Written by Sam Marks
17/09/2023
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. This is the first time in history a woman was nominated by a major political party for president of the United States. However, the honor of being the first woman to ever run for the US presidency belongs to someone whose candidacy predates Clinton by 144 years. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first women to run for president. And just as Hillary Clinton served as first lady and Secretary of State, Woodhull led a pioneering life of accomplishments before her presidential run that defied social norms and gender roles.
Born in 1838, Victoria California Claflin grew up in the frontier town of Homer, Ohio. Her mother Roxy was a follower of Austrian mystic Franz Mesmer of the new spiritualist movement, believing that natural energy could be transferred between all objects. Her father Buck was a snake oil salesman (a con man selling various fraudulent medical cures) who regularly abused his children.
While considered extremely intelligent by her teachers, Claflin had a limited formal education of around three years by age 11. Influenced by her mother, Victoria became a believer and advocate for spiritualism, a growing movement in America from the 1840s onwards closely linked to Christian Socialism that believed a “spirit world” existed alongside the physical one. She often referred to “Banquo’s Ghost” from Shakespeare’s MacBeth to cite her spiritual awakening and belief in a better life.
At age 14, the Claflin family moved to Rochester, New York after Victoria’s father got them run out of town due to a failed insurance fraud con. Victoria met physician Canning Woodhull and they were married on November 23, 1853, two months after her fifteenth birthday. He was 28. They had two children, Byron and Zula, the former born with an intellectual disability that Victoria blamed on her husband’s alcoholism. Victoria quickly divorced Canning due to his alcoholism and his womanizing behavior and in 1866, remarried Colonel James Harvey Blood, but kept Canning’s name.
Following her strenuous relationship with her first husband, Woodhull became a strong supporter of the Free Love movement, which promoted social changes to forms of love. Woodhull spoke strongly in favor of monogamous relationships, criticized the societal acceptance of married men having mistresses, and believed that sexual consent was a right solely and wholly endowed to women. Woodhull’s advocacy challenged the male-dominated national political establishment.
In the 1870s, the major political debate in America was that of Reconstruction, the reintegration of Confederate States after the Civil War ended in 1865. On February 26, 1869, the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race. The passage of this amendment increased the momentum of the women’s suffrage movement, who were still denied a right to vote while non-white men were constitutionally enfranchised. Woodhull became a powerful voice to advance the rights of women nationally.
Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, broke barriers by becoming the first recorded female stockbrokers in New York City in 1870. The shock and awe of Wall Street was doubled when Woodhull, Claflin & Company made a fortune by advising Cornelius Vanderbilt, the wealthy railroad and shipping magnate, earning them the title of “Bewitching Brokers” by the New York Herald. Though the duo faced demeaning attacks from the press, which published sexualized and degrading images of the sisters running the firm, the press also became a major asset for Woodhull to attract support for her advocacy.
On March 14, 1870, Woodhull and Claflin began publishing a weekly newspaper that achieved a readership of 20,000 nationally at its height. Woodhull & Claflin Weekly became highly controversial for advocating ideas of free love, sex education, and socialism, reforms Woodhull argued for and based her later presidential run on. The paper has also been noted for being the first to ever print an English translation of the Communist Manifesto, arguing for its importance to working-class Americans. While Woodhull’s scandal-chasing methods were not universally agreed upon by key suffragette leaders, the newspaper launched her name into national spheres.
On June 6, 1872, the National Equal Rights Party nominated Victoria Woodhull as their presidential candidate, the first female presidential candidate in US history. Despite it being illegal for women to vote in the US, there was no law to prohibit them from running for office. By the election year Woodhull was a national voice for women’s suffrage and socialism, describing the economic and financial independence of women as phases towards equal rights. The party also nominated African American activist Frederick Douglass as Vice President, though he declined the nomination.
During the campaigning period, the Weekly exposed American preacher Henry Ward Beecher, a campaigner against Free Love, for having an affair with his friend’s wife. The story became “the most sensational ‘he said, she said’ in American history” and led to Woodhull, her sister, and husband to be arrested for “publishing obscene literature”. They were released on a technicality, but Woodhull was arrested along with other suffragettes on voting day for attempting to cast their votes.
The 1872 US Presidential election is one of the most bizarre in American history. The first presidential election after the Civil War, there were reports of irregular vote-counting practices despite Congress certifying the election results. Incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant defeated a challenge from third-party Liberal Republican Horace Greeley, who died before the Electoral votes were cast. Greeley’s death, the only major presidential candidate to die during the election process, led to significant confusion and invalidated his electoral votes. As for other third-parties such as the Equal Rights Party, Victoria Woodhull received no electoral votes and an insurmountable, but uncounted, percentage of the popular vote. Despite losing the presidential election, Woodhull continued to advocate for women’s rights, spiritualism, and free love but from outside of America.
In 1876, Victoria divorced James Blood and moved with her family to the United Kingdom. Following the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1877, his son William Vanderbilt paid Victoria and Tennessee $1,000 ($27,000 in 2022) to leave the country as to not interfere with the division of the Vanderbilt estate. Woodhull lectured at St. James’s Hall about women’s rights and the importance of consent. She soon remarried banker John Biddulph Martin in 1883 and published a magazine The Humanitarian under his name.
After Martin’s death in 1901, Woodhull Martin retired to Brendon’s North where she used her wealth to build schools in English villages and establish them with a kindergarten curriculum. Before dying on June 9, 1927, Victoria left one last noteworthy accomplishment of being the first female to drive around Hyde Park in London.
The tremendously fulfilling and ceiling-shattering life of Victoria Woodhull was miraculous, but hardly uncommon from suffragettes in the late 1800s. After Woodhull’s run for the presidency, the Equal Rights Party continued (albeit unsuccessfully) by nominated Belva Ann Lockwood, one of the first women to practice law in the US, in 1884 and 1888. Women were eventually enfranchised in the US with the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, 48 years after Woodhull had campaigned. 151 years after the 1872 campaign, women have made trailblazing advancements in politics with Vice President Kamala Harris being the first to occupy the position in 2021, but the country still awaits the arrival of a Madame President that Woodhull aspired to be.
Bibliography
“Belva A. Lockwood Collection: Manuscripts and Special Collections: NYS Library.” Accessed September 9, 2023. https://www.nysl.nysed.gov/msscfa/sc21041.htm.
Brady, Mathew Benjamin. Cabinet Photograph of Victoria Woodhull. Albumen Silver Print on Card. between and 1873 date QS:P,+1850- -00T00:00:00Z/7,P1319,+1866-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1326,+1873-00-00T00:00:00Z/9 1866. Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum, Historical Photographs and Special Visual Collections Department, Fine Arts Library. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Victoria-Woodhull-by-Mathew-Brady-c1870.png.
Cheshire, Herb, and Maxine Cheshire. “A Woman for President?” The New York Times, May 27, 1956.
Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers : The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York : HarperPerennial, 1999. http://archive.org/details/otherpowersageo000gold.
Hamilton, Neil A. Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States. 1st edition. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Havelin, Kate. Victoria Woodhull: Fearless Feminist. Twenty-First Century Books, 2006.
Katz, Elizabeth D. “Sex, Suffrage, and State Constitutional Law: Women’s Legal Right to Hold Public Office.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY, July 30, 2021. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3896499.
Lougen, Colleen. “Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States.” Reference & User Services Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 270.
McDougall, Walter A. Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877. Harper Collins, 2009.
Shearer, Mary L. “Victoria Woodhull: The Spirit to Run the White House.” Accessed September 6, 2023. http://www.victoria-woodhull.com/marriages.htm.
“The First Lady Motorist.” Accessed September 9, 2023. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002947/19040610/064/0010.
The New York Times. “THE CLAFLIN FAMILY.; Arrest of Victoria Woodhull, Tennie C. Claflin and Col. Blood–They Are Charged with Publishing an Obscene Newspaper.” November 3, 1872, sec. Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/1872/11/03/archives/the-claflin-family-arrest-of-victoria-woodhull-tennie-c-claflin-and.html.
The New York Times. “VIGTORIA MARTIN, SUFFRAGIST, DIES.” June 11, 1927, sec. Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/1927/06/11/archives/vigtoria-martin-suffragist-dies-nominated-for-president-of-the.html.
Tilton, Theodore. Biography of Victoria C. Woodhull. New York: Golden Age, 1871. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002918632.
Walsh, Colleen. “1872 Election: Victoria Woodhull Picks Frederick Douglass as VP.” Harvard Gazette (blog), November 2, 2020. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/11/1872-election-frederick-douglass-vice-president/.
“Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly (IAPSOP).” Accessed September 9, 2023. http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/woodhull_and_claflins_weekly/.
Retrospect Journal 
