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.

“A remarkable biography . . . Well written and researched, this book warrants a spot on every serious American history student’s bookshelf.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review She was the first woman to run for president. She was the first woman to address the U.S. Congress and to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street. She’s the woman Gloria Steinem called “the most controversial suffragist of them all.” So why have most people never heard of Victoria Woodhull? In this extensively researched biography, journalist Mary Gabriel offers readers a balanced portrait of a unique and complicated woman who was years ahead of her time—and perhaps ahead of our own. “One of the most controversial American women of the late nineteenth century springs to life in this study that leaves no stone unturned.” —Publishers Weekly “[A] deftly written biography . . . of a hell-raising visionary.” —Mirabella “A meaty slice of feminist history peppered with Victorian drama.” —Civilization

Suffragist, lecturer, eugenicist, businesswoman, free lover, and the first woman to run for president of the United States, Victoria C. Woodhull (1838?1927) has been all but forgotten as a leading nineteenth-century feminist writer and radical. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull is the first multigenre, multisubject collection of her materials, giving contemporary audiences a glimpse into the radical views of this nineteenth-century woman who advocated free love between consensual adults and who was labeled ?Mrs. Satan? by cartoonist Thomas Nast. Woodhull?s texts reveal the multiple conflicting aspects of this influential woman, who has been portrayed in the past as either a disreputable figure or a brave pioneer. ø This collection of letters, speeches, essays, and articles elucidate some of the lesser-known movements and ideas of the nineteenth century. It also highlights, through Woodhull?s correspondence with fellow suffragist Lucretia Mott, tensions within the suffragist movement and demonstrates the changing political atmosphere and role of women in business and politics in the late nineteenth century. ø With a comprehensive introduction contextualizing Woodhull?s most important writing, this collection provides a clear lens through which to view late nineteenth-century suffragism, labor reform, reproductive rights, sexual politics, and spiritualism.

From the author of Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last, a stunning combination of history and biography that interweaves the stories of some of the most important social, political, and religious figures of America's Victorian era with the courageous and notorious life of Victoria Woodhull, to tell the story of her astonishing rise and fall and rise again. This is history at its most vivid, set amid the battle for woman suffrage, the Spiritualist movement that swept across the nation (10 million strong by midcentury) in the age of Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the bitter fight that pitted black men against white women in the struggle to win the right to vote.

Passet shows that the majority of correspondents who participated in the sex radical movement resided in the Midwest and the Great Plains states, where ideas of individual freedom and sovereignty resonated particularly strongly.".

Post–Civil War New York City is the battleground of the American dream. In this era of free love, emerging rights of women, and brutal sexual repression, Freydeh, a spirited young Jewish immigrant, toils at different jobs to earn passage to America for her family. Learning that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city, she begins a determined search that carries her from tenement to brothel to prison—as her story interweaves with those of some of the epoch's most notorious figures: Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony; sexual freedom activist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; and Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose censorship laws are still on the books. In the tradition of her bestselling World War II epic Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy once again re-creates a turbulent period in American history and explores changing attitudes in a land of sacrifice, suffering, promise, and reward.

Well before television and the internet, there were women who sought fame, flirted with infamy, and actively engaged with their fan base. In today's pop culture world, it can be hard to understand what the lives of these women were like. In their pre-suffrage world, women who attracted attention were considered scandalous and it was largely uncommon for women to become celebrities. Women who rose to fame in those times had to put up with societal standards for women on top of the lack of privacy and free speech. This book provides the details and context to let us know the women who captured America's heart in the 19th century. Rather than looking at influential women who strictly avoided notoriety, it covers the lives of 18 celebrities like Lydia Maria Child, Sojourner Truth, and Jane Addams.

Steve Shone’s Women of Liberty explores the many overlaps between ten radical, feminist, and anarchist thinkers: Tennie C. Claflin, Noe Itō, Louise Michel, Rose Pesotta, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mollie Steimer, Lois Waisbrooker, Mercy Otis Warren, and Victoria C. Woodhull. In an age of great and understandable dissatisfaction with governments around the world, Shone illuminates both the lost wisdom of the anarchists and the considerable contribution of women to intellectual thought, influences that are currently missing from many classes documenting the history of political theory.

Exploring the gendered dimension of political conflicts, Laura Edwards links transformations in private and public life in the era following the Civil War. Ideas about men's and women's roles within households shaped the ways groups of southerners--elite and poor, whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans--envisioned the public arena and their own places in it. By using those on the margins to define the center, Edwards demonstrates that Reconstruction was a complicated process of conflict and negotiation that lasted long beyond 1877 and involved all southerners and every aspect of life.