Victoria Woodhull, Presidential Candidate, 1872

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Victoria Woodhall, born Victoria California Claflin in 1838, was by all accounts a remarkable American, although her memory is lost to most of us. She was a frontier woman, stockbroker, newspaper editor, advocate for women's rights, and presidential candidate.

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Victoria Woodhull
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Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), was anAmerican leader of the woman's suffrage movement.

In 1872 Woodhull was the first female candidate forPresident of the United States. She was also the first woman to start a weekly newspaper and an activist for women's rights and labor reforms. Woodhull was an advocate of free love, by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce, and bear children without government interference.

Woodhull went from rags to riches twice, her first fortune being made on the road as a highly successful magnetic healer[1] before she joined the spiritualist movement in the 1870s.[2] While authorship of many of her articles is disputed (many of her speeches on these topics were collaborations between Woodhull, her backers, and her second husband Colonel James Blood[3]), her role as a representative of these movements was powerful. Together with her sister, she was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street, and they were the first women to found a newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly.

At her peak of political activity in the early 1870s, Woodhull is best known as the first woman candidate for the United States presidency, which she ran for in 1872 from the Equal Rights Party, supporting women's suffrage and equal rights. Her arrest on obscenity charges a few days before the election for publishing an account of the alleged adulterous affair between the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton added to the sensational coverage of her candidacy. She did not receive any electoral votes, and there is conflicting evidence about popular votes.

Many of the reforms and ideals Woodhull espoused for the working class, against what she saw as the corrupt capitalist elite, were extremely controversial in her time. Generations later many of these reforms have been implemented and are now taken for granted. Some of her ideas and suggested reforms are still debated today.

Presidential candidate

Woodhull was nominated for President of the United States by the newly formed Equal Rights Party on May 10, 1872, at Apollo Hall, New York City. A year earlier, she had announced her intention to run. Also in 1871, she spoke publicly against the government being composed only of men; she proposed developing a new constitution and a new government a year thence.[19] Her nomination was ratified at the convention on June 6, 1872.

They nominated the former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass for Vice President. He did not attend the convention and never acknowledged the nomination. He served as a presidential elector in the United States Electoral College for the State of New York.

This made her the first woman candidate.

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 issues 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. Biographer Mary L. Shearer, a descendant of Colonel Blood and researcher of Woodhull's life, has not found one article that discusses her age as an issue in the election.[12] The presidential inauguration was in March 1873. Woodhull's 35th birthday was in September 1873.

Woodhull's campaign was also notable for the nomination of Frederick Douglass, although he did not take part in it. His nomination stirred up controversy about the mixing of whitesand blacks in public life and fears of miscegenation (especially as he had married a much younger white woman after his first wife died.) The Equal Rights Party hoped to use the nominations to reunite suffragists with African-American civil rights activists, as the exclusion of female suffrage from the Fifteenth Amendment two years earlier had caused a substantial rift between the groups.

Having been vilified in the media for her support of free love, Woodhull devoted an issue of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly(November 2, 1872) to an alleged adulterous affair between Elizabeth Tilton and Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent Protestant minister in New York (he supported female suffrage but had lectured against free love in his sermons). Woodhull published the article to highlight what she saw as a sexual double-standard between men and women.

That same day, a few days before the presidential election, U.S. Federal Marshals arrested Woodhull, her second husbandColonel James Blood, and her sister Tennie C. Claflin on charges of "publishing an obscene newspaper" because of the content of this issue.[20] The sisters were held in the Ludlow Street Jail for the next month, a place normally reserved for civil offenses, but which contained more hardened criminals as well. The arrest was arranged by Anthony Comstock, the self-appointed moral defender of the nation at the time. Opponents raised questions about censorship and government persecution. The three were acquitted on a technicality six months later, but the arrest prevented Woodhull from attempting to vote during the 1872 presidential election. With the publication of the scandal, Theodore Tilton, the husband of Elizabeth, sued Beecher for "alienation of affection." The trial in 1875 was sensationalized across the nation, and eventually resulted in a hung jury.

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 September 21 of that year.Mary L. Stowe of California was nominated as the candidate for vice president. The convention was held at Willard's Hotel inBoonville, New York, and Anna M. Parker was its president. Some woman's suffrage organizations repudiated the nominations, however, 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.

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All of the above, and more, is at Wikipedia here:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull

- Alan
 
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