Peta Lindsey — 2012

I hope that Candidate Clinton will actively acknowledge the women who paved the way for her imminent, unprecedented accomplishments. The list starts all the way back in 1872, half a century before women could vote, when Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838 – 1927) secured the nomination as the candidate of the American Equal Rights party. Her running mate was none other than the famous freed slave, abolitionist, orator, and statesman, Frederick Douglass.

Victoria along with her sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, were the first women to open a brokerage firm on Wall Street (1870), and publish a women owned newspaper (1871). Victoria was cruelly punished for her audacity by being portrayed as Mrs. Satan in the press, ridiculed by all the major newspapers, and arrested on false charges to spend election day and night in the notorious Ludlow Street jail nicknamed ‘The Dungeons.’  Both sisters lived long lives manifesting a prodigious list of firsts for women accomplishments. They both advised Emmaline Pankhurst and helped position the British Suffragette movement she founded.

The following was Victoria’s political platform (surprisingly similar to todays issues):

• Full legal and social rights for women
• Equal pay for equal work
• Regulation of and splitting up monopolies
• End political corruption by purchasing influences
• Eight-hour workday with living wages
• Universal healthcare
• Establish (increase) direct taxation of the wealthiest
• Abolition of the death penalty
• Welfare and vocational training for the poor
• The opportunity to elect the first woman President

Belva Ann Lockwood (1830 – 1917) became the second woman to run for President in both 1884 and 1888, nominated by the National Equal Rights Party (the antecedent to Victoria’s Equal Rights Party).  After Columbia Law School turned her down, as they deemed the presence of a woman to be too distracting, Belva graduated National University Law School (known today as the George Washington University Law School among several other women. National University refused to award the women a diploma, so they could not take the District of Columbia bar exam to become practicing attorneys.

At age forty-three Belva Ann Lockwood petitioned the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, arguing that as President of the Union, he was the ex-officio President of the National University Law School. Weeks after her petition, she received her diploma and went on to pass the bar and practice law in spite of repeated prejudice from judges decrying her appearance in their courtrooms. She constantly faced the argument that God Himself had determined that women were not equal to men and never could be.

Supreme Court justices used her marriage as grounds for denying her the right to appear because as a married woman she was legally subordinate to her husband. Lockwood wrote anti-discrimination legislation to give women the same rights to practice law in Federal courts. She became the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court and a year later sponsored Samuel R. Lowrey as the fifth black attorney admitted to the Supreme Court Bar and the first black attorney to argue a case before the Court.

This is the full list of the twenty-nine women who achieved the nomination of their national parties in thirty-six Presidential elections:

Victoria Claflin Woodhull — 1872

Belva Ann Lockwood — 1884, 1888

Gracie Allen — 1940

Ellen W. Linea Jensen — 1952

Mary Kennery — 1952

Agnes Waters — 1952

Charlene Mitchell (1^st African American) — 1968

Linda Jenness — 1972

Evelyn Reed — 1972

Margaret Wright — 1976

Ellen McCormick — 1980

Maureen Smith — 1980

Deidre Griswold — 1980

Sonia Johnson — 1984

Gravielle Holmes — 1984

Lenora Fulani — 1988, 1992

Willa Kenoyer — 1998

Helen Halyard — 1992

Isabella Masters — 1992, 1996

Gloria La Riva — 1992, 2008

Monica Moorehead — 1996, 2000

Marsha Feinland — 1996

Mary Call Hollis — 1996

Diane Beall Templin — 1996, 2004. 2008

Cathy Gordon Brown — 2000

Cynthia McKinney — 2008

Jill Stein — 2012

Roseann Barr — 2012