The first woman to run for
president? Think 1872....
It’s not like you need the fingers
of more than one hand to count the women who have run for president of the
United States.
In fact, Hillary makes two.
Almost 145 years ago, the Equal
Rights Party nominated Victoria California Claflin Woodhull to run for
president against incumbent Republican President Ulysses S. Grant and Horace
Greeley, the nominee of both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties.
Woodhull didn’t get any
Electoral College votes, and there is no authenticated count of the number of
votes she received.
In any event, she hadn’t
reached her 35th birthday, and was legally ineligible to be elected.
Woodhull, a suffragette, had a
somewhat notorious career as a stockbroker, newspaper editor and a high-profile
advocate of women’s rights, including the right to vote.
The weird thing is, of course,
she couldn’t vote for herself. American women got the right to vote nationwide
only in August 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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