A new biography by Eden Collinsworth spotlights Victoria Woodhull, the Ohio-born reformer who mounted a presidential bid in 1872 and later became a footnote in American political history. The book, The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President, frames Woodhull as a multi-faceted figure — a self-described clairvoyant, businesswoman, suffragist and controversial publisher whose life intersected with major social and legal debates of the late 19th century.
Woodhull’s 1872 campaign, run against President Ulysses S. Grant, is presented in the biography as both a publicity vehicle and a political statement aimed at the exclusion of women from the franchise. Collinsworth told the Daily Mail that Woodhull used the run to draw national attention to the fact that the 15th Amendment extended voting rights to Black men while continuing to bar women. Woodhull was under the constitutional age of 35 for the presidency and, at the time of the election, was jailed on charges tied to material published in her newspaper.
Collinsworth reports that Woodhull’s public life began under unusual circumstances. According to the biography, Woodhull claimed to receive messages from spirits starting at age five, a claim her father, Buck Claflin, who the book describes as a con man, used to market his daughters as child clairvoyants. The family staged séances in which guests supplied names of the dead in advance and the girls appeared to contact those relatives, the biography says.
At 14, Woodhull married to escape her father’s household; the marriage quickly proved troubled, the book says. Over subsequent years she cultivated a series of roles: a stockbroker on Wall Street, a newspaper publisher, an advocate for women’s rights and an outspoken proponent of what contemporaries called "free love." Collinsworth writes that Woodhull used funds from a reported affair with railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt to finance a newspaper and a brokerage, and that she drew information about investments from unconventional sources, including brothel madams, a detail Collinsworth said she uncovered in archival research.
The biography also details legal entanglements that followed Woodhull to Britain. Collinsworth said she discovered a folder labeled Woodhull vs. British Museum in the British Library’s Reading Room and that the case, brought by Woodhull in the 19th century, led to changes in British libel law by establishing that libraries could not be sued for material they held. Museum staff, Collinsworth told the Daily Mail, were largely unaware of Woodhull’s role in the institution’s legal history until the book project.
Woodhull’s American notoriety intensified after she and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, published a reformist weekly that ran stories attacking public figures and addressing sexuality and politics. The publication drew charges that material it printed was obscene; Woodhull was arrested and convicted on charges connected to distributing material deemed improper, and she spent time in jail. Collinsworth emphasizes that the jailing did not deter Woodhull’s efforts to use high-profile actions to promote women’s suffrage and other reforms.
The book sketches Woodhull’s policy positions as broad and, for the era, radical: she argued for women’s suffrage, unions, limits on presidential terms, and what Collinsworth describes as early calls for universal healthcare and sexual freedom. Collinsworth, a former book publisher who said she did not know Woodhull’s story until encountering archival materials in London, describes Woodhull as "an interesting combination" of progressive beliefs and entrepreneurial opportunism.
Collinsworth’s biography portrays Woodhull as a figure whose ambitions were constrained by laws and social norms of her time. Women did not gain the right to vote nationally until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, decades after Woodhull’s campaign. Woodhull died in 1927, having witnessed some but not all of the changes she urged.
The book seeks to reposition Woodhull from a marginal character in histories dominated by men to a fuller subject in her own right. Collinsworth told the Daily Mail that many remarkable women become "kind of a footnote" in history and that recovering those stories can alter how the public understands reform movements of the 19th century.
Collinsworth’s account relies primarily on archival documents, newspaper records and contemporary legal papers, and the biography draws on previously overlooked material housed in institutions such as the British Library. The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President was published Sept. 2 and adds to a growing body of scholarship that reexamines the lives of 19th-century activists whose work anticipated later reforms in gender, labor and social policy.
While some historians have long noted Woodhull’s role in early suffrage agitation, Collinsworth’s book foregrounds the intersections of publicity, legal risk and entrepreneurial initiative that marked Woodhull’s public life. The biography neither claims that Woodhull single-handedly transformed American politics nor dismisses the obstacles she faced; instead, it presents a portrait of a controversial public actor whose methods and ambitions reflected the volatile public culture of Reconstruction-era America.