Madame President

“They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform. The world moves.”

Victoria Woodhull achieved many firsts in her life: the first woman on Wall Street, the first woman newspaper founder, and the first woman to testify before Congress.

In a time when women weren’t allowed to vote (and almost a century and a half before Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign), Victoria Woodhull achieved her most important first-by becoming the first woman to run for president.

Early Life

Victoria California Claflin was born on September 23, 1838, in Homer, Ohio, the seventh of ten children. Her mother believed herself to be a clairvoyant and convinced Victoria and her sister Tennessee that they also had the ‘gift.’ When forced to leave Homer under suspicion that their father had burned down the family mill for the insurance money, Victoria and Tennessee traveled the country in a family medicine and fortune-telling show, billing herself as a ‘medical clairvoyant’ who could heal the sick.

Her first marriage at age fifteen to Canning Woodhull in November of 1853 was not a happy one. Thirteen years her senior, he proved to be a physically abusive alcoholic. After eleven years and two children, she divorced in 1864.

Victoria continued to tour with Tennessee throughout her first marriage as a clairvoyant, making her first fortune by promoting herself as a ‘magnetic healer.’

She married a second time to former Union Colonel James Harvey Blood in 1866. Blood would introduce her to the reform movements that would become a part of her future presidential campaign.

“The Bewitching Brokers”

In 1866 she moved to New York City with her husband and sister to open a spiritualist salon. It was there that she met Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in the world. At seventy-six, Vanderbilt had recently lost his wife and wanted to contact her from beyond the grave.

Whether he was successful or not is unknown, but he was so impressed with the beautiful and resourceful sisters that he began providing financial advice to them. Victoria made her second fortune in the stock market, specifically during the September 1869 market crash where her astute trading allowed her to amass a nest egg of around $700,000 ($15 million in 2022 money).

Victoria and Tennessee used their new fortune to establish Woodhull, Claflin & Company, the first woman-owned brokerage house on Wall Street. The New York Herald called Victoria and Tennessee “the Queens of Finance,” and the Bewitching Brokers.”

Newspaper

After conquering Wall Street, Victoria and Tennessee set their sights on the newspaper industry.

One of the first women to start a newspaper in the US, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly promoted progressive social causes of the day, such as sex education, free love (defined as the freedom of a woman to marry, divorce, and have children without social or government interference), women’s suffrage, short skirts, spiritualism, vegetarianism, and licensed prostitution. However, the real goal of the newspaper was to promote Woodhull’s upcoming presidential campaign.

Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly printed the first English version of the Communist Manifesto on December 30, 1871. In 1872 the newspaper published a story about an alleged affair between popular pastor Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton. In one of the most sensationalized scandals of the age, Elizabeth’s husband Theodore Tilton sued Beecher for ‘alienation of affection.’ Beecher was tried in 1875 but it ended in a hung jury.

Woodhull achieved another first on January 11, 1871, when she became the first woman to testify before a Congressional committee exploring women’s right to vote. She contended that the Fourteenth Amendment already gave women the right to vote. She may have been correct, but women would have another forty-eight years to wait for the Nineteenth Amendment.

“Women are the equals of men before the law and are equal in all their rights.”

Victoria’s newspaper was intentionally controversial, so much so that on November 2, 1872, US Marshalls arrested Victoria, her husband, and Tennessee on charges of publishing an obscene newspaper through the postal service. She was eventually acquitted, but her actions spurred Congress to pass the Comstock Laws of 1873.

Presidential Run

Woodhull announced her presidential campaign on April 2, 1870. Nominated in May of 1872 by the Equal Rights Party, her platform supported women’s suffrage and equal rights. Her running mate was the abolitionist Frederick Douglas, who never acknowledged or campaigned for the job.

Arrested on her obscenity charge a few days before the election, she spent election day in the Ludlow Street Jail.

Woodhull received no electoral votes in an election where six candidates earned at least one. It probably didn’t matter anyway-she was younger than the Constitutionally mandated thirty-five-year-old requirement.

She tried to run again for president in the 1884 and 1892 elections but was unsuccessful.

Life in England

Legal bills and a downturn in the stock market cost Victoria her second fortune. Taking $1000 ($27,000 in 2022 money) from William Henry Vanderbilt for her and her sister to prevent them from testifying in the legal battle over Cornelius Vanderbilt’s estate after his death, Victoria divorced Colonel Blood and she and Tennessee moved to England in August 1877.

There she became a lecturer and made her third fortune the old-fashioned way, by marrying wealthy banker John Biddulph Martin in October 1883.

When Martin died in 1901, Woodhull retired to their country residence at Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, England, where she died at eighty-eight years old on June 9, 1927.