edit: I have changed my title to match the new NYTimes headline. Sorry about the all caps, I guess they are really excited about this lol

Also shoutout to @SayJess@lemmy.blahaj.zone who shared a gift article link in the comments. I hope you don’t mind but I kinda stole it and updated the post

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    I bet some female ran prior to female suffrage.

    kagis

    Yeah.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull

    Victoria Claflin Woodhull (born Victoria California Claflin; September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women’s suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency,[2] some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35. (Woodhull’s 35th birthday was in September 1873, six months after the March inauguration.)

    An activist for women’s rights and labor reforms, Woodhull was also an advocate of “free love”, by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference.[3] “They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform,” she often said. “The world moves.”[4]

    Woodhull twice went from rags to riches, her first fortune being made on the road as a magnetic healer[5] before she joined the spiritualist movement in the 1870s.[6] Authorship of many of her articles is disputed (many of her speeches on these topics were collaborations between Woodhull, her backers, and her second husband, Colonel James Blood[7]). Together with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, she was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street,[8] making a second, and more reputable fortune.[9] They were among the first women to found a newspaper in the United States, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which began publication in 1870.[10]

    Woodhull was politically active in the early 1870s when she was nominated as the first woman candidate for the United States presidency.[8] Woodhull was the candidate in 1872 from the Equal Rights Party, supporting women’s suffrage and equal rights; her running mate (unbeknownst to him) was abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. Her campaign inspired at least one other woman – apart from her sister – to run for Congress.[8] A check on her activities occurred when she was arrested on obscenity charges a few days before the election. Her paper had published an account of the alleged adulterous affair between the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Richards Tilton which had rather more detail than was considered proper at the time. However, it all added to the sensational coverage of her candidacy.[11]

    Heh, and she was in trouble with the law in the runup to the election like Trump, too.

      • dutchkimble@lemy.lol
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        5 months ago

        What is this “looking it up” you speak of? We only do googles and kagis and duckduckgos and altavistas

        • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Funny enough, I tried DDG, then Google, then asked MS Copilot and then ChatGPT (both Bing). 😅

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 months ago

      I suppose the only questions there are whether or not her state allowed women to vote for president, and whether or not a candidate who cannot legally hold the office counts (since she was under 35). Because it wasn’t just blanket illegal for women to vote prior to the 19th Amendment, it was up to the individual states and like anything up to the individual states it was all over the place depending on which state we’re talking about. For example, New Jersey allowed anyone who had the equivalent of 50 British pounds of wealth to vote regardless of sex (and there are recorded examples of women voting there) - at least until they embraced Jacksonian democracy and removed the wealth requirement and added a sex one. By the time the 19th Amendment passed, women could vote in at least some elections in most states.