The First Woman by Lynn Miller

Piece Description

Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States, was a charismatic and polarizing figure.  She was a self-made woman whose ambition and radical views first galvanized and then alienated the suffragists who would write the history of the first wave of feminism.  For disenfranchised women then and now, Woodhull was an imperfect fit. They wanted the impossible:  a woman brash and courageous enough to buck the norms for women, magnetic enough to capture the attention and the hearts of the working class as well as the educated.   And yet someone proper and conformist enough not to be called the worst thing a woman could be called: immoral.   A conformist woman could never have broken the barriers of that or any other era.  It took someone ambitious,  precocious, fearless and uncaring of the judgment of others.  It took Victoria Claflin Woodhull.