Victoria Woodhull, the first woman candidate for US Presidency
Born in 1838, in a family of 7 children, from a swindler father and a mother servant and medium, she was an American feminist politician, journalist, women's rights activist, suffragist, editor, writer and stockbroker.
She gave her first lectures, advocating for feminism, in Ottawa, around 1861, and soon found success. In 1870, she announced in the New York Herald her intention to run for president, and then created her own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. Her candidacy was eminently symbolic: in addition to being a woman, she is only 34 at the time, whereas the minimum age to be candidate was 35.
Candidate for the presidency, she named Frederick Douglass, former slave and radical Republican activist, as her running mate, but he refused the nomination.
Her campaign for women's suffrage led to creating an Equal Rights Party at the National Convention.
Expressing her support to Communism, she translated in 1871, and for the first time in the US, the Communist Party Manifesto and became a member of the International Workers' Association. Karl Marx expelled her the following year because of her support of free love and the exclusion of migrants from the communist movement.
In 1872, she was arrested for obscene remarks after denouncing in her newpaper the "hypocrisy of sexual morality" of pastor Henry Ward Beecher, a well-known preacher and opponent of free love, and his adulterous relations with his best friend’s wife. Her imprisonment was followed by a wave of arrests of free love activists.
Victoria was jailed again on election day. When the ballots were counted, those in her favor were ignored.
Deeply hurt by this arrest, she moved to England and, preceded by her notoriety, gave successful new lectures. She remained a feminist, but started using more chastity and respect for the bonds of marriage, and denied all her former speeches on free love.
She died in 1927, and was later honored at the National Women's Hall of Fame.
@ Adama Toulon - Julie Henry Poutrel
