What happened, and when
Victoria Woodhull ran for president in 1872, almost half a century before American women won the right to vote nationally. She is the figure most often called the first woman to run for the presidency of the United States. Later candidates included Belva Lockwood, who ran in 1884 and again in 1888, and Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator from Maine who sought her party’s nomination in 1964.
Nothing of this kind happened in 1967. No woman launched a notable presidential campaign that year, and the political news was dominated by the Vietnam War, urban unrest and the early manoeuvres before the 1968 election. Shirley Chisholm, who is sometimes mixed up with the earliest candidates, ran in 1972, five years later, and was the first Black woman to seek a major party’s presidential nomination.
Victoria Woodhull in 1872
Woodhull was born in Ohio in 1838 and became one of the most controversial public figures of her day. With her sister Tennessee Claflin she opened a Wall Street brokerage in 1870, and the two women published a newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, that took up causes such as women’s suffrage, labour reform and what was then called free love.
In January 1871 she addressed a congressional committee in Washington, arguing that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments already gave women the right to vote. The committee did not accept this view, but the appearance made her a prominent figure in the suffrage movement, although some of its leaders distrusted her.
In 1872 she was nominated for president by the Equal Rights Party. Frederick Douglass was named as her running mate, but he did not take part in the campaign, and accounts differ on how far he even acknowledged the nomination. Around election time she was arrested on obscenity charges connected with her newspaper’s reporting on a scandal involving the preacher Henry Ward Beecher. The charges did not lead to a conviction.
The details of how many votes she received, if any were counted for her, are not reliable in popular accounts. It is safest to say that her campaign was symbolic rather than serious in electoral terms, but historically important.
Woodhull’s later life
After the 1872 campaign Woodhull’s public career faded in the United States. She moved to England in the late 1870s, married a banker, John Biddulph Martin, in 1883, and lived there for the rest of her life. She published magazines and took part in English reform causes, and she died in 1927, after women had gained the national vote that she had argued for. Historians still debate how much of her reputation rests on genuine political skill and how much on publicity, and both views have support.
Why a woman could run before women could vote
The Constitution does not say that a president must be a man, and in the 1870s there was no law stopping a woman from being named a candidate. Voting was different. The Nineteenth Amendment, which barred denying the vote on the basis of sex, was ratified in 1920. Until then, rights to vote were set largely by individual states, and some Western states had admitted women earlier.
This gap between candidacy and suffrage explains why the earliest women candidates were protest candidates. They could be named, but they could not realistically win, and they were often making a point about exclusion.
Belva Lockwood, 1884 and 1888
Belva Lockwood was a lawyer who in 1879 became the first woman admitted to practise before the United States Supreme Court bar. She ran for president on the Equal Rights Party ticket in 1884 and again in 1888. Her campaigns were more organised than Woodhull’s and she travelled to speak for them. Reports of her vote totals vary, and since voters in most states could not cast ballots for her in any case, the numbers are best treated cautiously.
Margaret Chase Smith, 1964
Smith had been a member of the House and then a senator from Maine, and she was a prominent Republican. In 1964 she allowed her name to be put forward at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where Barry Goldwater won the nomination. She is generally described as the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for president at a major party’s convention, though it is wise to treat such “firsts” as widely reported rather than beyond dispute. She remained in the Senate until 1973.
Her campaign matters for this article because it was the most recent breakthrough before 1967. A candidate with real standing in a major party had tested the idea that a woman could seek the top office, and she did so in the middle of the same decade that gave rise to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act.
What 1967 looked like for women in politics
Women were in public life in 1967, but their numbers in elected office were small. Most of the year’s political stories concerned men: Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, the Dump Johnson movement, the Powell exclusion from the House, and the first steps of Eugene McCarthy’s challenge. Women’s organisations were active, and debates about workplace fairness, including Title VII equal pay questions, were gathering force, but a woman presidential candidate remained unusual. The related “second wave” of feminism was still taking shape.
Abroad, one notable electoral milestone fell in November 1967, when Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election for the Scottish National Party in Scotland. It was not a presidential race, but it was an example of a woman winning a prominent political contest that year.
Chisholm in 1972
Shirley Chisholm entered the Democratic primaries in 1972. She had been elected to the House of Representatives in 1968, the first Black woman to serve there. Her campaign did not win the nomination, but she took part in the primaries and gathered delegates at the convention. Her run belongs to the 1970s and to a different phase of American politics.
A quick timeline
- 1872: Victoria Woodhull, Equal Rights Party
- 1884 and 1888: Belva Lockwood, Equal Rights Party
- 1920: Nineteenth Amendment ratified
- 1964: Margaret Chase Smith, Republican convention
- 1972: Shirley Chisholm, Democratic primaries
If a source tells you that the first woman candidate for president appeared in 1967, it is mistaken. The history starts in 1872.