On this week’s episode of THINK BACK, I speak with author Eden Collinsworth about her new book The Improbable Victoria Woodhull, a lively and surprising biography of the first woman to run for president. Woodhull’s 1872 campaign may have been a long shot, but it set off a national sensation—especially when she accused famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher of adultery, sparking one of the Gilded Age’s biggest scandals and leading to her own imprisonment and exile.
We explore what made Woodhull such a fascinating and contradictory figure: a radical reformer with a checkered past, a champion of women’s rights and free love who moved in elite social circles, and a political visionary who might feel right at home in today’s media-saturated, personality-driven politics. Even if Woodhull had no chance of winning in the 19th century, she might have a pretty good one in the 21st.
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