Image courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Museum Artifact Collection, Artifact No. 1991.61.18.

Victoria Woodhull

United States, 1838 - 1927

Victoria Woodhull, a charismatic fortune-teller from Ohio who’d attended a suffrage convention in 1869, moved to New York, and reinvented herself as a stockbroker, became the first woman to run for president [in 1872]; she ran as a "self-nominated" candidate of the party she helped create, the Equal Rights Party; ingeniously, she argued that women already had the right to vote, under the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution -- an argument Woodhull brought before a House Judiciary committee, making her the first woman to address a congressional committee.