Early in 1870, two women opened for business on Wall Street. In a deluge of publicity, Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin demonstrated that women could establish and successfully run a business, even in a man’s world of stock speculation. No one knew much about them, except that they appeared to be unfazed by controversy. They seemed accustomed to public life; they said they had pursued a series of careers, from acting to magnetic healing and fortune telling. They had also privately speculated in stocks and claimed a stunning $700,000 profit on “Black Friday” the previous autumn. They...

Ten weeks after the opening of Woodhull, Claflin & Company, Brokers, in 1871, Victoria Woodhull took another swipe at the male monopoly on public life; she nominated herself as a candidate for the 1872 presidential contest. She saw herself as eligible because she embodied the many facets of women’s rights activism. In an open letter to the New York Herald, Woodhull said:

While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence;. . . while others sought to show that there was not valid reason...

On May 10, 1872, at 8 o’clock in the evening, 668 delegates of the newly founded Equal Rights Party, from twenty-two states and four territories, invited Victoria Woodhull to come forward and share her views on the party’s radical platform, adopted earlier that day. She took the stage to uproarious applause, and congratulated the delegates on their political daring. “From this Convention will go forth a tide of revolution that shall sweep over the whole world,” she promised the cheering delegates. And revolution was needed: “Go where we may in the land,” she said, “there we see despotism, inequality and...

In September 1872, Victoria Woodhull took the platform of the annual convention of the American Association of Spiritualists (AAS) in Boston. She intended to deliver her farewell address as the organization’s president, bowing to pressure from conservative Spiritualists who thought that she gave the movement a bad name. In fact, the movement was badly divided over Woodhull’s leadership. Spiritualist sex radicals, however, were Woodhull’s closest friends and staunchest supporters, and they still dominated the association. Just as she was about to speak, she later reported, an “inspiration” overwhelmed her and prompted her to expose the hypocrisy of her critics. Her...

In early February 1876, the citizens of Atlanta, Georgia, braced themselves for the arrival of “the celebrated woman agitator of social theories,” Victoria Woodhull. Life-size woodcut portraits of Woodhull appeared throughout the city, and advertisements for her upcoming lecture, “The Human Body, Temple of God,” filled the pages of the Democratic Atlanta Constitution. There was some doubt that authorities would permit her to speak, and the announcement that her lecture would go forward prompted calls for a boycott, on the grounds that “it would not do to encourage her.” Many Atlanta citizens disagreed; they decided “to go and hear exactly...

When Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly folded with the June 10, 1876 issue, Woodhull the lecturer disappeared from national (and historical) view. Only traces of her activities remain. The 1876 presidential election process was well underway, and Woodhull was, again, a candidate herself. As in the 1872 election, however, she failed to get herself on the ballot, and received no votes. Yet she did not sit idle. In October 1876, Woodhull divorced her second husband, Colonel Blood, on the grounds of adultery.¹ Without the Weekly to record them, her further activities are obscure, but there is evidence that she kept her...