Madam president: America’s wait for one seems to stretch on endlessly
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In 1872, Victoria Clafflin Woodhull became the first woman to stand as a candidate in an American presidential election (for the Equal Rights Party). The spirited spiritualist chose the radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate, albeit without seeking his consent or informing him.
Also the first female broker on Wall Street, Woodhull was a suffragist. “They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform," she said, according to popular accounts. “The world moves." It could’ve been a historic year for US democracy, with a woman president and an African-American veep.
As it happened, she was prevented from voting herself, received no electoral-college vote and an unknown number of popular votes. In any case, she couldn’t have voted in a world of unequal civil rights. One woman who tried to do so that November, Susan B.
Anthony, was arrested. In August 2020, Donald Trump pardoned her—but his executive grant of clemency drew outrage from American women, who argued Anthony had committed no crime and needed no pardon. After all, she had not paid a penny of her $100 fine for a reason.
Gender courses through the lifeblood of US democracy. The latest White House election that handed Trump a clear mandate to rule for the next four years was another flashpoint in the history of a long struggle. A full 152 years after Woodhull’s abortive bid, 2024 could have given America its first female president—and indeed, the first ‘of colour’—in Kamala Harris.
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