It’s still not Mrs President

So another US Presidential election has come and almost gone, and we know who will be the occupant of the White House for the forthcoming four year term. Inevitably in the modern world thing one tends to follow at least some of the news about American elections and also one has opinions as to the eligibility and suitability of the candidates. However I will keep my opinions on that matter largely to myself but I will say that I never really thought that Kamala Harris would win the election. She just didn’t seem to me to be a sufficiently strong candidate for the post. 

Had she been successful she would have course of been the first female President of the USA. When that might actually happen, remains still an open question. However, there is also the question of when did a woman first run for this exalted position. If you want to keep up-to-date with your fund of knowledge of pub quiz trivia, such as the fact that Donald Trump will be only the second US President to have two separate terms in office, the other being Grover Cleveland, then who and when was the first female candidate is clearly of great importance. The answer is surprising both in the date and also in the very eventful life of that first female candidate.

It was in the election of 1872 that Victoria Woodhull ( later Woodhull-Martin ) was nominated, although that was technically invalid as she was not yet 35, the minimum age under the Constitution. She also sought to be a candidate in 1884 and 1892, but by then she was no longer based in the United States, but in the United Kingdom.where she lived from 1877. In 1878 she met her third husband-to-be whom she married in 1883. Following his death in 1897 she remained in England and from 1901 lived at Norton Park at Bredon’s Norton on the southern edge of Worcestershire. That is where she died aged 88, and was buried in the churchyard in 1927. 

Bredon’s Norton is very close to Tewkesbury and in the ambulatory of the abbey church is a handsome colourful wall tablet, topped with the crossed Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and which commemorates her, her work for the “great cause” of Anglo-American friendship and records that she played a significant part in securing the open lawns which set the Abbey off to the east. Her political and publishing career is not mentioned. Although I had seen the monument in Tewkesbury Abbey on my many visits there it was quite by chance that I came across her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography when it was the featured life of the day and I recognised her name. Looking at her life span I did vaguely wonder when looking at the monument what she had experienced in the land of her birth before and after the Civil War, but reading her life was far more interesting than one could glean from the memorial in Tewkesbury Abbey.

In addition to the ODNB there is a quite detailed life of her on Wikipedia at Victoria Woodhull

Her remarkable and varied life story really would make a good film or television series.