Victoria Woodhull:: Victoria was the first woman to run for President in 1872. Starting out a spiritual healer, Victoria became a leader in the suffrage movement, the head of the American Spiritualism Association, an activist in labor circles, publisher of a successful newspaper, and a wildly popular lecturer. An activist for women's rights and labor reforms, Victoria was an advocate of "free love,” by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference.

Victoria said: “I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”

Victoria further argued: “When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold.”

Victoria and her sister Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin became the first women to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street, making a fortune. Cornelius Vanderbilt was a great admirer of Victoria's skills as a medium and became a avid supporter.

Toward the end of the decade, Victoria and Tenniel outraged public opinion by publishing a tell-all article about the sexual misbehavior of the famous Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Victoria married a wealthy British citizen and spent the rest of her years in England.