AMANDA FRISKEN: My name is Amanda Frisken, and I wrote the book "Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution." Woodhull came from an unusual family, the Claflins. She grew up in a small town in Ohio, but they moved a lot, kind of traveling salesman, catch-as-catch-can. And at the age of 14, Woodhull was married off by her parents to a man who proved to be an alcoholic. And she had a pretty hard life with him. She was traveling around when she said she had a revelation to go out there and declare her right to be a woman in public and to be a powerful woman. And so she packed up and came to New York.
CLAFLIN: This was an era where a woman could not vote, could not enter a restaurant, a store, an establishment of any kind unless she was escorted by a man. It was controversial for women to do anything, but she had the foresight not to accept the way society was.
FRISKEN: She started a radical newspaper. She opened the first woman stock brokerage firm. But the thing that gave her national fame was when she sent a card to the New York Herald declaring her candidacy for the presidency.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Letter to the New York Herald, April 2, 1871 - I claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised woman of the country and announce myself as a candidate for the presidency.
FRISKEN: For a woman at that moment to be running for president when most women in the country couldn't even cast a ballot made this a pretty extreme act.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) If the men should see the women going to the polls...
FRISKEN: In the 19th century, lots of women were making claims about women's rights. You might think that women suffragists turned to Woodhull, and some of them did. But the suffragists in the 1870s tended to be middle-class to upper-middle-class women, more conventional, more serious. Woodhull was really an outsider - not well-educated, rather uncouth. And some of them just thought she was insane.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Though all the men should frown on us when going to the polls.
FRISKEN: The thing that really made Woodhull notorious was when she gave a speech in New York City on November 20, 1871, entitled "The Principles Of Social Freedom." In that speech, she claimed marriage was a form of tyranny for women.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) It is high time that your sisters and daughters should no longer be led to the altar like sheep to the shambles. The sexual relation must be rescued from this insidious form of slavery. I protest...
CLAFLIN: She was speaking, and a woman yelled out and said, do you believe in free love? And she said, yes, I believe in free love.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to change that love every day if I please. And neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.
FRISKEN: She was really just making a rhetorical point in the middle of a much more complicated speech. But that's the one that everyone put in the paper. It became known as her free love speech. It gave her instant national fame but not necessarily the kind that she had hoped for.