She was an anti-slavery suffragette, an advocate of free love... and the first woman to run for US president
Victoria Woodhull paved the way for Kamala but, vilified by opponents, she fled to Britain and became a society hostess and friend to royalty. Now A-listers are vying to play her
IN THE south-east corner of 900-year-old Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire rests a cenotaph in memoriam of Victoria Woodhull. Friend to royalty and prime ministers, she was famed as a Victorian suffragette, social reformer and one of her era’s most controversial women. She twice went from rags to riches, and ignited one of the greatest political scandals of her time, before her death in 1927, aged 88.
Woodhull was one of the first women in Britain to own a car, and in her later years rode at breakneck speed in a motorbike sidecar, urging her chauffeur not to dawdle. Largely forgotten, her memory is poised for a major revival.
Oscar winners Nicole Kidman and Brie Larson are in negotiations to star in rival movies about the feminist phenomenon, and a TV mini-series about her is in development starring Katherine Heigl, veteran of Grey’s Anatomy.
But it’s not Woodhull’s decades in Britain that are generating such interest – it’s the fact that 149 years ago the dark-haired beauty shattered barriers by becoming the first woman to run for President of the United States.
Four years after Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Donald Trump, as America gets used to its first female vice president in Kamala Harris, it’s strange to reflect that it is one of the few major nations never to have had a woman leader.
Unlike Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, Germany’s Angela Merkel, India’s Indira Gandhi, Israel’s Golda Meir, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, and dozens more female leaders across the globe, no woman has ever had the top job.
Yet in 1872 American-born Woodhull tried to storm that bastion of male dominance – almost 50 years before US women won the right to vote – leading the Equal Rights Party, campaigning for women’s rights and labour reform.
“Although few have heard of her today, when she ran for President of the United States she was one of the most famous women in the country,” says her great-great-grand-stepdaughter, Mary Shearer, aged 54, of Round Lake, Illinois.
“She advocated many things we take for granted today: the eight-hour work day, graduated income tax, social welfare programmes and profits sharing. She was a woman 100 years ahead of her time.”
Woodhull was also one of the most successful American women of her day – the first to own a New York stock brokerage firm, one of the first to own a newspaper and one of the first to address the US Congress. She was also the most scandalous.
SHE HAD risen from humble beginnings, born in 1838 in Homer, Ohio, the sixth of 10 children. Her abusive father was a counterfeiter, thief and suspected arsonist. She was only 15 when she wed 29-year-old Dr Canning Woodhull, amid rumours that he had abducted her.
She divorced her alcoholic, womanising husband after having two children, and in 1866 married second husband Col James Blood, while amassing a fortune as an ethically dubious clairvoyant, “magnetic healer”, spiritualist and ultimately stockbroker. Financially liberated, she became a vocal campaigner for women’s rights and “free love”, advocating for a woman’s right to marry, have children and divorce without government interference. Shocking delicate Victorian sensibilities, Woodhull proclaimed: “I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.” Shearer explains: “She believed that if a woman could be self-sufficient, it would free her. She was an advocate of voluntary motherhood: that a married woman had the right to say ‘No’ to having
‘She learned her jail food might be poisoned and that enemies planned to burn down her prison’
children, and a single woman had the right to say ‘Yes’.
“She was the inspiration for women having control over their own bodies.”
Yet when she ran for the presidency against incumbent Ulysses S Grant, Woodhull was destroyed by misogynistic political enemies.
“They called her everything from a witch to a prostitute,” says Shearer. “They accused her of having affairs with married men. There were a lot of attacks on her because she had different moral and sexual standards.”
She also shook America with her choice of vice presidential running mate: the nation’s most famous former slave, Frederick Douglass, barely seven years after slavery was abolished.
Woodhull believed the most vicious attacks emanated from the family of celebrity preacher and leading political activist Rev Henry Ward Beecher, who denounced her advocacy of free love.
Decrying the hypocrisy of a society that accepted men who openly flaunted mistresses, while condemning women who had affairs, Woodhull published in her weekly national newspaper the story of Rev Beecher’s affair with a married woman. “My judges preach against free love openly, practise it secretly,” she said.
Beecher lashed back with a flurry of lawsuits.
ON THE DAY of the presidential election in 1872, Woodhull was behind bars, arrested for obscenity for publishing the allegations of Beecher’s affair. She lost the election, and her legal battles dragged on for two and a half years, dominating American news headlines.
“That was a very difficult time for her,” says Shearer. “She was arrested eight different times. She learned her jail food might be poisoned and enemies planned to burn down her prison.
“After a ruinous legal battle she came out victorious, but lost her fortune.”
Branded “Wicked Woodhull” and “Mrs Satan,” her scandalous lifestyle and political theories saw her erased from the history of America’s pioneering women’s rights movement.
Broke and demoralised, she divorced Col Blood and in 1877 fled to Britain.
The family of American railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, rumoured to be having an affair with her younger sister Tennessee, allegedly bribed Woodhull to flee the country to protect his reputation.
“By the time Victoria got to England there were reports she was suicidal,” says Shearer.
Woodhull lectured across Britain promoting women’s suffrage, advocating shorter skirts, contraception, vegetarianism, licensed prostitution and the benefits of bicycling. Her fiery speeches captured the attention of a wealthy English banker, who became her third husband in 1883.
“John Biddulph Martin, who owned Martin’s Bank on Lombard Street in London, was her knight in shining armour, and took on her attackers,” says Shearer. As Martin’s wife, Woodhull became a society hostess, entertaining guests including Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, the Prince of Wales, peers and Members of Parliament. When Martin died in 1897, Woodhull inherited his vast fortune and estates and retired to his family seat at Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, four miles from Tewkesbury.
As lady of the manor, she became a leading campaigner for British educational reform, encouraged women in farming, built an agricultural college and village school and published a monthly magazine, The Humanitarian. “Victoria would be delighted to see Kamala Harris as the vice president,” says Shearer. “But I think she’d be asking: ‘What took so long?’ She thought at most it would take 100 years to have a woman president. She even thought it could be her.”
The cenotaph in Tewkesbury Abbey memorialises Woodhull, but her body was cremated and her remains sprinkled at sea off Newhaven, East Sussex.
“Her ashes were scattered in the waters between England and America because her heart lay in both countries,” says Shearer.
“Her cenotaph at Tewkesbury Abbey speaks of her commitment to Anglo-American relations, and her ashes were laid to rest between the two countries she loved.”