The first woman ran for president before women could vote

In 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president of the United States, nominated by the newly formed Equal Rights Party. It was a startling bid: American women would not win the vote nationwide until 1920, nearly half a century later. Woodhull could not legally cast a ballot, yet she campaigned to lead the country that denied her one.

A self-made stockbroker and newspaper publisher, she championed women’s suffrage and sweeping social reform. The party named the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate, though he never acknowledged the nomination or joined the campaign.

She sought the highest office in a republic where she herself was barred from the polls.

The candidacy collapsed under scandal. Days before the election, Woodhull was jailed on obscenity charges after her paper exposed an alleged affair involving the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher. She spent Election Day behind bars and received no electoral votes, but her run remains a landmark in the long fight for women’s political equality.