Ohio Women of Note
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Victoria Woodhull
Crusading Feminist
by Daniel R. Porter
Women who made their mark for posterity in 19th and early 20th century Ohio history were sometimes eccentrics,
who may appear to many of us today as daring heroines, but to their female contemporaries were shocking and
repellent; to menfolk, cute curiosities.
One such colorful character was Victoria Claflin Woodhull Blood Martin. All Ohio can claim this
peripatetic crusader of pen and stump. Victoria was born in the tiny hamlet of Homer, Licking County, in 1838,
one of nine children. At ten she had experienced visions in which Demosthenes appeared to hear as her
patron saint; at 16 she married a Cincinnati patent medicine salesman, Dr. Canning Woodhull, who utilized her
persuasive talents to vend the "Elixir of Life."
Eleven years of patent medicine sales built in Victoria an immunity to the benefits of the
Elixir, whereupon she divorced Woodhull, married a James Blood, and moved to New York City where her "talents" were
discovered by financier Cornelius Vanderbilt. His backing permitted her and her sister, Tennessee, whose prior claim
to fame had been her portrait on the Elixir bottle label, to found in 1870 Woodhull and Chaflin's Weekly.
The journal advocated a single morality, which Victoria boastfully practiced, and free love.
Her magazine gave Victoria a base upon which she could catapult herself into the national political arena.
In 1872 this effort culminated in her nominations as a presidential candidate by the Equal Rights Party,
making her the first woman in history to be nominated to the highest office in the land. Of course,
women in 1872 could not vote for her had they wanted to, and her vote tally against Ohioana U.S. Grant
was so pitiful it was not recorded.
Defeat at the polls merely whetted her appetite for battle. She accused former
Ohioan Henry Ward Beecher of indiscretions. For this charge she was arrested and jailed, but was
later acquitted. In 1877 she departed for England, where she married an English banker and become
the often-ferocious lap dog of Continental and Isle liberal society. Until her death in 1927,
she returned occasionally to New York to flay male chauvinists and to inspire women's rightists.
This article was first published in the 1974 Ohioana Year Book. At the time, Daniel R. Porter was
the director of the Ohio Historical Society.
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