabilities, diseases, and other traits in the human species. Her interest in what was then called “stirpiculture” likely came from the fact that her son, Byron, had profound developmental disabilities that she attributed to her husband’s alcoholism and her own age and inexperience. Today, however, the practice of eugenics is associated with Nazi Germany and racist beliefs, further complicating the legacy of this controversial activist.
