She didn’t have the right to vote, but that didn’t stop her from seeking office.
Ohio native Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927), the first woman to run for U.S. president, was ahead of her time.
Many Americans considered her a threat to society, a notorious feminist with questionable morals and radical ideas of equal rights. Some viewed her as a menace. Others dismissed her as a joke.
A native of Homer in Licking County, Victoria was the seventh of 10 children born to Roxanna and Reuben “Buck” Claflin. The family traveled Ohio while operating a medicine show and fortune-telling enterprise, moving frequently and briefly settling in Massillon.
At age 15 in Cleveland, Victoria married Dr. Canning Woodhull, a philandering alcoholic and morphine addict 14 years her senior. The couple had two children, Byron and Zula, before divorcing.
Woodhull and sister Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin (1844-1923) moved to New York and “struck up an acquaintance” with millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), introducing him to the family trade of spiritualism and faith healing, among other things.
With Vanderbilt’s backing in 1870, the sisters founded Woodhull, Claflin & Co., the first Wall Street brokerage run by women. They also established the newspaper Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly in 1870. Woodhull’s second husband, Col. James Blood, served as managing editor.
Early activist
Through the newspaper, Woodhull advocated for women’s suffrage, civil rights, social reform, free love and other causes. Claiming to be “the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented class in the republic,” she announced her presidential candidacy for 1872.
“I am quite well aware that in assuming this position I shall evoke more ridicule than enthusiasm at the outset,” she noted. “But this is an epoch of sudden changes and startling surprises. What may appear absurd today will assume a serious aspect tomorrow. I am content to wait until my claim for recognition as a candidate shall receive the same consideration of the press and public.”
She was nominated at the 1872 Equal Rights Party convention at Apollo Hall in New York with ex-slave Frederick Douglass as vice president.
“She denounced politicians, parties, and the constitution, and declared a new constitution would take the place of the present blood-stained document,” the New York Sun reported. “Mrs. Woodhull was received with the heartiest demonstrations, and at the close of her remarks was greeted with a perfect tumult of applause and shouts of delight.”
On the day before the election, agents charged Woodhull, Claflin and Blood with publishing an obscene newspaper article about an unfaithful minister. It probably had little impact on the vote.
Republican Ulysses S. Grant, a fellow Ohioan, whipped Liberal Republican Party nominee Horace Greeley, a New York publisher. Woodhull received less than 0.1 percent of the popular vote.
No one knows what the total might have been if women had cast ballots.
Drawing crowds
After the election, Woodhull remained in the public eye as a public speaker. She drew big audiences even though many religious leaders discouraged their congregations from attending.
In 1875, she presented her talk The True and the False, Socially to 250,000 people at 150 engagements “in the principal cities and towns of the country.”
In the address, she called for sexual freedom and the abolition of prostitution “both in and out of marriage.”
“Of all the horrid brutalities of this age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage,” she told audiences. “Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and … millions of poor, heartbroken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust.”
Woodhull crisscrossed Ohio to present the speech. A Canton newspaper scoffed when she announced a Nov. 2 engagement in Akron.
“Victoria Woodhull is lecturing in this neighborhood,” the Stark County Democrat reported. “Akron and Mansfield are to have Vic’s soothing voice but Canton has suffered enough this fall, and is hardly prepared to bear such an infliction.”
Impressive performance
The Akron speech attracted “a large and respectable audience” to the Academy of Music at Market and Main streets. Admission was 50 cents.
Woodhull gave a commanding performance.
“We wonder not that she is called ‘Queen of the Rostrum,’ when she holds her audience spellbound, apparently without an effort, from her first appearance upon the stage until she utters her last syllable,” the Akron Daily Argus newspaper reported Nov. 3, 1875.
“Possessed of a finely developed physique, standing erect, completely self-possessed, her large restless eyes peering in every individual face as though addressing each hearer in person, her own soul catching fire at the inspiration of her own words, and all the energies of her nature being roused up by the vast importance of her theme, she pours forth such a stream of eloquence — fervid, liquid, electric — as to compel even the admiration of her most malignant opposers.”
Sandusky Daily Register reporter C.D. Martin also was impressed with the speech, but feared Woodhull was “doomed to disappointment.”
“That she will be able to achieve a great social revolution, I cannot believe,” Martin wrote. “I should rejoice with great joy if she had the power of doing what none of her predecessors have been able to do … but that she is the chosen instrumentality whereby this great change is to be effected, admits, to my mind, of very serious question.”
Woodhull ran again for president in 1884 and 1892, but the results were no better than the first election. After divorcing Blood, Woodhull moved with her sister to England and continued to be a public speaker. She met third husband John Martin in London and retired to the English countryside.
After decades of championing women’s suffrage, she lived to see American women gain the right to vote in 1920. Seven years later, Victoria Woodhull died June 9, 1927, at age 88 in Bredon, Worcestershire.
Her ashes were scattered at sea.
She was the first woman to run for president … but certainly not the last.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of the book Lost Akron from The History Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.