The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President

From the acclaimed author of What the Ermine Saw and Behaving Badly, a portrait of Victoria Woodhull, a celebrated and maligned 19th-century businesswoman and activist, and a leader in the fight for women's suffrage and labor reforms.

In 1894, a remarkably self-possessed American woman, with no formal education to speak of, stood before a British court seeking damages for libel from the trustees of the British Museum. It was yet another stop along the unpredictable route that was Victoria Woodhull's life. Born dirt-poor in an obscure Ohio settlement, Woodhull was the daughter of an illiterate mother entranced by the fad of Mesmerism--a therapeutic pseudoscience--and a swindler father whose cons exploited his two daughters. It was through her mother, though, that Woodhull familiarized herself with the supernatural realm, earning a degree of fame as a clairvoyant and her first taste of financial success. Woodhull's life would continue to turn on its axis and then turn again.

Despite a deeply troubled first marriage at the age of fourteen, countless attempts by the press to discredit her, and a wrongful jail sentence, Woodhull thrived through sheer determination and the strength of her bond with her sister Tennie. She co-founded a successful stock brokerage on Wall Street, launched a newspaper, and became the first woman to run for president. Hers was a rags-to-riches story that saw her cross paths with Karl Marx, Henry Ward Beecher, and Frederick Douglass. In an era when women's rights were circumscribed, and the idea of leaving a marriage was taboo, she broke the rules to carve out a path of her own.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Collinsworth tells the story of a woman truly ahead of her time--a radical visionary who made defying mores a habit and brought to the fore societal and political issues still being addressed today. Neither a saint nor a villain, Woodhull emerges as an iconic, complex woman: an entrepreneur; lover of freedom; and a fiercely loyal family member whose political activism and suffragist legacy will cement her in history.

Author: Eden Collinsworth
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 09/02/2025
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.03lbs
Size: 9.48h x 5.43w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780385549578


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2025 pg. 8
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2025
Publishers Weekly 07/21/2025
Booklist 08/01/2025
BookPage 09/01/2025

About the Author
EDEN COLLINSWORTH is a writer, essayist, novelist, former media executive, and business consultant. At twenty-eight, she was appointed president and publisher of Arbor House. She left the book business in 1990 to launch the Los Angeles-based lifestyle magazine, BUZZ. In the third decade of her career, she was appointed vice president and director of Cross Media Business Development at the Hearst Corporation. In 2008, Collinsworth became vice president, chief operating officer, and chief-of-staff of The EastWest Institute, an international think tank, and in 2011, she launched Collinsworth & Associates, a Beijing-based consulting company in intercultural communication. She is the author of a novel, It Might Have Been What He Said; of a memoir, I Stand Corrected: How Teaching Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson; and of Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business, What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci's Most Mysterious Portrait, and The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President.