Victoria Woodhull Born - Sept. 23, 1838

Victoria Woodhull, first woman to run for U.S. president, was born on this day in 1838. There's more in the March 28, 2011 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, "Little Queen for President."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's September.

(00:22):
Victoria Woodhall was born on this day in eighteen thirty eight.
She was the first woman to run for president in
the United States, fifty years before the ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote nationwide. She
was from Ohio, named Victoria Claflin after Queen Victoria. Her
family also called her Little Queen because she was very

(00:43):
proud and she had an uncanny ability to concentrate. Her
family background was also a little odd. Her father, Buck Claflin,
had a whole range of jobs and schemes to try
to make money. He decided to take advantage of the
growing interest in spiritualism and to set Victoria and her
sister Tennessee up as mediums to have them travel around

(01:04):
as a sort of spiritualist medicine show. They had a
varied and checkered career as spiritualists and mediums. Victoria got
married in the middle of all this, and that's where
she got the last name wood Hall. She eventually, though,
divorced him and married someone else and kept the last
name Woodhall, which was highly scandalous. In eighteen sixty eight,

(01:26):
a purported vision led Woodhull and her family to move
to New York City, where she and her sister continued
to work as clairvoyance. One of their clients was Commodore
Cornelius Vanderbilt, who gave them investment advice, which worked out
very well for them. Later on, he financially backed the
two sisters opening up their own brokerage firm, which made

(01:49):
them the first women's stockbrokers on Wall Street. This made
her a lot of money. Woodhull was finally able to
do something she had wanted to do for a long time,
which was to focus on social reform. It's really hard
as a woman to be a social reformer unless you
also had money to support your work. In April of
eighteen seventy, she started publishing a series of articles in

(02:09):
the New York Herald, including one where she announced her
candidacy for the presidency. It was expected that Republican President
Ulysses S. Grant was going to run for re election.
She knew she was not at all likely to earn
the Democrats nomination, so to run for president, she would
need to nominate herself and get enough support to make
it onto the ballot. So she bought a newspaper. The

(02:32):
newspaper obviously endorsed her candidacy. She also moved to Washington,
d C. And started working as a lobbyist, and she
befriended Congressman Benjamin Butler. Together, the two of them worked
out this argument that there didn't need to be a
constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, that women
already did have the right to vote under the fourteenth

(02:52):
and fifteenth Amendments. She was allowed to deliver that argument
before Congress on January eleven, eighteen seventy one, making her
the first woman to do so. Although suffragists were very
interested in wood Hall, and she was invited to join
the National Woman's Suffrage Association, women's suffrage wasn't really her
key political issue. She was a lot more focused on

(03:13):
education reform and assistance for the poor, and reforms of
marriage laws so that men and women were equal partners,
something that was described at the time as free love
that is not at all the free love of the hippies.
She gave a speech about this free love idea on
November twenty, eighteen seventy one, and this absolutely tanked her candidacy.

(03:38):
It was viewed as too radical and immoral, and she
was widely denounced. Most of the suffragists cut ties with her.
Only the most radical stayed by her side and helped
her found the Equal Rights Party, which nominated her for
president in eighteen seventy two, also nominating Frederick Douglas as
vice president, although he declined that nomination. At this point, though,

(04:01):
things were really falling apart for Victoria. Would haul all
the controversy, lost her clients on Wall Street, and her
stockbroker business failed and she lost all of her money.
Then she tried to stoke up a big scandal with
her sister, involving Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe and
their brother. This didn't get them anything positive. Victoria and

(04:21):
Tennessee wand up being arrested for distributing indecent material through
the mail, so on election day they were in jail.
That's a pretty unspectacular end of the campaign for the
first woman to run for president, and there is some
debate about whether her candidacy even really counts. The Constitution
requires presidents to be at least thirty five years of age.

(04:42):
Woodhull turned thirty five on September seventy three, which was
nearly ten months after the election and six months after
Inauguration Day of eighteen seventy three. You can learn more
about this in the March episode of Stuff You Miss
in History Class, Little Queen for President, and you can
subscribe to This Day in History Class on Apple Podcasts,

(05:03):
Google Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts, and you
can tune in tomorrow for one of the United States
most infamous traders.