Victoria Woodhull

This is the third part in a series I'm calling "Rad Bitches." First came Lucy Stone. Then Hillary (Rodham, Rodham-Clinton) Clinton. Now: Victoria Woodhull. Who the hull is that, you ask? A champion of free love and women's rights, as well as the first female Wall Street broker and Presidential nominee. She was also a looker!

At 15 she married a 28-year-old doctor. She quickly realized he was an alcoholic and a womanizer and she'd need to support him and their 2 kids. This pissed her off for several reasons: (i) at that time women had few options to escape shitty marriages; (ii) divorced ladies were stigmatized and often ostracized and maybe Jazzercized; and (iii) men were allowed to have sex of the pre- and extra-marital varieties.

She and her sister were the first female Wall Street brokers. Their firm opened in 1870 with the assistance of her admirer and wealthy benefactor. Many contemporary men's journals published sexualized images of the pair running their firm, thereby linking the concept of publicly-minded, un-chaperoned women with ideas of "sexuality immorality" and prostitution.

She and her sister also established a paper with opinions on taboo topics. Among other things, the paper advocated women's suffrage, short skirts, spiritualism, free love, vegetarianism, licensed prostitution, and birth control. The paper also included the first English version of the Communist Manifesto.

In 1871, she argued to the House Judiciary Committee that women already had the right to vote - all they had to do was use it - since the 14th and 15th Amendments granted that right to all citizens. (Reminder: Women didn't get the vote until 1920. NINETEEN TWENTY.)

In 1872, she received the Presidential nomination from the Equal Rights Party and Frederick Douglass received the Vice Presidential nomination. While he didn't accept his nomination, her association with him stirred controversy about the mixing of whites n' blacks. The Equal Rights Party hoped the combination would reunite suffragists with civil rights activists, because the exclusion of female suffrage from the 15th Amendment two years earlier apparently had suffragist panties in a bunch.

Two days before the 1872 election, Victoria's paper published an article about a rumored affair between a prominent Protestant Reverend and some woman. The article intended to highlight the sexual double-standard between women and men. It resuled in her arrest that very day for sending obscene materials through the mail. The arrest was arranged by Anthony Comstock, the self-appointed moral defender of the nation at the time, and incited questions about censorship and government persecution. She was acquitted on a technicality six months later, but the arrest prevented Victoria from attempting to vote during the election.