Women are free to own and to control property, separate and apart from males, and they are held responsible in their own proper persons, in every particular, as well as men, in and out of court.
Victoria C. Woodhull
The Public Record
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.
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Women have the same inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that men have.
Why have they not this right politically, as well as men?
Women constitute a majority of the people of this country—they hold vast portions of the nation’s wealth and pay a proportionate share of the taxes.
Men trust women in the market, in the shop, on the highway and the railroad, and in all other public places and assemblies, but when they propose to carry a slip of paper with a name upon it to the polls, they fear them.
Nevertheless, as citizens women have the right to vote; they are part and parcel of that great element in which the sovereign power of the land had birth: and it is by usurpation only that men debar them from their right to vote.
The American nation, in its march onward and upward, cannot publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half its citizens by narrow statutes.
The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression of that will by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation or sex, is the only means by which that will…
A different construction would destroy a vested right in a portion of the citizens, and this no legislature has a right to do without compensation, and nothing can compensate a citizen for the loss of his or her suffrage—its value is equal…
The issue upon the question of female suffrage being thus definitely and clearly set forth, and its rights inalienably vested in woman, a brighter future dawns upon the country.
The contrast may be best and most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the family; of a modern society, the individual.
Charity, with its long cloak of justice escaped, has long enough covered a multitude of sins.