sister Tennessee, in spring 1870, Woodhull opened a brokerage firm on Wall Street, Woodhull, Claflin & Co., the first brokerage firm intended for—and headed by—women.
BY DIANE RAPTOSH
D
o you know the first woman to run for president? The first woman to have a seat on the Stock Exchange? The first woman to own a newspaper? To speak before Congress? They were all Victoria Claflin Woodhull (18381928).
Born into poverty—far from the inherited wealth that characterized most female suffragist leaders, Woodhull embodied several radical causes, from women’s right to vote to international socialism and free love. Most historians agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for U.S. President. Indeed, Woodhull was nominated for this post by the newly formed Equal Rights Party in May 1872 in New York City, with abolitionist Frederick Douglass as presumptive running mate. Some historians, however, question the legality of her run, citing one of the following reasons: her age (she was a few months shy of the constitutionally mandated age of 35), the fact that the government declined to print her name on the ballot, or the fact women could not legally vote until August 1920. Notably, Douglass never acknowledged his nomination, serving instead as presidential elector in the U.S. Electoral College for New York State. Nonetheless, delivering such slogans as “Women and Negroes and the Workingman’s Passage,” Woodhull saw her historic nomination ratified at the June 6, 1872, convention.
Well before presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was mocked as “the devil” by certain powerful sources, 19th-century tabloids used Woodhull family photos, featuring bedraggled characters and caricatures of Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” as stock to lampoon all suffragists. Anti-suffrage men and women alike exploited tawdry Woodhull representations to discredit the movement as a threat to class privilege. Prominent suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—once ardent supporters of Woodhull’s platform—eventually turned on her. In the six-volume account of the early women’s movement that Anthony and Stanton compiled— considered to be definitive—there appear no plaudits, no pictures, no mention of Woodhull in the index. According to suffragist leader Anthony, after May 1872, Woodhull no longer had a place in the women’s movement, nor in its history. My upcoming book, Run: A VerseHistory of Victoria Woodhull, to be published as part of a triptych of works by female poets (Trio, Etruscan Press, August 2021) seeks to redress this erasure, to ensure Woodhull a place in Victoria Woodhull was mocked as American history’s “Mrs. Satan” by tabloids because of her future. suffragist efforts. Photos by WikiCommons
Victoria Woodhull:
A Place in History’s Future
Despite a background characterized by severe poverty and a childhood in which Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin suffered alleged abuses from an alcoholic father, Woodhull and Claflin became well-known spiritualists and healers. The sisters railed against Victorian hypocrisy and exposed in their radical weekly newspaper Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly the alleged adultery of America’s most highly revered preacher, Henry Ward Beecher. Woodhull was one of the few women to live out in public the principles of female emancipation, as well as to exemplify sexual and financial freedoms typically foreclosed to women. With
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