The Female Presidential Candidate That You've Never Heard Of: Victoria Woodhull

With it being nearly the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment. Let's take a look at some of the individuals that played a major part in the Women's Suffrage movement in the United States. For today, we will be covering the Female Candidate that you haven't heard of. Victoria Woodhull.

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Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio on September 23, 1838. She was the seventh of ten children, to a mother that was illiterate, and a father that was an abusive conman. By her teen years, she had little in the way of formal education, but was noted as being extremely intelligent by her peers. During her early teen years. Woodhull became interested in the spiritualism movement. Based primarily off the late Austrian mystic Franz Mesmer. From childhood, Victoria maintained that she was guided and protected by the spirits, who occasionally let her visit a Utopian world in heaven unlike the chaotic, miserable world in which she lived. Victoria spent most of her youth traveling with her family's medicine show, telling fortunes and selling snakeoil medicines.

She married at the age of 15 to a 29 year old Canning Woodhull, who she kept the last name of after divorce. Her parents sent her to Canning to be treated for a long-term illness of some sort, here, Victoria studied medicine and often had to work outside of home to feed Cannings alcoholic addition. Together, they had two children, the first born with an intellectual disability, that Victoria blamed on her husbands alcoholism, and the second child which Canning botched so badly, both the child and mother nearly bled to death during the birth. The family moved many times throughout the early 60's, during which Victoria became an advocate of the so called “Free-Love” movement due to the infidelity of her then husband. Women who married in the United States during the time, were bound into the unions, even if loveless, with few options to escape. Divorce was limited by law and considered socially scandalous, and women who divorced were stigmatized and often ostracized by society.