A Woman for President—in 1872?

On May 10, 1872, 135 years ago today, the Equal Rights party nominated the newspaper editor and stockbroker Victoria Woodhull as its candidate for President of the United States.

The campaign was a farrago of impossibilities. Had she, by some miracle, been elected, Woodhull could not even have served, as she had not yet reached the constitutionally required age of 35. Frederick Douglass, chosen for Vice President, never even acknowledged the nomination and indeed served as an elector for the Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, who was running for a second term. There was no money with which to campaign or even to print ballots (parties printed their own ballots until the adoption of the secret ballot in the 1880s). Not a single Equal Rights party ballot survives. To add insult to injury, on Election Day, November 5, Victoria Woodhull had been in jail for several days on a charge of obscenity.

Regardless, she has the distinction of being the first woman to run for President. In a year when, for the first time in American history, there is a female presidential candidate who has a very real chance to be nominated and elected, attention should be paid to this remarkable character.

Victoria Woodhull was born in Ohio in 1838, the daughter of Reuben “Buck” Claflin and his wife, Roxanna. She was named for the queen who had ascended the British throne the previous year. (And thus she was spared her mother’s taste for unusual names. Her two brothers were Hebern and Maldon, and two of her sisters Odessa and Utica. Another sister, Tennessee Claflin, would be closely associated with Victoria for most of her life.)

The Claflin family was usually in precarious economic circumstances and not well accepted by the communities in which it lived. Buck Claflin owned a gristmill in Homer, Ohio, but that burned down, and the family had to move. They would move several times thereafter, often one jump ahead of the sheriff. Soon the family was involved in faith healing and spiritualism, which was having a great vogue in the mid-nineteenth century. Both Victoria and Tennessee practiced the art. Gifted performers and both strikingly attractive, they were quite successful at it.

In 1853, aged only 15, Victoria married Canning Woodhull, a doctor of limited medical training. He turned out to be a drunk and chronic philanderer, and his wife was soon the mainstay of the family, selling Dr. Woodhull’s “Elixir of Life” and working as an actress and even a cigar girl in various cities around the country. In 1864 she divorced Dr. Woodhull, and in 1866 she moved to New York, where her parents and her sister Tennessee were already living.

The two sisters soon attracted a group of people interested in such topics as women’s rights and what was called “free love.” This was not, as it has often been portrayed, unlimited sexual license. Rather the advocates of free love, of which Mrs. Woodhull became a leading exponent, sought an end to the extreme sexual strictures of the time, in which women were not supposed to have sexual desires, marriage was often a trap from which there was no escape, and the double standard was very much the standard.

In 1868 the two sisters met Cornelius Vanderbilt, rapidly becoming the richest man in the country with his railroads. Always interested in beautiful women, the Commodore, as he was universally called, also had keen sense of humor. Tennessee was soon providing the recently widowed Vanderbilt with “magnetic healing” treatments and other comforts. He apparently asked her to marry him, but she was forced to turn him down, as she was still married to a long-discarded husband.

Vanderbilt began giving the sisters stock tips, which allowed them to prosper mightily, and he soon agreed to finance them in establishing a Wall Street brokerage house, Woodhull, Claflin and Company. In the mid-nineteenth century the phrase “lady broker” was nearly as oxymoronic as “lady soldier.” The newspapers had a field day with the “queens of finance” and the “bewitching brokers,” but they were soon doing a brisk and profitable business at their office at 44 Broad Street, thanks to the Commodore’s backing and patronage.

The profits from the brokerage business allowed them to start a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. The masthead proclaimed it “The Organ of the Most Advanced Thought and Purpose in the World!” and there were not many Victorian hot-button topics that the weekly was unwilling to cover. It soon claimed a circulation of 20,000. In 1871 it became the first periodical to publish Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto in English.

In January of that year, Mrs. Woodhull became the first woman ever to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, in favor of woman suffrage, and the next day she spoke before the National Women’s Suffrage Association, which was meeting in Washington. There she first met such major figures of the movement as Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Woodhull was a remarkably talented orator, one newspaper calling her “the ablest advocate on Woman Suffrage, a woman of remarkable originality and power.” But her radical views, especially regarding “free love,” made her unacceptable to many of the middle-class suffragette leaders. Nonetheless, a dissident group within the NWSA organized the Equal Rights Party and nominated Woodhull for President.

However, when her newspaper broke the story of the affair between the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the country’s most famous clergyman, and the wife of his best friend—one of the great American scandals of the nineteenth century—she was sued for criminal libel. When it published reports about a Wall Street broker’s dalliances with innocent young women, the two sisters were arrested for sending obscene material through the mails (they were eventually found not guilty).

By the time the dust settled, the crash of 1873 ended their involvement in the brokerage business and the newspaper folded. In 1877 the two sisters moved to England. (Apparently with considerable assistance from the Vanderbilt family. The Commodore had died that year, and his will was being contested in court by those who hadn’t fared well in it. The last thing the heirs wanted was for Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin to be called as witnesses.) In England they both soon married very rich men and stayed for the rest of their lives, and Victoria published an important journal, The Humanitarian, there for several years.

In many ways, not least as a presidential candidate, Victoria Woodhull was a woman ahead of her time. Even her ideas about “free love,” which so deeply scandalized her contemporaries, have—in an age of easy divorce, casual sex, and unmarried couples living together—largely come to pass. Whatever her failings, and she had her share, Victoria Woodhull did not have even an iota of the greatest moral failing of the Victorian age, hypocrisy.

—John Steele Gordon writes “The Business of America” for American Heritage magazine. His most recent book is An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins).