The First Woman To Run For The Office Of President Of The United States Of America

Based on the rhetoric surrounding her historic candidacy in 2008 and, in more recent months, leading up to the 2016 campaign, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton was the first woman ever to run for the nation’s highest office. Far from it.

Few know, though, the name of the woman who challenged the highest glass ceiling. That honor belongs to a colorful and convention-defying woman named Victoria Woodhull, a spiritualist, activist, politician, and author, who ran for the office in 1872, 136 years before Clinton made her first run in 2008.

Born in 1838, Victoria California Claflin was the seventh of 10 children who lived in an wooden shack in Homer, Ohio, a small frontier town in Licking County. Her education lasted less than three years between the ages of eight to eleven. According to Myra MacPherson, Victoria’s latest biographer (The Scarlet Sisters: Sex Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age about Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee), Victoria claimed that she had never spent even one full year in a schoolroom. MacPherson writes that their mother, Annie, was a “slattern” who was described by all who met her in later life as an “unpleasant old hag.” Their father, Buck, was, if possible, worse: a thief, a child beater, “a one-eyed snake oil salesman who posed as a doctor and a lawyer.” The lives of the children were “filled with Dickensian debauchery.” Victoria was forced by Buck to travel in his painted wagon and work as a revivalist child preacher and a fortune teller; Tennessee, with whom Victoria would collaborate closely throughout her life, worked as a “magnetic healer;” and both were made to perform as “faith healers” and “clairvoyants who spoke to the dead.” Their lives were tumultuous, impoverished, unpredictable, and nomadic.

In 1868, Woodhull and Tennessee traveled to New York City, where they met the recently widowed Cornelius Vanderbilt. He claimed that Victoria Woodhull’s psychological solace aided him, greatly. He demonstrated his appreciation by setting the sisters up in business. Victoria and “Tennie” established the first woman-run stock brokerage company on Wall Street.

In April 1870, just two months after opening her brokerage firm, Woodhull announced her candidacy for president of the United States. She campaigned on a platform of women’s suffrage, regulation of monopolies, nationalization of railroads, an eight-hour workday, direct taxation, abolition of the death penalty, and welfare for the poor, among other things. In addition to promoting herself in her weekly newspaper, Woodhull organized an Equal Rights Party, which nominated her at its May 1872 convention to run against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant and Democrat Horace Greeley.

She selected as her running mate Frederick Douglass, former escaped slave-turned-abolitionist writer and speaker. His nomination stirred up controversy about the mixing of whites and blacks in public life and fears of miscegenation. On paper, it was an impressive pick, but actually, Douglass never appeared at the party’s nominating convention, never agreed to run with Woodhull, never participated in the campaign, and actually gave stump speeches for Grant.

While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for President of the United States, some have questioned that priority given concerns with the legality of her run. They disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35. However, election coverage by contemporary newspapers does not suggest age was a significant issue. The presidential inauguration was in March 1873. Woodhull’s 35th birthday was in September 1873.

Victoria received zero electoral votes.

Woodhull again tried to gain nominations for the presidency in 1884 and 1892. Newspapers reported that her 1892 attempt culminated in her nomination by the “National Woman Suffragists’ Nominating Convention” on 21 September. Mary L. Stowe of California was nominated as the candidate for vice president. Some women’s suffrage organizations repudiated the nominations claiming that the nominating committee was unauthorized. Woodhull was quoted as saying that she was “destined” by “prophecy” to be elected president of the United States in the upcoming election.

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other giants of the women’s suffrage movement embraced Woodhull around the time of her congressional appearance. But they soon had a falling out, in part over Woodhull’s political ambitions and love of the limelight. She did not get invited to speak at suffrage conventions following her first run for president.

In October 1876, Woodhull divorced her second husband, Colonel James Blood. Less than a year later, exhausted and depressed, she left to start a new life. When Commodore Vanderbilt died, his son William Henry Vanderbilt gave Victoria and Tennessee a large sum of money to leave the country and set up in England.

She made her first public appearance in London as a lecturer at St. James’s Hall on December 4, 1877. Her lecture was called The Human Body, the Temple of God, a lecture which she had previously delivered in the United States. Present at one of her lectures was the banker John Biddulph Martin. They began to see each other and married on October 31, 1883
From then on, she was known as Victoria Woodhull Martin. Under that name, she published the magazine, The Humanitarian, from 1892 to 1901, with help from her daughter Zula Woodhull. After her husband died in 1901, Martin gave up publishing and retired to the country, establishing residence at Norton Park in Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, where she died on June 10, 1927.

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