More than a century and a half before Nikki Haley’s run for the GOP presidential nomination, a fiery activist from Ohio became the first woman nominated for U.S. president.
Victoria Woodhull’s varied and colorful life makes her difficult to pigeonhole. The suffragist, medium, businesswoman, stockbroker and newspaper publisher was “Mrs. Satan” to some, a visionary champion of women’s and children’s rights to others. She rode motorcycles, preached “free love” and followed the guidance of an ancient Greek orator she believed had presented himself to her as a spirit guide.
The Equal Rights Party nominated Woodhull to face incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 and Democrat Horace Greeley, nearly 50 years before women had the right to vote. At 34, she was a few months shy of the required age, but most historians still view her nomination and run as the first.
Woodhull lost, of course, but by how much is unclear. The number of votes she received in losing to Grant was never officially recorded, and historians surmise many were discarded. Nonetheless, interest in Woodhull’s life is renewed each time another woman makes a bid for the White House.
Woodhull was honored in and around her hometown in Homer, Ohio, with exhibits, lectures and prominent mention in the village’s bicentennial parade when Democrat Hillary Clinton became the first female nominee of a major party in 2016. Fans and history buffs visited the only U.S. memorial to Woodhull: a clock tower in nearby Granville where her wooden likeness emerges hourly to organ music.
Licking County antiquarian Robbins Hunter conceived the Woodhull memorial in the 1970s, not wanting to see the legacy of a local daughter forgotten.
Judith Dann, a professor of ancient history at Columbus State Community College who made a project of Woodhull’s life after moving to Homer around 2000, told The Associated Press in 2016 that a rivalry with Susan B. Anthony and others in the early suffragist movement may have led to Woodhull’s exclusion from history books. Her radical beliefs on women and marriage also caused consternation.
One of 10 children, Woodhull was beaten and starved, possibly abused, by her father as a child. She later blamed the disability of her first child on her first husband’s alcoholism and drug addiction. When she preached “free love,” Woodhull wasn’t talking about sex, but of the institution of marriage, Dann said. She saw the day’s legal prohibition against divorce as akin to slavery. Woodhull also favored legalizing prostitution as protection to women.
The family was effectively run out of Homer when Woodhull was a girl, Dann said.
After relocating to New York City, Woodhull, born Victoria California Claflin, and her sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, befriended railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. With his help and with money earned helping him communicate with the spirit world, they became the first women to open a Wall Street brokerage house, earning nicknames including “the bewitching brokers.”
They also started a newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, to support Victoria’s presidential run and to promote edgy ideas like short skirts and vegetarianism. Woodhull was in jail on Election Day 1872, charged with publishing obscenity for an article about a prominent minister’s alleged extramarital affair; she was later acquitted on a technicality.
This Aug. 25, 2016, photo shows biographies and pulp fiction about America’s first female presidential candidate, Victoria Woodhull, and other items in an exhibit about Woodhull at the Robbins Hunter Museum in Granville, Ohio. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)
The Robbins Hunter Museum organized an exhibit in 2016 that focused largely on the women’s suffrage movement but also featured photos, newspaper clippings and books about Woodhull.
Rebecca Dungan, a then-board member who chaired the museum’s program committee, told the AP at the time that some were fiction books that she wouldn’t read because they made her blush.
“They’re titles like Notorious Victoria, The Terrible Siren, Mrs. Satan, Outrageous, The Scarlet Sisters, Renegade Queen, Free Lover,” she said. Well before the story of a Founding Father became “Hamilton,” there was even a Broadway musical, 1980’s “Onward Victoria,” telling Woodhull’s story.
Woodhull’s party picked Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave turned abolitionist, as her running mate — though Douglass never acknowledged it.
Despite her campaign fading into history, Dann said, she had a lasting impact.
“Victoria’s here,” she said. “She left her mark. We just don’t know to look for it.”
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