Notorious Victoria: the first woman to run for president By The Guardian, adapted by Newsela staff on 02.10.20 Word Count 1,064 Level 1010L

Image 1. A portrait of Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president. The date of the portrait is unknown. Photo: Bradley & Rulofson/Wikimedia Commons.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton made history when she became the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major political party. But she was not the first woman to run as a presidential candidate. That honor belongs to Victoria Claflin Woodhull.

In 1872, Woodhull became a third-party candidate, running against the Republican President Ulysses S. Grant and Democrat Horace Greeley. She could not vote for herself, the right to vote would not be granted to American women for another 50 years. However, that did not stop this pioneering feminist from making a historic bid for change.

The Subject Of Women's Rights

Woodhull's rise to national prominence began in 1871, when she was invited to Washington to address the house judiciary committee on the subject of women's rights. Woodhull made a bold statement before the committee: "Women are the equals of men before the law, and are equal in all their rights."

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. She argued that women already had the right to vote, as all citizens born in the United States were granted this under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. More controversially, she claimed the 15th Amendment, which had ended slavery in 1870, applied to women as well. Women, she said, must be freed from having to act as servants to their husbands and families. Unsurprisingly, the committee did not agree with her position.

Woodhull ended her speech with a threat. If men continued to exclude women from government, she said, women would have no choice but to revolt and govern themselves. Still, Congress refused to budge.

For 25 years, suffragists, or women seeking the right to vote, had tried to get the attention of leaders of established political parties. Repeatedly, they were ignored. Asking for their rights was getting them nowhere, so suffragist leaders decided to take dramatic action. On May 9, 1872, the National Woman Suffrage Association formed its own political party, the Equal Rights Party. Victoria Woodhull was selected to run as the new party's candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Candidacy Brought Attention To Issues

Woodhull's presidential campaign was based on a platform far ahead of its time. It began with female suffrage, but also called for an end to the "slavery" of marriage. Woodhull believed in workers' rights and trade unionism, equal pay for men and women, universal health care, and changes to the prison system.

Woodhull never had any real chance of being elected, and she was too young to be president according to the Constitution. However, her candidacy helped to bring attention to otherwise ignored issues.

Woodhull ran her own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, with her younger sister, Tennie Claflin. The paper helped publicize Woodhull's ideas, but also proved to be her downfall. On November 2, 1872, three days before Election Day, Woodhull published two articles about major critics of her campaign. One of the pieces accused New York preacher Henry Ward Beecher of having an affair with a married woman. The other claimed Luther Challis, a prominent Wall Street trader, had assaulted two young girls.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. Because the two articles dealt openly with sexual matters, they were considered obscene. Woodhull and her sister were quickly arrested, brought to court and jailed.

Despite her jailing, Woodhull remained on the ballot. It is unknown how many votes she received as some polling stations may have simply thrown away votes for her. However, we do know that she did not win any states or electoral votes. Grant was reelected to another term as president.

The sisters were released on bail one month after their arrest. They were both cleared of obscenity charges the following June, when the judge ruled that obscenity laws did not apply to newspapers. Although Woodhull became a public speaker and continued to publish her weekly paper, she had poor health and was always short of money. She eventually left her husband and moved to England. There, she started another newspaper, The Humanitarian, and joined the British suffragist movement.

Death And Legacy

By the turn of the century, Woodhull was married to a wealthy Englishman and retired from public speaking. Woodhull died in 1927, and British women won the right to vote the following year.

Today, Woodhull had mostly been forgotten, and when she is remembered, she is usually treated like a curiosity. However, Woodhull deserves to be considered an important pioneer.

Following her presidential campaign, the women's suffrage movement received more attention. Thousands of suffragists continued fighting for women to have a place in the political system. In later elections, the Equal Rights Party continued to nominate women for the presidency. They sent members to polling stations to insist on women's right to vote.

Progress was slow, but by 1917, the suffragist Jeanette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress. By 1918, women had won the right to vote in 40 states. Two years later, in 1920, the constitution was amended to guarantee universal female suffrage. As of 2016, a total of 313 women had served in Congress.

Since Woodhull's pioneering campaign, other third parties have nominated 21 more female presidential candidates. Most recently, in 2016, Dr. Jill Stein campaigned to be president with the Green Party. That same year, Hillary Clinton was nominated as the Democratic Party's first-ever female presidential nominee. Clinton's nomination came 136 years after Woodhull's arrest.

Back in 1872, Woodhull closed her campaign with a prophetic letter to the editor of the New York Herald. Woodhull's letter, written from her prison cell, showed that she was very well aware of what she had begun: "The public may succeed in crushing me out, even to the loss of my life. But

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. let me warn them and you that from the ashes of my body a thousand Victoria Woodhulls will spring. They will seize the work laid down by me and carry it forward to victory."

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. Quiz

1 According to the article, WHY did Victoria Woodhull publish articles about Beecher and Challis?

(A) The two men had been critical of her campaign.

(B) She wanted to send the two men a message.

(C) The two men were against women's suffrage.

(D) She wanted the two men to be arrested.

2 How did Victoria Woodhull affect the women's suffrage movement?

(A) Her newspaper criticized the movement's slow progress.

(B) Her presidential run brought attention to the suffrage movement.

(C) She helped pass legislation that advanced women's rights.

(D) She founded the Equal Rights Party to start the movement.

3 What is the MAIN reason the author includes the section “Death And Legacy”?

(A) to describe the successes that Woodhull had in England

(B) to detail the reasons Woodhull did not win the presidency

(C) to note advances made by suffragists after Woodhull's run

(D) to show how Woodhull felt about later women candidates

4 Read the introduction [paragraphs 1-2].

How does the introduction introduce the MAIN idea?

(A) It details the issues that were included in Woodhull's platform.

(B) It shows the problems Woodhull encountered in her campaign.

(C) It emphasizes the historic nature of Woodhull's run for president.

(D) It reveals the reasons that Woodhull decided to run for president.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.