Hillary Clinton is Not the First Woman to be Nominated for President

HOMER, OH — You may have heard that Hillary Clinton is the first woman of any major party to be nominated as a presidential candidate. There is a reason the qualifying language "of any major party" is part of that statement — it's because Hillary Clinton is not the first woman to run for president. A woman named Victoria Woodhull from Homer, Ohio in Licking County is entitled to that honor. A historical marker can be found outside the Homer library in Licking County memorializing Woodhull.

Woodhull ran for president in 1872 with the Equal Rights party — 50 years before women had the right to vote. Woodhull was not even able to vote for herself. She named abolitionist, Frederick Douglass as her running mate but Douglass never acknowledged this nor did he campaign with her.

Ann Lowder, executive director of the Robbins Hunter museum in Granville told WCMH of Columbus that Woodhull and her sister broke a lot of new ground.

“First women to ever have a brokerage firm, they also started publishing a newspaper and were the first women to own a newspaper and she (Victoria) was the first woman to address Congress in 1871.”

Lowder added that because of a falling out between Woodhull and leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, she has been all but left out of most historical accounts.

There were other issues with Woodhull's bid for the presidency. For starters, no votes were recorded and secondly, she was several months shy of her 35th birthday so she was not eligible to be president.

Image by Matthew Brady, via Wikimedia Commons