Ask most people who the first woman to run for president was, and you'll get a lot of modern names. But the answer goes back more than 150 years, to a time when women in America couldn't even vote. The woman who did it was as bold and unpredictable as anyone in American history.
Her name was Victoria Woodhull, and she ran for president in 1872 as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. Most historians call her the first woman to run for the office. There's one wrinkle: she was only 34, too young to serve under the Constitution, so some argue it wasn't a true candidacy.
From a Frontier Town to Wall Street
Victoria Claflin was born in 1838 in the small frontier town of Homer, Ohio, the seventh of ten children. Her father was a con man and snake oil salesman, and her childhood was hard. She made her first fortune traveling as a so-called magnetic healer and later joined the spiritualist movement.
Then she did something no woman had done before. In 1870, she and her sister Tennessee Claflin opened a brokerage firm on Wall Street, becoming the first female stockbrokers. They had help from the wealthy Cornelius Vanderbilt, who admired Victoria's skills as a spiritual medium. One New York paper called the sisters the Queens of Finance.
That same year, the sisters started their own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, making them among the first women to found a newspaper in the United States.
Speaking Up in Congress
Woodhull also found her way into the all-male world of national politics. In December 1870, she submitted an argument for women's suffrage to the House Judiciary Committee and later read it aloud there. Her point was simple: women already had the right to vote under the 14th and 15th Amendments, and they only needed to use it.
Suffrage leaders were so interested that they postponed the opening of their national convention in Washington to watch. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw her as a new champion for the cause.
The Campaign of 1872
When the Equal Rights Party nominated her for president, they also named a running mate: the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass, however, didn't know he'd been picked. Woodhull campaigned for women's suffrage, equal rights, and labor reforms.
Then, a few days before the election, she was arrested on obscenity charges. Her newspaper had published a story about an alleged affair involving a famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher, with more detail than was considered proper at the time. The scandal only made her campaign more sensational.
In the end, she received no electoral votes and only a tiny, unknown share of the popular vote. One man in Texas said he voted for her as a protest against President Grant.
A Quieter Final Chapter
Woodhull later moved to England, where she lectured and in 1883 married a banker named John Biddulph Martin. She lived until 1927, long enough to see American women win the right to vote in 1920. Today a memorial to her hangs on a wall at Tewkesbury Abbey in England.
Woodhull didn't win, and she may not have been old enough to take office if she had. But she cracked open a door that many women would walk through after her, and she did it with plenty of nerve.
