Now and again, as ladies bowl over the remaining barricades, there emerges the specter that one day there may be a triumphant outcome for a female aspiring to the Oval Office. Victoria Woodhull made a prescient statement when she became the first female candidate to run for president, proclaiming, “What may appear absurd today will assume a serious aspect tomorrow.”
One hundred and forty years later, when Hillary Rodham Clinton dropped out of the 2008 presidential race, she made the stirring remark, “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.” Few know, however, the name of the woman who put the first crack in that elusive glass ceiling.
The lady whose life would not have been out of place in a nineteenth-century novel, Victoria California Claflin, was born in 1838, the seventh of ten children, and lived in Dickensian squalor in a wooden shack in Homer, Ohio, a whistle-stop town in Licking County. Her mother, Roxanna or “Roxie,” was an illiterate German immigrant and a follower of the Austrian mystic Franz Mesmer (from whose name the word mesmerize derives). The alcoholic patriarch, Ruben, known as “Buck,” peddled moonshine and opium as a cure for cancer. In one instance, it resulted in murder charges. At age fourteen, Buck marketed his daughter as a medium in his traveling medical show; she was to state her father “made her a woman before her time.” Her sister Celeste, known as Tennessee or “Tennie,” was obliged to hustle potions—and her body. In all likelihood, their shack went up in flames so Buck could collect the insurance money. Victoria married at age fifteen, pushed by her pyromaniac parent into the arms of the far older “Dr.” Canning Woodhull, who loved wine, women, and morphine. Eventually, despite the stigma of divorce, Victoria took her departure, along with her married name, her daughter, Zula Maud, and her son, Byron, who suffered from brain damage. Victoria claimed Byron came by his disability when his father dropped him on his head.
Her second marriage was to Colonel James Blood, a Union Civil War hero and spiritualist. He did not believe in freedom just for slaves; as an adherent of “free love,” he insisted on an open relationship, a proposition that struck a respondent note in his wife. She later declared, “I have an inalienable, constitutional right to change that love every day if I please.” Blood brought the beautiful and brilliant sisters, Victoria and Tennie, to New York, where they became the most notorious ladies in Manhattan. They treated the social norms of the 1870s as no more substantial than the spirits with which they professed they communicated.
The siblings made their first big splash in 1868 when they astounded a male-dominated metropolis by becoming the first women to open a brokerage firm on Wall Street. The press went berserk, and Harper’s Weekly dubbed them “the bewitching brokers.” The enterprise was all the more remarkable given the era’s mores, where females were not welcome to pass through Wall Street even in covered carriages. Their office bore a sign: “All gentlemen will state their business and retire at once.” The official opening on February 14 was besieged by so many throngs of the curious that one hundred police officers had to maintain order. A great proportion of their clientele were ladies who preferred to work with members of their own sex: widows, high-class prostitutes, and actresses. Suffragette superstar Susan B. Anthony heralded the arrival of the sisters on Wall Street as “a new phase in the women’s rights question.” The irony—one not lost on the siblings’ legion of detractors—was that Cornelius Vanderbilt had bankrolled their business. His investment was logical, as Tennie was the mistress of the multimillionaire railroad baron, whose term of endearment for his paramour was “little sparrow.”
On the flip side, Roxie and Buck had followed their daughters to Manhattan when the money had started to roll in, and Woodhull felt duty bound to take them in. Victoria’s household included her two children, her sister, both her past and present husbands, and Roxie and Buck. To make matters worse, Roxie forged Tennie’s signature on a blackmail letter to Vanderbilt that led him to sever ties with his “little sparrow.”
Wall Street was just the beginning for the scandalous sisters of the Victorian era. With the funds earned from the brokerage, in 1870, Victoria and Tennie founded the radical newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Their periodical’s battle cry was, “We advocate the rights of the Lower Million against the Upper Ten!” In the mainly feminist press, they printed installments of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Marx considered them a little too radical for his taste and found their interest in his economic doctrine confusing given their Wall Street wealth. Increasingly political, Victoria testified on suffrage for women to a congressional committee—the first female ever to address Congress. She argued that women already had the right to vote as all citizens born in the United States had been granted that right under the Fourteenth Amendment. She also cited the Fifteenth Amendment (that had abolished slavery in 1870) as pertinent to women, who had long been in servitude. In response, the Ohio Representative, John Bingham, cried out, “Madam, you are no citizen…you are a woman!”
In May 1872, when the Equal Rights Party congregated in Apollo Hall, New York, it nominated Woodhull to run against the incumbent Republican president, General Ulysses S. Grant. Woodhull stood before 668 delegates in New York and vowed to fight “despotism, inequality, and injustice.” She also campaigned to raise the hemlines on women’s skirts to alleviate the burden of dragging them through muddy streets. Perhaps even she could not have imagined a presidential candidate campaigning in pastel pants suits. Woodhull chose as her running mate escaped slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who may not even have been aware he was on the ticket. Woodhull spoke to packed houses across the country, espousing the view that women needed to be freed from subservience in marriage just as the slaves had needed to be freed from slavery. The New York Herald endorsed the nonconventional candidate, and their headline declared: “Victory for Victoria in 1872.” Immediately, her checkered personal life was held under the spotlight, and the public had fertile grounds for attack—starting with her sharing her marital home with two husbands. Victoria defended herself by explaining she had taken in her alcoholic, disabled ex as an act of charity, not bigamy. Other poison barbs were directed at her ties to spiritualism and free love. The scandal was so great she had to withdraw eleven-year-old Maud from school. As a result of Victoria’s pioneering protest, cartoonist Thomas Nast drew her caricature dressed in black with bat wings sprouting from her shoulder blades, snarl upon her face, clutching a placard: “Be Saved by Free Love.” In the background, a woman struggled up a steep path, carrying a baby and an alcoholic husband, with the caption, “I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow in your footsteps.” The full-page cartoon was entitled, “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!”
Hillary Clinton supporters sporting yellow roses visited Susan B. Anthony’s grave, where they placed “I voted” stickers on her tombstone. A far different scenario played out with this nineteenth-century female presidential hopeful. On Election Day 1892, the candidate and her sister were in Ludlow Street Jail. Two deputy marshals who had appeared at the door of their brokerage house noticed their carriage speeding down Wall Street and gave chase. They apprehended the sisters and produced a warrant charging them with sending obscene publications through the mail. The vice crusader Anthony Comstock, who referred to himself as a “weeder in God’s garden,” had conspired to have them arrested on a charge of obscenity after they printed articles exposing the alleged affair of the city’s most eminent preacher, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Victoria had accused him of an adulterous affair with a female parishioner, Elizabeth Tilton. Victoria had not been incensed by his sidestepping of his marital vow; rather, she was upset by the hypocrisy of his threatening brimstone from his pulpit for those who broke the Seventh Commandment. In her paper, she had vowed to make it, “hotter on earth for Henry Ward Beecher than Hell is below.” What hurt her further was the United States District Attorney was a member of the Reverend’s Plymouth Church congregation. The arrest for sending the libelous periodical through the US post office led to the passage of the Comstock Act; it sought to uphold a strict moral code by barring the circulation of “obscene literature and articles of immoral use.” Victoria and Tennie secured their release after posting $16,000 in bail. Spoiler alert: the female presidential candidate and her black