[Women]. Woodhull, Victoria

"Mrs. Woodhull, Broker" [printed caption]

Portland, Me. Geo. Stinson & Co., [ca. 1870]. Carte-de-visite, 3.5 x 2.25 inches, on a slightly larger mount with printed caption in bottom margin, photographer's credit printed on verso. Light surface wear and dust-soiling, minor edge wear to mount. Ownership signature in blue pencil on verso, reading "Miss Gordon Fredericton." Very good. Item #5090

A delightful profile portrait of the great Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927). Woodhull was a force of nature in 19th-century American politics, journalism, finance, and society. Woodhull was the first woman to testify in front of a Congressional committee (arguing that the 14th and 15th Amendments already entitled women to vote), the first woman to be nominated for President (of the Equal Rights Party, with her proposed running mate, Frederick Douglass), the first woman to head a Wall Street brokerage firm (after befriending and then learning investing from Cornelius Vanderbilt), and much more. In fact, the present photograph references Woodhull's Wall Street experience in its printed caption, which reads, "Mrs. Woodhull. Broker." Along with her sister Tennessee "Tennie" Claflin, Woodhull also owned and edited a weekly newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly beginning in 1870. The newspaper printed articles in favor of women's suffrage, spiritualism, communism (the weekly published the first English-language edition of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto), free love, equal rights, and other important progressive issues. Though Woodhull's popularity would decline in the late-1870s due to the radical nature of her views and an obscenity charge stemming from publication of a story about an affair between Henry Ward Beecher and one of his congregants, she continued to work in support of women's suffrage and publish periodicals, even after relocating to England. She lived out her elderly years in the English countryside, where she died in 1927.

Price: $650.00