Woodhull & Clafflin's Weekly. Vol. 2, No. 26. Whole No. 52.
New York: May 13, 1871. 16pp., printed in three columns, on folio newsprint. Some dust soiling, chipping, and wrinkling to edges of outer leaves, especially along spine, costing a handful of letters and words on the front page, adhesive remnant in contents section costing or obscuring a few words, top of spine on last few leaves chipped just touching a few words. Internally quite clean. Good condition overall. Item #12986
A rare, early, and impactful issue of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, the newspaper owned and edited by the most famous American suffragist siblings of the 19th century, Victoria Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin. This issue is particularly interesting for an endorsement printed across the top of the second and third columns on the front page, reading: "The Cosmo-Political Party. Nomination for President of the U.S., In 1872. VICTORIA C. WOODHULL. Subject to Ratification by the National Convention." Woodhull's nomination would indeed be ratified by the Cosmo-Political Party, after being renamed the Equal Rights Party, about a year after the present issue was published, on May 10, 1872, signaling a singular moment in American politics. Though she was technically too young to assume the office had she won, Woodhull became the first woman ever nominated for President of the United States. Interestingly, she chose as her running mate the esteemed Frederick Douglass, but he refused to acknowledge or participate in the campaign.
Still, Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927) was a force of nature in 19th-century American politics, journalism, finance, and society. In addition to her landmark nomination for the White House, Woodhull was the first woman to testify in front of a Congressional committee (arguing that the 14th and 15th Amendments already entitled women to vote) and the first woman to head a Wall Street brokerage firm (after befriending and then learning investing from the feet of Cornelius Vanderbilt). The newspaper she owned and operated with her sister was one of her most important contributions to American life. In it, they printed articles in favor of women's suffrage, spiritualism, communism (the weekly published the first English-language edition of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto), free love, equal rights, and other important progressive issues. Though Woodhull's popularity would decline in the late-1870s due to the radical nature of her views and an obscenity charge stemming from publication of a story about an affair between Henry Ward Beecher and one of his congregants, she continued to work in support of women's suffrage and publish periodicals, even after relocating to England. She lived out her elderly years in the English countryside, where she died in 1927.
This front page presidential endorsement appears on a handful of issues of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly from March through May 1871, but this seems to have ceased in the summer of 1871, when the newspaper changed to a four-column format. The present issue also includes articles on motherhood, suffrage, "The Marriage Question," "Moral Journalism," the Cosmo-Political Party itself, and more.
Price: $1,250