The amazing life of the first woman to run for US president
Wikimedia Commons
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is not the first woman to run for President.
As Janet Tavakoli at Tavakoli Structured Finance pointed out on Monday, the first female nominee was in fact over a century ago in 1872.
Victoria Woodhall, also the first woman to work on Wall Street, secured the third party nomination by the Equal Rights party in the 1872 election.
Her opponents were Horace Greeley for the Liberal Republican Party and incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant of the Radial Republican Party.
Grant won, but Woodhall, along with her VP candidate Frederick Douglass, put up a good fight 48 years before women were even able to vote.
Her story is one of adversity and optimism - a rags to riches story of a woman from a small rural town in Ohio who made it to Wall Street and then the presidential race.
Scroll down to read more about Woodhall's incredible life:
Lucinda Shen contributed to an earlier version of this post.
Woodhull was born September 23, 1838, in Licking County, Ohio. She was the seventh of 10 children raised by a con man and an illiterate spiritualist. Her sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, the youngest of 10, was born in 1844.
Honolulu Academy of Arts/Wikimedia CommonsAt 11, her con-man father burned their family enterprise, a gristmill, down in order to collect the insurance benefits.
But the townsfolk caught on and the family was driven out of town instead.
According to "Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored" by Mary Gabriel
At 14, Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, then 7, were marketed by their father as mediums who could heal people and communicate with the dead. They became the family's primary breadwinners.
WIkimedia CommonsThe father wrote to Victoria, then 14, saying: "Girl your worth has never yet been known, but to the world it shall be shown."
According to "Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored" by Mary Gabriel
At 15, Victoria married 28-year-old Canning Woodhull, her doctor who turned out to be a nobody. He had no steady medical practice and proved to be a serial adulterer and a drunkard. Quickly, the 15-year-old had her fairy-tale notions of romance dispelled.
Wikimedia CommonsAccording to "Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored" by Mary Gabriel
See the rest of the story at Business Insider