Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927) was an American feminist reformer, stock broker, sex symbol, and advocate of free love.
Woodhull was born into a poor family in Homer , Ohio; the only person in her family she really felt close to was her sister Tennesse, who was seven years younger than her. She went from rags to riches twice, her first fortune being made on the road as a highly successful spiritualist. She made another fortune on the New York stock exchange as the first female Wall Street broker. In the year that the better known Susan B. Anthony cast her vote in the 1872 presidential election, Woodhull became the first woman to stand as a presidential candidate, though she couldn't vote for herself since she was imprisoned on charges of indecency at the time. She was also the first person to publish Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto in America (in her own newspaper).
George Francis Train once defended her. Other feminists of her time, including Anthony, disagreed with her aggressive tactics in pushing for women's equality.
She was an especially committed opponent of abortion, as were most feminists of her day, including Anthony, and stated in an 1870 issue of her weekly publication: “[t]he rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus.” In an 1875 edition of the Wheeling, West Virginia Evening Standard she attacked the practice of abortion:
- “Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth.”
Further reading
- Antje Schrupp , Das Aufsehen erregende Leben der Victoria Woodhull(2002: Helmer)
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