The Remarkable Story of the First Woman to Run For United States President in the 1872 Election

Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out shared the incredible story of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a fearless advocate and the first woman to run for President of the United States in the 1872 election.

The 19th amendment to the United States Constitution, which was the result of many decades of hard work and lobbying from tireless  suffragists who battled on both the state and national fronts, prohibits any US citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of  their sex. Nearly a half century before this  Constitutional amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, activist Victoria Claflin Woodhull  decided to run for the “nation’s highest office”,  

Woodhull, who was born in rural Ohio, lived with an abusive father and was married off to a drunken, abusive husband. After taking the unusual step (at the time) of filing for divorce, Woodhull and her sister Tennessee (Tennie) became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street and even opened their own brokerage firm.

The pair also started their own newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, where they could express their novel ideas of spiritualism, sex education, vegetarianism and women’s voting rights.

Beyond focusing on controversial  ideas like promoting sex education, their publication also committed the triple taboo  of the day of speaking out in support of equal rights and fair treatment regardless of race, sexual orientation, or sex. They even advocated for the legalization of prostitution…

When the newspaper was shut down due to manufactured violations that inspired the passing of the extremely conservative Comstock Act of 1873, Woodhull testified before Congress on January 11, 1871 to advocate a woman’s right to vote.

Notably, a few months before she announced she’d be running for president, she  even managed to secure herself an invitation to speak in front of the House Judiciary  Committee, which she did on January 11, 1871 …At the time, no other woman in American history had ever testified in front of that governing body.  Before the committee, she put forth the argument that women were already legally allowed to vote thanks to the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States  Constitution.

Woodhull announced her candidacy in 1870 with a strongly worded letter to the New York Herald and she was nominated in 1872.

Woodhull created the Equal  Rights Party, which subsequently nominated her as their presidential candidate in May of 1872  and then ratified her nomination in June. …While Woodhull was well aware she had no chance of being elected in the first place, that  was not the point of making the attempt. Her real goal was to establish a national platform with  which to spread her then controversial ideas. 

Sadly, she did not receive any electoral votes, however that did not stop her from speaking out about equal rights for all until her dying day.

From 1892 to 1901, she published  the magazine, The Humanitarian, with the help of her daughter…and during WWI volunteered with the Red Cross. After her third husband’s death in 1901, Woodhull ceased publishing her magazine and retired to a small village in Worcestershire, Bredon’s Norton, where she lived to  the ripe old age of 88, dying in 1927. As for the summation of her life’s work,  Woodhull once stated, “While others prayed  for the good time coming, I worked for it…”