But while the union managed to liberate Victoria from her squalid family, it did little to improve her life. Her father was plenty happy to exploit that belief by marketing her and Tennessee as fortunetellers and séance practitioners.Īt just 15 years old, Victoria married 28-year-old Canning Woodhull of Rochester, N.Y., a man of some means. For her part, it seems Victoria truly believed that she could communicate with her deceased siblings. At a young age, Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee began supporting the Claflin clan after her father decided that of all his scams, his daughter’s professed clairvoyance had the most potential. Her only formal education consisted of three sporadic years of elementary school between the ages of 8 and 11. She was the sixth of 10 children-seven of which survived infancy-born to an illiterate mother and an abusive crook of a father in Homer, Ohio. Victoria Claflin wasn’t born into status or opportunity. Her groundbreaking, albeit failed, campaign wasn't the only time she made headlines: though history has largely forgotten her, during her lifetime, Woodhull was one of the most notorious women in the country and a “first” many times over in business and politics. More than a hundred years before Hillary Clinton, Victoria Claflin Woodhull ran as a third party candidate in the 1872 election.
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