Victoria Claflin Woodhull

Facts about Victoria Woodhull

Victoria Claflin Woodhull died at 88 years old
Died: June 10, 1927
Birthplace: Homer, Ohio, United States
Best known as: The first woman candidate for U.S. President

     

Victoria Claflin Woodhull Biography

Name at birth: Victoria Claflin

Victorial Claflin Woodhull was a controversial activist, socialite, and political figure of the 19th century. She is best remembered now as the first woman to run for president of the United States, in 1872 — forty-eight years before white women could vote in the U.S.

Brought up in the family’s traveling medicine show, Victoria Claflin and her sister Tennessee made their way into New York social circles through fortune-telling and spiritualism.

With the backing of the wealthy Cornelius Vanderbilt, they opened the first woman-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street in 1870.

As Victoria Woodhull (she was married and divorced as a teenager) she became a vocal advocate of women’s rights, labor reform and free love; she was widely criticized for promiscuity, charges she answered in her own weekly magazine, Woodhull and Claflin.

Woodhull’s flamboyant ways and radical views kept her out of the mainstream of the suffragist movement, yet in 1872 she was nominated for the U.S. presidency at the New York convention of the minor Equal Rights Party.

She was never a serious threat to defeat incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, but Woodhull did become the first woman in history to run for the job.

Then, in her magazine, Woodhull accused one of the most famous ministers of the day, Henry Ward Beecher, of adultery with a friend’s wife.

Because she detailed the preacher’s love affair, Woodhull was jailed for sending obscene material through the mail (and labeled “Mrs. Satan” from cartoonist Thomas Nast). On election day presidential “candidate” Woodhull was in jail.

She eventually married the English banker John Biddulph Martin and left the United States for England, where she lived as Victoria Woodhull Martin until her death in 1927.

Extra credit

Victoria Woodhull was married three times: to Dr. Canning Woodhull (from 1853 until their divorce on an unknown date; Victoria was 15 at the time of their marriage); to Colonel James Blood (1866 until their divorce in 1876), and to John Biddulph Martin (1883 until his death in 1901)… Victoria Woodhull was back in the news in June of 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee for president — 144 years after Woodhull’s run.


     

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