Victoria Claflin Woodhull Biography

Victorial Claflin Woodhull was a controversial activist, socialite, and political figure of the 19th century. She is best remembered now as the first woman to run for president of the United States, in 1872 — forty-eight years before white women could vote in the U.S.

Brought up in the family’s traveling medicine show, Victoria Claflin and her sister Tennessee made their way into New York social circles through fortune-telling and spiritualism.

With the backing of the wealthy Cornelius Vanderbilt, they opened the first woman-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street in 1870.

As Victoria Woodhull (she was married and divorced as a teenager) she became a vocal advocate of women’s rights, labor reform and free love; she was widely criticized for promiscuity, charges she answered in her own weekly magazine, Woodhull and Claflin.

Woodhull’s flamboyant ways and radical views kept her out of the mainstream of the suffragist movement, yet in 1872 she was nominated for the U.S. presidency at the New York convention of the minor Equal Rights Party.

She was never a serious threat to defeat incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, but Woodhull did become the first woman in history to run for the job.

Then, in her magazine, Woodhull accused one of the most famous ministers of the day, Henry Ward Beecher, of adultery with a friend’s wife.

Because she detailed the preacher’s love affair, Woodhull was jailed for sending obscene material through the mail (and labeled “Mrs. Satan” from cartoonist Thomas Nast). On election day presidential “candidate” Woodhull was in jail.

She eventually married the English banker John Biddulph Martin and left the United States for England, where she lived as Victoria Woodhull Martin until her death in 1927.