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FAMOUS WOMEN OF THE WORLD
VIRGINIA WOODHULL
Most folks have never heard of Victoria Woodhull, but she made the pages of history books as the first woman to run for the office of the President of the United States. Let’s learn more about Victoria’s several other achievements. • Born into humble beginnings, Victoria’s parents ran a traveling medicine show, where her mother was a spiritualist and her father, the typical “snake oil salesman.” Victoria and her sister Tennie worked as clairvoyants and fortune tellers in the show. At age 14, Victoria contracted a serious illness and her parents consulted a 28-year-old doctor, Channing Woodhull, who would become Victoria’s husband just two months past her 15th birthday. • It soon became apparent that Dr. Woodhull was an alcoholic, morphine addict, and a womanizer, and Victoria went to work to keep them afloat. After two children, including one who was mentally disabled, Victoria divorced Woodhull 11 years later. • Victoria and Tennie were very successful as spiritual mediums and healers and made the move to New York City to capitalize on this success. Victoria married again, this time to James Blood, a former Union Army colonel in
the Civil War, who had also been the first mayor of Lawrence, Kansas. The sisters’ most famous client was railroad millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt. In appreciation for their services, in 1870 Vanderbilt helped them open their own stock brokerage house on Wall Street, and the sisters became the first women stockbrokers in history. The company was immediately successful, patronized by wealthy widows and other women of means. • With the proceeds from the brokerage, the women established their own newspaper Woodhull and Claflin’s
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Weekly, a publication with 20,000 subscribers, which focused on women’s rights and labor reform. The paper was the first to print the English version of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. • In 1872, nearly 50 years before women had the right to vote, Victoria became the first female candidate for U.S. President, nominated by the Equal Rights Party. The Party chose former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass as her running mate, although he never acknowledged the nomination. Victoria’s platform included an eight-hour workday, a graduated income tax, social welfare programs, and women’s rights. As a divorced woman, she advocated new divorce laws that gave women the right to leave unbearable marriages. In her words, “I have an inalienable constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please!” • Just days before the Presidential election, Woodhull, her husband, and her sister were arrested on obscenity charges for running an exposé on popular Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Victoria spent election day in jail, and although she was acquitted of all charges, her reputation was destroyed and her businesses went bankrupt. • Woodhull divorced her second husband in 1876, and moved to England, where she married a wealthy banker, and published a magazine called The Humanitarian for nine years. She lived out the remainder of her days in England, dying in London in 1927.
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