Humanities => first female US presidential candidate
Victoria Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio on September 23, 1838 to parents Reuben Buckman Claflin and Roxanna Hummel. Woodhull’s childhood was a turbulent one: she received only three years of inconsistent schooling at Homer’s Methodist Church school before her family was forced to leave town under the suspicion that her father had purposefully burned down the mill he owned for the insurance payout. She then spent her early years taking part in her family’s traveling medicine show, telling fortunes and selling homemade medicines.
In 1853, 15-year-old Woodhull married a 28-year-old doctor, Canning Woodhull, and the couple had two children. Her husband was an alcoholic who neglected the family, so Woodhull worked as a seamstress, store clerk, and stage actress to support them. Woodhull’s younger sister, Tennessee Claflin, had set out on her own as a traveling fortune teller and healer. Woodhull eventually joined her sister, promoting herself as a “medical clairvoyant” who could cure the sick.
Tired of his drinking and adultery, Woodhull divorced her first husband in 1865. She became an advocate of the free love movement, which argued that individuals should be able to remain with romantic partners as long as they chose and then move on, rather than marry for life.
In 1866, Woodhull married Union army veteran Colonel James Harvey Blood, after he sought out her services as a healer.
Woodhull and Claflin found success as mediums and their work introduced them to railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who hired clairvoyants to help him contact his recently deceased wife. They were among the first women to found a newspaper in the United States, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which began publication in 1870.
Woodhull became involved in the women’s suffrage movement in 1869 and her success as a public speaker on behalf of the cause led her to take on prominent roles at suffrage conventions in the next few years. She made history in 1871 when she became the first woman to testify before a committee of the US House of Representatives.
Woodhull again made history in 1872, when she became the first woman to run for president of the United States. The new Equal Rights Party, which Woodhull was instrumental in establishing, nominated her for president and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass for vice-president, though the latter never acknowledged the nomination. VanderBilt is rumored to have partially financed the nomination.
She lost the election and afterwards, Woodhull’s political reputation was declining: her radical views supporting free love, communism, and spiritualism alienated many and suffrage leaders distanced themselves from her. Further, her newspaper’s publication of the Beecher affair, and the resulting obscenity charges, meant that Woodhull faced legal trouble and scandal at this time, even spending Election Day in jail. The legal issues lasted for several years, forcing Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly to shut down publication.
Nearing bankruptcy and divorced from her second husband, Woodhull moved with Claflin to England in 1877. She married aristocratic banker John Biddulph Martin in 1883 and tried to distance herself from her past controversies.
In England, she was known as Victoria Woodhull Martin. Under that name, she published the magazine The Humanitarian from 1892 to 1901 with help from her daughter, Zula Woodhull.
She was active in the pioneering days of female motorists, with the Ladies’ Automobile Club, and was reputed to have been the first woman to drive a car in Hyde Park, London and in the English country roads
Her husband John died in 1897. After 1901, Martin gave up publishing and retired to the country, establishing residence at Norton Park, Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, where she built a village school with Tennessee and Zula. Through her work at the Bredon’s Norton school, she became a champion for education reform in English village schools with the addition of kindergarten curriculum
She died at age 88, in June, 1927, in Bredon’s Norton, England.