She was the first woman to run for president, the first to address a congressional committee, and the first to own a brokerage on Wall Street. She was also a con artist, a gold digger, and a scandal magnet. When she ran for president in 1872, she sat out Election Day in a Manhattan jail, arrested on charges of obscenity. Victoria Woodhull was unquestionably a pioneer in women’s rights, yet her legacy is so messy and complicated that she remains an outlier in feminist history.
She was born Victoria Claflin in 1838, into a squalidly poor family in Homer, Ohio, a tiny frontier hamlet. Her sister Tennessee (called Tennie C or just Tennie) came along seven years later, and a third sister, Utica, after her. In all there were ten Claflin kids, seven of whom survived into adulthood.
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