Oh hey did you notice how *six* women are running in the Democratic presidential primary? And remember how that's already groundbreaking? Follow CAWP's Presidential Watch for news and analysis about 2020 and historical info on women and the presidency. https://t.co/Xbbwy76sjc pic.twitter.com/gNqFyuwu5Z

While watching news coverage of the horrible terrorist massacre of Muslims in New Zealand, I’ve been reminded again that other countries have already elected progressive women to the highest office in their countries. The amazing grace, empathy, and strength displayed by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made me wish that we, too, could have a woman leader who would be the polar opposite of the one we have now.

I made a point of reading this op-ed by Sushil Aaron in The New York Times, which is subtitled “New Zealand’s prime minister is emerging as the progressive antithesis to right-wing strongmen like Trump, Orban and Modi, whose careers thrive on illiberal, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

Curious about her campaign and election, I found this profile in The Guardian:

The party unanimously chose Ardern , who had previously said her sights were not set on the leadership. Hours later Ardern fronted the media for the first time in the role and was impressive – fielding questions effectively and surprising political pundits with her confident performance.

Ardern, 37, the youngest person to lead the party, has taken a crash course in leadership and passed, so far, with flying colours. Just seven and a half weeks out from the 23 September general election, Andrew Little resigned as Labour leader after its lowest ever poll result of just 24 points.

After doing more research, I realized she wasn’t a “first.” New Zealand’s first female PM was Dame Jenny Shipley, elected in 1997, and Helen Clark was the second, defeating Shipley in 1999.

I think about it when I see Germany’s Angela Merkel and, though I loathe her politics, Great Britain’s Theresa May.

What is it about us here in the U.S. that has prevented a woman’s election to the highest office in the land?

Granted, there are many countries that haven’t.

However, when I look at countries who have had a woman in leadership, they are on every continent.

What is our problem? Part of it may be rooted in the fact that we don’t have a parliamentary form of government. Part of it is attributed to the incumbency factor and recruiting more women to run for office. In spite of the obstacles, we saw a lot of Democratic Party gains for women in 2018, and I hope we will see more.

Since I believe that you can’t know where you are headed unless you examine where you’ve been, I want to start at the beginning—and that is with Victoria Woodhull.

Victoria Woodhull Ran for President Before Women Had the Right to Vote

Over the centuries, more than 200 women have sought the country’s highest office, to varying degrees of success. And leading the way for all of them was Victoria Claflin Woodhull: a 19th-century women’s rights activist and business owner. When Woodhull began her campaign for the presidency in 1870, this was no small thing. At the time, women were still about 50 years away from having the right to vote, and even many small, seemingly mundane everyday experiences were off-limits, Judy Woodruff reports for the PBS Newshour. “This was an era where a woman could not vote, could not enter a restaurant, a store, an establishment of any kind unless she was escorted by a man,” Scott Claflin, one of Woodhull’s descendants, told Joe Richman and Samara Freemark for Radio Diaries. “It was controversial for women to do anything. But she had the foresight not to accept the way society was.” Even before running for president, Woodhull was an iconoclast. She was a spiritualist and fortune-teller who later owned her own stock brokerage and newspaper and was a staunch advocate for women’s rights, Amanda Frisken, who wrote a biography of Woodhull, told Richman and Freemark.

There are several biographies of Woodhull that I recommend you read. They take on her history, and the time she lived in from different perspectives. The first is referenced in the article above.

Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America by Amanda Frisken

Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, forced her fellow Americans to come to terms with the full meaning of equality after the Civil War. A sometime collaborator with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, yet never fully accepted into mainstream suffragist circles, Woodhull was a flamboyant social reformer who promoted freedom, especially freedom from societal constraints over intimate relationships. This much we know from the several popular biographies of the nineteenth-century activist. But what we do not know, as Amanda Frisken reveals, is how Woodhull manipulated the emerging popular media and fluid political culture of the Reconstruction period in order to accomplish her political goals. As an editor and public speaker, Woodhull demanded that women and men be held to the same standards in public life. Her political theatrics brought the topic of women's sexuality into the public arena, shocking critics, galvanizing supporters, and finally locking opposing camps into bitter conflict over sexuality and women's rights in marriage. A woman who surrendered her own privacy, whose life was grist for the mills of a sensation-mongering press, she made the exposure of others' secrets a powerful tool of social change. Woodhull's political ambitions became inseparable from her sexual nonconformity, yet her skill in using contemporary media kept her revolutionary ideas continually before her peers. In this way Woodhull contributed to long-term shifts in attitudes about sexuality and the slow liberation of marriage and other social institutions. Using contemporary sources such as images from the "sporting news," Frisken takes a fresh look at the heyday of this controversial women's rights activist, discovering Woodhull's previously unrecognized importance in the turbulent climate of Radical Reconstruction and making her a useful lens through which to view the shifting sexual mores of the nineteenth century. If we think, because we live in a instant scandal-ridden age due to social media, that we are different from past generations, think again. Back in Woodhull’s time, she was the center of newspaper-driven scandal and titillation, and the target of vicious caricatures. "Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan!" 1872 caricature by Thomas Nast: Wife, carrying heavy burden of children and drunk husband, admonishing (Mrs.) Satan (Victoria Woodhull), "I'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps." Mrs. Satan's sign reads, "Be saved by free love."

The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull, by Lois Beachy Underhill, has an introduction by Gloria Steinem.

Drawing on newly available material, Underhill, a former advertising executive, has written an outstanding study of controversial feminist Woodhull (1838-1927). Beautiful and charismatic, Woodhull and her sister made their living as spiritualists until financier Cornelius Vanderbilt established them as stockbrokers. With their wealth, they began a muckraking newspaper that argued for women's suffrage and free love. Woodhull became an influential speaker for women's rights and ran for president against Grant in 1870 as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party. Her advocacy of communism and sexual freedom (she married three times and had many affairs) angered feminists and liberals. In retaliation for his criticism, Woodhull publicized in her newspaper the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher's affair with a parishioner. This act resulted in lawsuits and effectively ended her career. She moved to London, remarried and denied her past. Underhill argues convincingly that, although Woodhull was deliberately left out of histories written by Susan B. Anthony and others, she was an important figure in the struggle for women's equality.

Elinor J. Brecher’s writes in her review of the book:

She was the first female broker on Wall Street. She was the first woman to address the U.S. Congress, the first to publish her own newspaper. She was a passionate suffragist as famous in her day as the sister-in-arms later honored with a $1 coin. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president . . . 48 years before women won the right to vote. She challenged Ulysses S. Grant, as standard bearer of the Equal Rights Party - a coalition of trade unionists, spiritualists, abolitionists, communists, humanists, suffragists, temperance and birth-control advocates... The story of Victoria Woodhull might have remained a historical footnote had not Underhill, a former advertising executive, gone hunting for political women to use in a 1980 campaign for Conde Nast, the publishing giant. "I looked for the first woman who ran for president, and when I found her, I wondered, `How come I don't know about her?' " Underhill said from her home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. The more research she did, the more Underhill became convinced that what had happened to Woodhull was "wrong, wrong, wrong - that a woman who contributed so much should not be recognized."

While writing this, I asked my goddaughter and my husband of they had ever heard of Woodhull. They both said no, and were surprised when I told them a little about her.

I can fully understand why we don’t get taught about Woodhull in grade school and high school. Sex?! *Gasp*

‘Respectable,’ she wasn’t. She broke the mold, and women who came after her had to toe the line. I think we are still trapped in that straightjacket of faux morality for women, up until this day.

Woodhull was the start of a long line of women who would attempt to run for president, or vice president. Many were Democrats, and others Republican. However, the majority have run on the tickets of smaller parties.

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) has a list titled “Women Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates: A Selected List”:

Many women have sought to become President of the United States. A number received national attention, either as pioneers in the electoral process, as potential candidates, or as candidates of minor parties with a significant national presence. Others were from minor parties or were fringe candidates who entered major party primaries. Two women have been nominated to run for the office of Vice President: Sarah Palin by the Republican party in 2008 and Geraldine Ferraro by the Democratic party in 1984. Another, Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, had her name put into nomination for Vice President at the Democratic National Convention in 1972. In addition, Toni Nathan, the 1972 Libertarian candidate for Vice President, became the first woman to win an electoral vote when one Republican elector voted for her instead of for his party’s candidate. This fact sheet includes all candidates known to CAWP who meet any of the following criteria: achieved major historic firsts; were named in national polls; achieved prominence by holding significant elected or appointed office; appeared on the general election ballot in a majority of states; and/or became eligible for federal matching funds.

x In 1965, Patsy Takemoto Mink became the first woman of color to serve in the US Congress. She also ran a limited campaign for president in 1972.#WomensHistoryMonth



Learn more about the history of women of color in US politics here:https://t.co/ckalnXgDSL pic.twitter.com/til904Zm0F Ã¢ÂÂ CAWP (@CAWP_RU) March 19, 2019

Diving into the history even deeper, CAWP provides a link to “The Women Who Ran for President” by Jo Freeman. (This article is Chapter 5 of Jo's book We Will Be Heard: Women's Struggles for Political Power in the United States.)

Long before women could vote they ran for public office, including the highest office -- the Presidency of the United States. They ran for the same reasons that men run who don’t have a chance: because a Presidential candidacy is a great platform from which to talk about issues and sometimes just to talk about yourself. Two women put themselves forward for the Presidency in the Nineteenth Century. None did so in the Twentieth before 1964. Between 1964 and 2004 over fifty women were on at least one ballot as candidates for President, both as minor party candidates and as candidates in primaries for the nomination of the Republican or Democratic parties. Only a few of these women were noticed by the national press. In 1987 and 1999 two women who had established their credentials as political professionals tested the waters of the major parties, but decided they were too chilly because adequate funds were not available. Not until the Twenty-First Century were the names of women who had not yet indicated an interest in running “floated” as possible Presidential candidates. Who were these women and why did they run?

Due to copyright restrictions I won’t post more of the article here, so give it a read. I knew a few of the names she listed from the smaller leftist parties, but most were new to me. Let me know whose names were new to you.

So here we are in 2019, looking ahead to a presidential election year in 2020, which will hopefully remove the Orange Misogynist from the White House (if he isn’t impeached or indicted before then).

I’ve added a poll below, because I’m curious about who readers would like to see on our ticket (from the list of the six Democratic Party women who are running) in the top spot or as veep.

Some may not be your choice. None may be your choice. One may become our nominee, and failing that, will more than likely be a vice presidential pick.

From my POV, a Democratic ticket without a woman on it this time around would be a very bad fuckin’ deal.

But that’s me.

I’d like to hear from you. And in the interest of civility, please refrain from bashing those who are not your choice.