The Improbable Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth

The subtitle is more revealing as well as more sensational: Suffrage, Free Love, and The First Woman To Run For President. Here's what I have to say about this: It is a great story about a woman that I never heard of, and fills out some of the mid-19th century American history that I am fuzzy on. Victoria Woodhull was a contemporary of Mark Twain, even had some overlap with him when they both lived in England, and I had just finished that highly detailed and voluminous biography earlier this fall, so even though up on some things, there was a lot to learn here. Woodhull pushed the limits in everything she did, from her hardscrabble upbringing in Ohio to her death in 1927 at age 88 as a wealthy widow on an inherited estate in England. Her father, Buck Claflin, was a classic con man, a swindler, and a cheat--he used his children, and everyone else he could, for personal gain, and they learned those skills well. Victoria and her sister were raised to perform as child clairvoyants, and between their beauty and their charm they were able to scam Cornelius Vanderbilt, and with his backing, the two women parlayed their connection to him and opened the first women-owned stock brokerage in America. Victoria managed to accumulate great wealth and unlike her father, she managed to hang on to it. She also sought fame in addition to fortune and allied herself with high profile causes in pursuit of that. She became, in 1871, the first woman to speak before a House of Representatives committee to promote women’s suffrage and she improbably also ran for president as a candidate when she herself could not vote. This is a pretty quick one and quite interesting, if not riveting, to read.