Amidst the rapidly changing landscape of the presidential election with President Joe Biden dropping from the race on Sunday, July 21 and Vice President Kamala Harris the assumed Democratic nominee, the next chapter of women seeking highest office in the United States is already being written. Amidst that change, on Friday, July 19, the Dakota Historical Society hosted Frank D. Sachs, a retired educator turned lecturer, for the well-timed discussion of “The First Three Women Who would be President.”
This lecture comes from a series of lectures called “Neglected History,” meant to showcase overlooked portions of history: “things that don’t get talked about but maybe they should,” said Sachs.
“All three of these people overcame great hardships to become the successes they were […] This is an American Story,” said Sachs.
For many, the 2016 presidential run from Sen. Hilary Clinton was a watershed moment for women breaking the glass ceiling of the highest office in the United States. While Clinton up until now is the closest woman to becoming president, she is far from the first.
Women have been running for president of the United States even before they could vote for themselves. The first woman Sachs discusses demonstrates that systemic oppression women faced throughout early U.S. history and beyond.

Victoria Woodhull
Victoria Woodhull was born in 1838 in Homer, Ohio and holds many firsts. She was the first woman to own her own brokerage firm on Wall Street, the first woman to start and own her own newspaper, and the first female candidate for U.S. President. But it was a long road from rural Ohio to get to those firsts.
Woodhull was born the seventh of 10 children to a conman. She eloped at 15 to escape her home situation only to quickly find out her first husband wasn’t the medical doctor he claimed to be, but an alcoholic, and a womanizer.
It is speculated that Woodhull’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity spurned her interest in the Free Love movement, a movement which at the time meant that people should be able to move between monogamous relationships when they pleased, able to end relationships and marriages when and if the love ended. While that definition of Free Love more or less reflects the modern-day rules of no-fault divorce legal in all 50 states, it was a radical opinion of sexual agency in the 1850s and earned Woodhull the nickname “Mrs. Satan,” for her association with the movement.
In 1866 at the age of 28, Woodhull remarried and moved to New York City to open a salon. The salon catered to the city’s intellectuals as well as offering fortune tellings. This salon eventually led Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, to the recently widowed 76-year-old Cornelious Vanderbilt to whom they began providing spiritual advice and Claflin is said to have begun a relationship.
In exchange for spiritual advice, in 1870 Vanderbilt began funding Woodhull, Claflin, & Company, a brokerage firm run by Woodhull and Claflin. The sisters took to the trade and quickly made a fortune trading stocks despite a widespread uproar of women working in the industry. Those funds allowed both women to open Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a widely circulated reformist newspaper that ran for six years.
During this time, Woodhull became involved with the suffragist movement and became the first woman to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee where she argued that women already had the right to vote because the 14th and 15th amendments provided protection of that right to all citizens. It would be the same foundational argument used nearly a century later by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Despite that belief, Woodhull angered many of her suffragist contemporaries including Susan B. Anthony when she said, “A woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.”
Woodhull announced her run for president in 1870 for the newly formed Equal Rights Party. Her vice-presidential pick was none other than Fredrick Douglass, a statesman, orator and titan of the 19th Century civil rights movement. Woodhull’s campaign faced incredible opposition, with several states refusing to put her name on the ballot. Only days before the election, Woodhull and Claflin were both arrested for exposing an affair between the prominent New York Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher with one of his parishioners. Both sisters were in jail for the election but were later acquitted.
Woodhull received no electoral votes in the 1872 election and due to being in jail was not able to attempt to vote for herself which was her plan. Woodhull moved to England in 1877 where she spent the rest of her life. It would take nearly 100 years for another woman to take another run for the office.

Margaret Chase Smith
Margaret Chase Smith was born in Maine in 1897. She was the first woman to hold seats in both chambers of congress and is famously remembered for denouncing Joseph McCarthy in 1950, near the height of his rising influence.
Smith became fully involved in politics after marrying Clyde Smith who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1936 for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Margaret served as her husband’s campaign manager during the 1936 election and kept her salary to become his secretary in office. She is alleged to have done much of the work of the office including correspondence, research and speechwriting due to her husband’s failing health. Clyde died in 1940, endorsing his wife for the office from his deathbed.
Smith would go on to serve 33 years in congress, become a staunch bipartisan leader and still holds the record for the highest number of consecutive votes cast in congress with 2,941 consecutive votes, a string that was only ended when Smith was hospitalized and unable to leave.
In congress, Smith would become known as the “mother of WAVES,” for creating the United States Naval Reserve (Woman’s Reserve), better known as WAVES, for her incredible election turnout with Smith never receiving less than 60% of the vote in her three elections in the House, and for her 1964 presidential run.
In her speech announcing her candidacy, Smith listed the hurdles she knew she would face including that the White House had only ever been held by men, that the odds of her winning were too steep, that some said she lacked the physical stamina, that she didn’t have the financial and political backing of other candidates and that the campaign would take her away from the Senate where even then she was known for her fanatical voting record. She famously said, “because of all these things against my running, I’ve decided I will.”
In 1964, Smith became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party in the United States, and refused to withdraw her name to allow Barry Goldwater to become the Republican nominee. Despite that, Smith would eventually go on to campaign for him.
Smith would continue serving in congress until 1972. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989.

Shirley Chisholm
The final woman highlighted who ran for president was Shirley Chisholm, born in New York City in 1924 who would later become the first black woman to be elected to congress as well as the first black woman to be major-party candidate for president.
Chisholm distinguished herself academically getting accepted to both Vassar College and Oberlin College but was unable to afford either. She instead graduated from Brooklyn College Cum Laude and later earned her master’s in childhood education from Columbia University.
Chisholm volunteered in various political groups including the League of Women Voters and the Unity Democrats Club before running for the New York State Assembly in 1964. When her opponent brought up issues of gender, Chisholm is said to have reviewed the data of registered voters in her district, only to discover that more than 13,000 more women were registered than men. She won by a massive margin.
In 1968 Chisholm was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, making her the first black woman to be elected there. Chisholm was placed on the House Agriculture Committee, a blatant snub given her urban New York City district. Despite that snub, she leveraged the committee and became a key creator in Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, better known as WIC.
In 1971, Chisholm would become one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus. In 1972, she announced her candidacy for president. In her speech, she specifically addressed issues of identity: “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people.”
Chisholm was the first black woman to run for a major party’s presidential nomination, and faced opposition both within and outside of her own Democratic party. She campaigned under the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed,” a reference to her lack of connections and backing from the establishment. It would be a moniker she carried the rest of her life and the title to her 1970 autobiography. At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, Chisholm received 152 delegates, the most received by any woman until Hilary Clinton in 2016.
Chisholm continued to serve in congress until 1983.
For a full schedule of Dakota County Historical Events, including their next Mendota After Hours with the topic: Life in an American Concentration Camp: The Japanese American Experience During WWII on Friday August 16, visit their website at https://www.dakotahistory.org/events