Victoria Woodhull achieved a lot of firsts in her life, but I bet you’ve never heard of her before.

Rebellious is putting it mildly in describing her nature. History books tend to leave out the more controversial people. She was way ahead of her time in many respects and the true definition of a free spirit. The reason you may not have heard about her is because she was a proponent of free love and was later outcasted by many of the most prominent women of the Suffrage Movement. When you hear the term ‘free love’ you might be thinking that it relates to the 1970’s or the practice of having multiple, short-lived relationships. This is incorrect in the context of Woodhull’s time.

5 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT VICTORIA WOODHULL

She and her sister netted around $700,000 during the gold panic of 1869.
She founded her own newspaper in 1870.
She received almost no formal education.
She went from rags to riches twice in her life.
She was the first woman to run for the US Presidency.

FREE LOVE:

Free love is a social movement that accepts all forms of love. The Free Love movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else. -Wikipedia

It’s basically the quest for freedom from state regulation and church interference in personal relationships. The main reason Victoria became a free love advocate is because her first husband turned out to be an alcoholic and a cheater. She was married at 15 years of age while her husband was 29. During these times, women rarely divorced due to the laws and social stigma, but Victoria was able to successfully divorce her husband. It was after her divorce that she began to write and speak publicly about the ideas of free love:

“To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold” -Victoria Woodhull

FIRST FEMALE BROKER ON WALL STREET

Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, began working as clairvoyants for the railroad baron, Cornelius Vanderbilt because he was distrustful of medical doctors.

Vanderbilt and Tennessee soon formed a relationship. The sisters became close friends with him.

Vanderbilt had greatly profited by selling gold, on Woodhull’s advice, just a few months before the 1869 Black Friday gold panic caused by the market manipulations of Fisk and Gould. Vanderbilt shared that profit with Woodhull, who probably had gotten a tip about Fisk’s activities from famous showgirl, Josie Mansfield who was Fisk’s mistress at the time.

From these profits along with Vanderbilt’s support, Victoria and Tennessee founded their brokerage firm, Woodhull, Claflin & Co. on Wall Street.

Their brokerage saw fast growth and also a flood of new female clients, from heiresses to showgirls. Women accounted for a large percentage of the firm’s clientele. It didn’t take long for the sisters to become wealthy women. With the profits from their brokerage, Victoria then founded a newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. This newspaper became the first in the United States to publish The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This was considered to be an extremely controversial thing for a newspaper to do at the time.

FIRST WOMAN TO RUN FOR US PRESIDENT

Image Source: https://cathyso3.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/women-in-history-month/

Victoria Woodhull learned how to infiltrate the all-male domain of national politics and was the first woman to ever petition the Congress in person.

In 1870 Victoria Woodhull announced her candidacy for the Presidency of the United States by writing a letter to the editor of the New York Herald. She was nominated for President by the newly formed Equal Rights Party on May 10, 1872 in New York City. It’s not clear how many votes she received because those voting for her were required to write in her name. But controversy, in the form of a jail sentence came knocking at her door three days before the election:

On Nov. 2….Woodhull was arrested, on charges of sending obscene material through the mail. This referred to the latest issue of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, in which she had attacked eminent preacher Rev. Henry Ward Beecher for practicing the same sort of “free love” that he denounced from the pulpit.
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She tried to get nominated again for President in 1884 and 1892, but she proved to be too controversial.

Sources:
http://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-should-know-about-victoria-woodhull
http://www.thinkadvisor.com/2011/01/01/wall-streets-first-woman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1869)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull