On 2 November 1872, three days before the nation went to the polls to elect its 19th president, one of the candidates was arrested. Two US deputy marshals, Colfax and Bernard, appeared early in the morning in Broad Street, calling at a nondescript shop front at number 48, around the corner from the imposing facade of the New York Stock Exchange. It was not their usual beat, but there they were, on a bitterly cold morning, trudging down Wall Street, to arrest a woman. Not even a prostitute or a thief – unless you believed certain newspapers. Nor was she a husband-poisoner or a pickpocket, but a woman of substance. For a woman to run for the presidency was a ridiculous idea, of course, but you had to admire her gumption.

The deputy marshals were just in time. As they knocked at the door, a fast carriage swept past, but they could see the passenger was their woman, and gave chase. Stopping the carriage and producing a warrant, they arrested her on charges of sending obscene publications through the mail. The carriage was crammed with stacks of newspapers bearing the motto: PROGRESS! FREE THOUGHT! UNTRAMMELED LIVES! The suspect, Victoria Woodhull, was reported to be calm and cool in the face of capture, and as the New York Herald reported, “expressed herself at once ready to accompany the officers”. She and her younger sister, Tennessee Claflin, who was travelling in the carriage with her, were escorted away.

Hillary Clinton will make history next week in Philadelphia when she formally becomes the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major party. But she is not the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate: that distinction is held by Victoria Claflin Woodhull. In 1872, she became a third-party candidate, running against the incumbent Republican president, General Ulysses S Grant, and his Democratic challenger, New York publisher Horace Greeley. She would not have been able to vote for herself – that right would not be granted to American woman for another 50 years – but that did not deter this pioneering feminist from making a historic bid for change.

Her life story would not be out of place in a 19th-century novel. It is peopled by a colourful array of charlatans, churchmen, philanthropists and philanderers. It is also a classic American tale: a triumph over adversity – poverty, abusive parents, and a bad marriage – and a rise to prominence in the most vital social movements of the day.

Woodhull’s journey to contesting the presidency had begun in 1871, when, at the behest of her friend and supporter, the Massachusetts senator Benjamin Butler, she was invited to Washington to address the house judiciary committee – the second woman, after leading suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to be accorded this honour. Woodhull made a bold statement before the committee: “Women are the equals of men before the law, and are equal in all their rights.”

She argued persuasively that women already had the right to vote, as all citizens born in the United States were granted this under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. More controversially, she cited the 15th Amendment (which abolished slavery in 1870) as pertinent to women, who had long been in servitude. The committee declined to agree with her position, but Woodhull’s appearance brought her to national attention. The influential organ Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper printed a full-page engraving of her delivering her testimony.

Woodhull ended her speech with a threat: if men continued to exclude women from government, women had no choice but to revolt and govern themselves. “If Congress refuse to listen and to grant what women ask, there is but one course left to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?”

Congress would not concede an inch. And so on 9 May 1872, the National Woman Suffrage Association held its annual convention and formed an offshoot, The Equal Rights Party. Woodhull was elected by the members to run for president.

President Ulysses S Grant. Photograph: National Archives/Getty Images

In the 25 years since the suffrage organisation’s founding, it had lobbied the leaders of established parties to recognise suffrage planks (or even splinters) as part of their platforms, without success. It was time for a dramatic new tactic: the nomination of Woodhull was a symbolic act of protest – the first of many to come. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, leading abolitionist and social reformer, was named as Woodhull’s vice-president. He did not attend the convention, and there is no evidence that he ever acknowledged the nomination, but this symbolism was also powerful: women wanted the same freedom that black men had achieved, and Woodhull – a dynamic, charming iconoclast – was going to lead them to it.

Woodhull’s life was full of contradictions: she was a suffragette superstar who ultimately lost the support of the movement’s leaders. She was a spiritualist who opposed organised religion, but regularly quoted scripture and was married four times in the Protestant church. She was a stockbroker who admired Marx and Engels, a passionate advocate for a woman’s right to choose her husband but also an opponent of abortion, which was then illegal, on the grounds that the practice was barbaric. She decried institutions from marriage to monarchy – and yet she spent the last third of her life as the wife of a member of the British landed gentry. She was also the mother of a son with brain damage (she used to say his father had dropped him on his head as a baby) who dedicated her later years to espousing eugenics.

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Woodhull’s presidential campaign was based on a platform far ahead of its time – it began with female suffrage, but she also endorsed free love and an end to the “slavery” of marriage. She believed in workers’ rights and trade unionism, equal pay for men and women, universal healthcare, and prison reform. In some ways, she was more Bill than Hillary: she excelled at public speaking and was praised, even by her detractors, as a charismatic campaigner.

Her call to action was published in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, the paper she ran with her sister in New York for six years. The battle cry – “We advocate the rights of the Lower Million against the Upper Ten!”– would find an echo in the slogan of the Occupy movement more than a century later. In December of 1871, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was the first publication in the United States to print an English translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Victoria Claflin Woodhull asserts her right to vote. Photograph: MPI/Getty Images

Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee (“Tennie”) Claflin, who was seven years her junior, had financed the newspaper out of handsome profits from their earlier venture as New York’s first female stockbrokers. The popular press had dubbed the pair “the Bewitching Brokers” when they launched their firm in 1870, but in spite of the dismissive coverage they received, the brokerage was a resounding success.

The suffragette leader Susan B Anthony heralded the arrival of the sisters on Wall Street as “a new phase in the women’s rights question” – economic freedom was then, as it still is, central to female emancipation. But there was an irony there, and it was not lost on the sisters’ many haters – a rich male benefactor financed the business from the outset. Tennie, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant, like her sister, was widely known to be the personal “seer” and mistress of the business magnate, railroad baron and philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt. He bankrolled their financial ventures after Tennie purportedly helped him to make contact with his mother in the spirit world. (No attempt was made to mask the Vanderbilt connection during Woodhull’s presidential campaign – in those days, being “owned by big money” was perfectly respectable.)

But Victoria Woodhull was still subjected to intense personal scrutiny and judgment, of a degree that male candidates did not experience. There was an uproar in the press, for example, when it was reported that Woodhull’s household included her children and her second husband, the civil war hero Colonel James Blood, along with her sister Tennie, their parents, other siblings – and Victoria’s first husband, Channing Woodhull, a morphine addict and alcoholic.

Similarly, reporting of Woodhull’s activities would, as with female politicians ever since, rarely fail to incorporate comments on her attire. Woodhull’s much-critiqued style choices included a penchant for short skirts – to the ankle, that is. This was, she insisted, merely a practical adjustment. By comparison, there was less commentary on the fact that her age, 34, technically disqualified her from becoming president, since the constitution mandates a minimum age of 35.

Victoria Woodhull was never in any danger of being elected, but, as with other third-party candidates before and since, in what is essentially a two-party system, the Woodhull candidacy and the coverage of her ideas in the press called attention to otherwise ignored or suppressed issues, including the suffrage movement itself. In the parlance of the day, she raised the profile of “the woman question”.

Woodhull was subjected to intense personal scrutiny and judgment, of a degree that male candidates did not experience

But some of her fiercest critics were women, who feared that her unconventional lifestyle, combined with the claims of clairvoyance and espousal of spiritualism, would detract from the seriousness of the women’s rights movement. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the bestselling novel of the century, was one such critic. Her novel My Wife and I, published in 1871, featured a character called Audacia Dangereyes (Woodhull’s blue eyes were much remarked upon). When Audacia runs for president, the female protagonist applauds her father’s assessment of her:

“No woman that was not willing to be dragged through every kennel, and slopped into every dirty pail of water like an old mop, would ever consent to run as a candidate … and what sort of a brazen tramp of a woman would it be that could stand it …? Would it be any kind of woman we should want to see at the head of our government?”

In the leading periodical Harper’s Weekly, the cartoonist Thomas Nast created a memorable caricature of Woodhull after she announced her candidacy, dressed in black with bat wings sprouting from her shoulder blades, with a snarl on her face, clutching a placard reading “Be Saved by Free Love”. In the background, a woman struggles up a steep path, carrying an infant and an alcoholic husband on her shoulders, but is shown rejecting Woodhull in favour of her burden, with the caption “I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow in your footsteps.” The full-page cartoon was titled “Get Thee Behind me, (Mrs) Satan!”

Woodhull’s most zealous opponent, however, was the bewhiskered reformer Anthony Comstock, the son of a Connecticut farmer and a devout Congregationalist mother, whose religious fervour he shared. In 1863, Comstock joined up to fight for the Union but was stationed in Florida, where he saw little action. Still, he busied himself in what we may assume to have been a vain attempt to ban tobacco use, alcohol and the use of profanity by his civil war comrades.

Anthony Comstock, Victoria Woodhull’s nemesis. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

He aligned himself with the Christian Commission, an organisation that sent ministers to the battlefields and was dedicated to banning the distribution of pornographic materials to the troops. Comstock embraced this cause, and when the war was over, he made a career for himself as a self-styled “weeder in God’s garden”.

Comstock would go on to become the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a United States postal inspector. He developed a plan to enhance his career by halting the progress of the first female candidate for president and destroying her reputation.

On 2 November 1872, three days prior to election day, Woodhull and her sister Tennie made a tactical decision that would bring about their downfall. They produced two incendiary stories for a special issue of The Woodhull and Claflin Weekly. The paper had lain dormant for months, owing to financial setbacks during the difficult presidential campaign. It was revived on this day for the express purpose of a scorching attack on Woodhull’s critics before the nation went to the polls.

Some historians suggest that the sisters, short of funds, had tried to blackmail the subjects of these scandalous stories, and those who failed to pay were exposed in print. Their publication may also have been motivated by revenge, as the stories featured men who had made outspoken attacks against Woodhull’s principles and her campaign.

The Weekly’s first scoop targeted the celebrated New York preacher Henry Ward Beecher. He was a pillar of the community, a prominent abolitionist and the brother of Woodhull’s well-known critic Harriet Beecher Stowe. He and Woodhull had once been friends, united in supporting common social causes including abolition and suffrage, but he had subsequently used his pulpit at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn to castigate her ideas about free love. In retaliation, Woodhull published a detailed account of his adulterous affair with the wife of one of his long-term supporters, the abolitionist and poet Theodore Tilton.

Woodhull adopted a tone of regret: “I have no doubt that [Beecher] has done the best he could do under the circumstances – with his demanding physical nature, and with the terrible restrictions on clergymen’s lives.” She made it clear that she was not charging him with immorality – “I applaud his enlightened views” – she was castigating his hypocrisy.

She had discovered the story, she wrote, in the course of her own work fighting for women’s suffrage, and cited the sources who had confirmed the allegation – a close friend of Elizabeth Tilton, Beecher’s lover, as well as Theodore Tilton, the cuckolded husband. Woodhull concluded her report by describing the scene when she told Beecher she felt compelled to speak out about his behaviour. He fell on his knees and begged for Woodhull’s silence, threatening to kill himself if she went ahead. She appealed to him to confess in public, but he declined, saying: “I am a moral coward.”

The next column in this special edition of the Weekly depicted an even more sordid scandal. In an article attributed to Tennie Woodhull, Luther Challis, a prominent trader and Wall Street wolf, was accused of seducing two young girls. Under the headline THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN HYPOCRISY, Tennie makes a point about double standards that remains pertinent today.

Put a woman on trial for anything, let her even so much as go before the courts to obtain pecuniary justice – and it is considered a legitimate part of the defence to make the most searching inquiry into her sexual morality, and the decision generally turns upon the proof advanced in this regard. How is it with regard to men? Who thinks of attacking them in regard to their sexual morality?

She stated that her aim was to show the real character of men prominent in social and financial life in the city. As a case in point, she offered up Challis, and cited a source that bore witness to the man’s recent night out at the Academy of Music, where he was seen to escort two girls aged 15 and 16, fresh from school in Baltimore. He and a friend plied them with wine and later adjourned with the girls to a house of ill repute, “where they were robbed of their innocence”.

The lurid articles provided Comstock with a convenient lever to secure his reputation and curry favour with donors for his crusade against obscene literature. Employing intermediaries, he ordered copies of the Weekly through the post, to trigger an arrest warrant under legislation designed to protect the moral probity of the US Postal Service. A warrant was issued for the sisters’ arrest, and they were soon apprehended by Colfax and Bernard, caught in the act of attempting to stop the authorities from confiscating copies of the offending edition.

Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie Claflin attempt to assert their right to vote in New York and are denied, circa 1875. Photograph: Kean Collection/Getty Images

The sisters were taken directly to the circuit court, where large crowds gathered outside, according to one observer, “wild with excitement”.

In the courtroom, Claflin and Woodhull took their seats, heads held high. The New York Herald noted that “not a single man spoke to them except their counsel”. As the charges were read out, Victoria was said to look “grave and severe, never smiling and listening with apparent painful interest”. Tennie, on the other hand, the New York Times reported, “wore an indignant air, and her eyes sparkled with excitement. She smiled affably as something in the remarks of her counsel or the district attorney struck her as funny.”

It was a brave stance. The women were charged with sending indecent and obscene publications through the United States mail. If convicted, the penalty would lead, under the new Post Office Act, to as much as a year’s imprisonment and a fine of $500. This was no small sum for the sisters. Now that their stockbroking days were over, their earnings had taken a sharp downturn. By some accounts, their funds were so depleted by the time of the trial that they were forced to camp out in the offices of the Weekly, sleeping on the floor, as they were no longer able to afford the rent on their home.

The charge against them would be contested on the grounds of the first amendment – the right to free speech. The renowned advocate William Howe led the defence team. The crack legal team of Howe and his formidable assistant Abe Hummel enjoyed a reputation for winning impossible cases. The prosecutor was district attorney Noah Davis, who also happened to be a board member of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.

Davis requested holding the sisters on a $10,000 bond, citing the gravity of their offences, not only against the obscenity law but also in the libelling of a leading citizen of good reputation. But the recorded charge was not libel. Reverend Beecher never refuted the story. Mark Twain would later call Beecher’s silence “a hundred-fold more of an obscene publication than that of the Woodhulls”, adding that he felt sure the nation would eventually realise that “there is fire somewhere in all this smoke of scandal”.

The judge ordered a bond of $8,000 and committed Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin in lieu of bail to the Ludlow Street jail, with a hearing on the case scheduled for two days later.

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Ludlow Street jail held an inmate population mainly accused of civil offences, most of whom could and did pay for better treatment there. It was also known as the “alimony club”, owing to the fact that it held a large number of delinquent husbands on charges of non-payment.

When the sisters arrived, the warden received them as if they were coming for tea, and graciously ushered them into his office. Press accounts say they appeared cool and collected, and “no womanly exhibition of tears was visible”.

Inside the warden’s office, the sisters met with Howe. He had formulated a plea that there was no basis for an obscenity charge because everything in the Weekly articles (and worse) could be found in Shakespeare or the Bible. This defence would also be used in obscenity cases in Britain, notably 15 years later in 1888’s landmark censorship case Regina v Vizetelly, when the trial of the publisher of English translations of the “obscene” novels of French author Émile Zola rocked the literary establishment.

On Sunday 4 November, the sisters received a crowd of visitors in their cell, including numerous reporters and family members. Among them were their parents, Reuben “Buck” and Roxanna “Roxy” Claflin, two opportunists who might have been invented by Mark Twain. Buck was a conman and literal snake oil salesman, peddling a brew consisting of alcohol and opium as a cure for cancer. Roxy was a German immigrant, an illiterate follower of spiritualists who set herself up as a fortune-teller. She bore 10 children, six of whom lived to maturity. She and Buck had followed their daughters to New York a few years previously, once their offspring made a fortune, and Woodhull felt she had no choice but to take them in. Roxy had caused irreparable harm to the family fortunes when she had forged Tennie’s signature on a blackmail letter to Cornelius Vanderbilt earlier that year, which caused him to cut off all further financial assistance to the sisters.

A more welcome family visit came from Zula Maud, Woodhull’s adored daughter from her first marriage (at age 15) to Channing Woodhull. Zula was by this time 11 years old, and received much unwanted attention from the press as she made her way into the prison. Also on the visitor’s list was Victoria’s second husband, Colonel James Blood. It is a matter of some dispute as to whether they ever married but Woodhull claimed they did, in St Louis in 1865, before the couple moved to New York together. Once there, they divorced and lived together as a defiant act in support of their shared free‑love beliefs. The evidence suggests they each took lovers but were friends and close collaborators. Some historians believe that he was the author of most of Woodhull’s speeches and articles, or at least a major contributor, together with their mutual friend, the self-styled “individualist anarchist” Stephen Pearl Andrews.

The most eagerly awaited visitor did not appear at Ludlow Street: Woodhull’s primary source for the Beecher article – the cuckolded husband. Theodore Tilton was apparently out of town, on the campaign trail for the Democratic candidate Horace Greeley. Another blow came when the Sun reported that the suffragette leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had always been a loyal supporter of Woodhull, was quoted as saying: “Mrs Woodhull’s statements are untrue in every particular.” It began to dawn on the sisters that they might be spending more time in their cell than they had originally supposed.

* * *

On the morning of election day, 5 November 1872, Susan B Anthony went to a polling station in Rochester, New York and became the first woman in America to successfully insist on exercising her right to vote. She chose to cast her ballot for President Grant – whose Republican party had made much of its willingness to listen to women in the runup to the election.

Two weeks later, Anthony would be arrested and tried for illegal voting, but she had made her point. Meanwhile, candidate Woodhull went back to the hearing room at the circuit court with her sister. When they arrived, they learned that a federal grand jury had already met and indicted them. They were remanded back into custody.

Woodhull’s eventual share of the popular vote is undocumented (possibly because some of the polling stations discarded any ballot papers that favoured her) but we know that she did not carry any states, and therefore won no electoral votes. Grant easily won a second term by a large margin, and Greeley died a few weeks after the election.

Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin in the front row, with fellow suffragists in 1910. Photograph: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

The sisters were released on bail a month after their arrest, and exonerated of obscenity charges the following June, when the judge ruled that existing obscenity legislation did not apply to newspapers. But Woodhull’s American career was over, and although she hung on for years as a lecturer and reformer, and continued to publish her weekly paper, she suffered from perpetual ill health and scant resources. She eventually left Colonel Blood and, together with her sister and her grown children, she emigrated to England. There she started a reforming newspaper, The Humanitarian, and threw her support behind the British suffragette movement. By the turn of the century, both she and Tennie would marry wealthy Englishmen and retire from the public gaze. Woodhull ended her long and colourful life in 1927 as the mistress of an English country house in Worcestershire. A year later, British women won the right to vote.

Woodhull’s accuser, Anthony Comstock, was outraged by her acquittal in the Beecher case but used it to build new support for stronger obscenity legislation. He travelled to Washington in the wake of the trial and was instrumental in drafting new and more comprehensive censorship legislation – which became known as the Comstock law.

History has reduced Woodhull to a footnote – a curiosity more than a contender – but, despite her penchant for melodrama, she was correct about her contribution: she set a vital precedent.

Thousands of Woodhull’s suffragette sisters continued to fight against political bigotry, nominating a woman through the Equal Rights party for subsequent elections and sending members to polling stations on voting day to attempt to insist on their rights. Progress was slow, but by 1917, the suffragist Jeanette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress, as a Republican representative for Montana, one of the few states that had agreed to allow women to vote. By 1918, women had won the right in 40 states, but with Rankin’s advocacy, the constitution was amended in 1920 to mandate universal female suffrage. Laura Clay, a southern Democrat, was placed on the presidential ballot that year. But restrictive rules and escalating campaign costs in subsequent years slowed the cause, and there were no more female presidential candidates in the running until 1964.

Today, a total of 313 women have served in Congress and two female candidates have been major party nominees for vice president: Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and Sarah Palin in 2008. Since Woodhull’s pioneering campaign, other third parties have nominated 21 more female presidential candidates – including this year’s Green party candidate, Dr Jill Stein. Finally, 136 years after Woodhull’s arrest, we may soon see Hillary Clinton carry her baton forward into the White House.

As night fell on election day in 1872, Woodhull closed her campaign – from prison – with a prophetic letter to the editor of the New York Herald, which showed that she was very well aware of what she had begun:

To the public I would say in conclusion they may succeed in crushing me out, even to the loss of my life: but let me warn them and you that from the ashes of my body a thousand Victorias will spring to avenge my death by seizing the work laid down by me and carrying it forward to victory.

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