Victoria Woodhull
—Chrissie
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The first woman to present herself as a candidate for President of the United States did so nearly fifty years before women had the right to vote in federal elections. This distinction goes to Victoria Woodhull, the candidate for the Equal Rights Party in 1872.
Victoria Claflin was born in 1838 in rural Ohio to a mother who was a Spiritualist and follower of Franz Mesmer and a father who was a lawyer and a conman. Victoria followed her mother’s interests into Spiritualism and also practiced a bit of her father’s arts as an itinerant Magnetic Healer, as a means to support herself and her children in the last years of her first marriage. She had only three years of formal schooling, but was self-taught in many subjects. She married for the first time at age fifteen to Canning (or Channing) Woodhull, who worked in Ohio as an unlicensed doctor. There is some question as to whether she entered into the marriage willingly or if he abducted her. They had two children, one of whom had a cognitive disability which she attributed to her husband’s alcoholism. She divorced him in 1865 on the grounds of adultery, a nearly impossible feat for a woman at the time.
It is likely her experience with Canning that inspired her advocacy of Free Love, a movement that demanded women have equal rights when it came to consenting to sex and the ability to enter into and leave a marriage. She vocally criticized the sexual double standard which allowed men to be promiscuous and adulterous while women were required to be virginal before marriage and chaste within it. She expressed these views, and many others, in a newspaper she ran with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, called the Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. The paper was funded by their work as stockbrokers on Wall Street (the first women to do so), which brought them into contact with Cornelius Vanderbilt, who may have used them to do some insider trading. The paper’s nearly 20,000 subscribers read about many controversial topics, including sex education and Free Love, women’s suffrage, Spiritualism, and vegetarianism. This paper was also the first place an English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published. The paper prompted the sisters’ arrest on obscenity charges in 1872, but they were acquitted.
Woodhull’s suffrage advocacy led her to be the second woman to address Congress on the issue (the first was Elizabeth Cady Stanton). She argued that women already had the right to vote according to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, despite the appearance of the term “male” in the Fourteenth. This was not a new argument at the time, but she expressed it in a way that impressed people in the movement and (reportedly) some of the Congressmen to whom she spoke. She was also very active in the Socialist Movement, framing her ideas of equality in socio-economic terms that were undoubtedly influenced by her experiences in her first marriage: a woman could not be truly equal until she was financially independent. It was during this time that she married James Blood, whom she later divorced.
She used these ideals as the basis for her platform as a candidate for President, which she announced in a letter to the Editor of the New York Herald published on 2 April 1870. The Equal Rights Party nominated her as their candidate at their convention in 1872. She was accompanied on the ticket by Frederick Douglass, who had not sought the nomination and was briefly unaware that he had been nominated for the Vice Presidency; he did not participate in any of the campaigning. It was during this campaign that Woodhull pushed back against those who had criticized her advocacy of Free Love by exposing that one of her most vocal and prominent critics, Henry Ward Beecher, had been conducting an adulterous affair. It was this story that, only a few days before the election, prompted her arrest on obscenity charges. Because she was in jail on election day, she was unable to test election law by attempting to vote in an election in which she was a candidate. She gained only a small number of votes nationwide and no electoral votes. She tried twice more to stand for the presidency, but with even less success.
She and her sister moved to England in 1877, in part because of a payoff by William Henry Vanderbilt, who feared they might reveal information about his father’s inappropriate trading practices from their time as stockbrokers. There, she married for a third time, to John Biddulph Martin, to whom she would remain married until his death in 1897. In England, she shifted her focus to education, funding local primary schools and pushing for the inclusion of a Kindergarten program. She repudiated some of her earlier views but remained an advocate for women to have equal rights before the law.