Her Greatest Legacy: The First Female Presidential Candidate

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The height of Victoria Woodhull’s fame came when she was nominated for President of the United States—

In the 1872 against Ulysses. S. Grant (R) and Horace Greely (LR) , Woodhull was nominated to run for the Equal Rights Party— despite not having yet reached the Constitutionally mandated age of 35 to serve as President.

 Woodhull nominated famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass as her running mate— he never accepted the nomination and didn’t even acknowledged her campaign, actively vocalizing his support of Grant later closer to election day. (NPS, 2018)

Image Courtesy of: San Fransisco Bulletin via Victoria Woodhull Spirit to Run

Woodhull’s platforms included universal gender and racial equality,  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—

Woodhull, of course, lost the election.

Her name did appear on ballots in some states, though the exact number of votes in her favor was never actually counted.

 Outside of being a woman, a number of other dramas plagued the integrity of Woodhull’s campaign—

Embarrassing details of her private life emerged as a result of a lawsuit that Woodhull’s mother brought against her second husband and Woodhull actually spent Election Day in jail as a result of her published account of Henry Beecher’s affair in the Claflin sister’s paper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. (Greenspan for History.com, 2018)