Move Over, Hillary! Victoria Woodhull Was the First Woman to Run for U.S. President
Source: Vogue, 13 April 2015
Hillary Clinton may have announced her candidacy via YouTube yesterday, but 143 years before her, another woman ran for president, and if social media had existed, she no doubt would have offered sentiments like, “I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please,” or perhaps, “If women would today rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.”
The above statements come from the quill pen of the incredible Victoria Woodhull, an unsung socialist feminist heroine who was the first woman to run for U.S. president on the Equal Rights Party ticket. At one time or another a traveling clairvoyant, a spellbinding lecturer, a newspaperwoman, and even a stockbroker, Woodhull took for her running mate, the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass. (In truth, there is scant record that Douglass accepted this honor—he never campaigned with her—but no matter, it was quite enough to put forth an interracial ticket in the years right after the Civil War.)
And what a platform she had! A militant feminist, she declared, “Women must rise from their position as ministers to the passions of men to be their equals. Their entire system of education must be changed. They must be trained like men, [to be] permanent and independent individuals, and not their mere appendages or adjuncts, with them forming but one member of society. They must be the companions of men from choice, never from necessity.” Her party also called for an end to the death penalty, prison reform, and dramatic improvements in education and workers’ rights. “If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask,” she once wrote, “there is but one course left then to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?”
Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Celeste Clafin, who went by Tennie, made a fortune on Wall Street as the first two women to run a brokerage house. These rebel girls of the nascent American left came by their wild ways honestly—their father was a literal snake oil salesman, their mom a follower of the Austrian mystic Franz Mesmer. (From which the word mesmerize derives.)
Read more: http://www.vogue.com/13254160/victoria-woodhull-first-woman-to-run-for-president/
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