“Victory for Victoria!” When Victoria Claflin Woodhull announced her candidacy for the 1872 Presidential election, she called herself the woman suffrage candidate. No law prevented women from running for public office, and Woodhull had the support and admiration of many well-known women’s rights leaders.
It is widely known that Susan B. Anthony was arrested for trying to vote in the 1872 election. Less known is that Anthony and many other women went to polling places that year following the leadership of Victoria Woodhull, who promoted an activist legal interpretation that no law prevented women from voting. Woodhull had made a similar attempt to vote the year before. But Woodhull herself was not able to join Anthony and the others for the 1872 activist stunt, because Woodhull had already been arrested and jailed for her efforts to emancipate women from marriage–promoting what she called “social freedom” but others called “free love”–through an attack on the reputation of America’s most respected Christian leader.
Learn more about the tumult within the early woman’s rights movement over “the marriage question” in the forthcoming book Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff. Pre-order copies on Kickstarter, now through December 4, 2014.