The Independent View: Woman Who Ran for President on a General Election Ballot

Who is the woman who put the first crack in that highest, hardest glass ceiling, the Presidency?

That honor belongs to a beautiful, colorful and convention-defying woman named Victoria Woodhull, who ran for the office in 1872. Woodhull, who died nearly twenty years before Hillary Clinton was even born, hazarded a path on which no woman before her had ever dared to tread. Even more amazing is that she did it almost 50 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the right to vote. On Election Day, November 5, 1872, Victoria Woodhull couldn’t even vote for herself. Although it must be noted that she could not have voted for herself in any case, given the fact that she was incarcerated on Election Day, and for a month or so after, in New York City’s Ludlow Street Jail on obscenity charges.

Woodhull ran under the banner of the Equal Rights Party, formerly the People’s Party, which supported equal rights for women and women’s suffrage. The party nominated her in May 1872 in New York City to run uphill against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant and Democrat Horace Greeley and selected as her running mate, Frederick Douglass, former escaped slave-turned-abolitionist writer and speaker. On paper, it was an impressive pick, but not really. Douglass never appeared at the party’s nominating convention, never agreed to run with Woodhull, never participated in the campaign and actually gave stump speeches for Grant.

But that’s just one more of many caveats about Woodhull, who, throughout her long life, she died in England in 1927 at age 88, never much cared for rules or regulations of a game she considered egregiously rigged against women. On inauguration day, she would have been just 34 years old. Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution requires that the president be 35 on the day “he” takes office. In the end, though, her youth was the most moot of moot points, because Victoria received zero electoral votes. There’s no record of how many popular votes she received.

We do know that 12 years later, Belva Ann Lockwood, running ran for President under the banner of the National Equal Rights Party and racked up 4,149 votes in six states.

The next major candidate was Linda Jenness in 1972, running on the Socialist Workers Party and received 83,380 in 25 states.

Next we jump to 1984, where Sonia Johnson, running on the Citizens Party label and received 72,200 in 19 states.

Then we come to 1988 and my friend, Dr. Lenora Fulani, the first woman and African-American, who was on the ballot in all 50 states and received 217,219 votes and received Presidential matching funds. She ran under the banner of the New Alliance Party. She ran again in 1992 and received 73,714.

CLICK HERE for a full list of woman who ran for President in a General Election.