The First Woman to Run for President

The Woodhull formula for fame was one part stubborn insistence on radical change and one part dramatics. She attracted countless enemies and angered many of her erstwhile allies. In May 1872, at another suffragist convention, Woodhull disrupted proceedings by calling for delegates to follow her to a new party convention to nominate her as president. By this time, she had already alienated Anthony and Stanton. But it didn't matter; at least, it didn't seem like it mattered.

Six hundred people moved over to New York City's Apollo Theater to anoint Woodhull the presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party and name Frederick Douglass the candidate for vice president. (Delegates roundly rejected a suggestion that the convention telegraph Douglass to see if he was interested.) And they cheered enthusiastically for a comprehensive plan of social revolution.

In four short years, Woodhull jolted the feminist movement leftward. In 1868, radicals favored national reforms to grant women the right to vote, while moderates favored a state-by-state approach. By 1872, radicals now favored the complete transformation of all aspects of domestic life, while moderates had adopted a nationwide strategy for securing the woman's right to vote. Woodhull's platform called for a new civil and commercial code, abolition of the death penalty, banning of monopolies, direct taxation, uniform wages, public works programs and free trade.

Mainstream suffragists like Anthony and Stanton, once delighted by this mystical upstart, supported New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley for president against President Ulysses Grant. And they watched in dismay as a scandal about sex put her in jail.

The scandal involved Henry Ward Beecher, a famed Brooklyn preacher and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Bothered by Beecher's condemnation of her "free love" attitudes—"I have an inalienable and natural right to love whom I may, to love for as long or as short a period as I can, and to change that love every day if I please," she said—Woodhull published reports in her newspaper that the moral prig himself had an affair that led to the breakup of a marriage.

In response, Beecher directed what might be called a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against Woodhull. Anthony Comstock, a prurient prude, prodded federal prosecutors to charge Woodhull with obscenity for her published accounts of Beecher's affair.