In 1872, half a century before American women could vote, Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927) ran for President, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.

Papers declared her candidacy “a brazen imposture, to be extinguished by laughter rather than by law.”

People — working-class people, people of color, people relegated to the margins of their time and place — clamored to hear her speak, rose up in standing ovation by the thousands, cried and cheered.

Born in Ohio to an illiterate mother and an alcoholic father who made a living by selling $1 bottles of opiate-laden “Life Elixir,” Victoria was named for the English Queen coronated the year she entered the world as the seventh of ten children, four of whom would not survive childhood. At eleven, when her father’s schemes ran the family into bankruptcy, she was forced to leave school after only three years of education. At fourteen, having been belted and starved all her childhood, she fled her father’s brutality in a desperate marriage to her 28-year-old physician, only to discover that he too was an alcoholic and a philanderer. Still in her teens, she bore two children — a son with developmental disabilities and a daughter whose delivery her husband so mishandled that both mother and baby almost bled to death.

Like Hildegard of Bingen, like Joan of Arc, like many people of uncommon strength and vision who have had to survive uncommon trials of circumstances, Victoria came to believe — had to believe — that she was guided and protected by the spirits. When her husband’s alcoholism became so disabling that it fell on her to support the family, she began working as a spiritual healer. As she traveled across America, she began to see the scale and depth of the suffering from which most people chose to avert their eyes — the pain of the enslaved, the struggle of the working class, the domestic enslavement of women’s minds and bodies, the syphoning of children’s souls by an education system that excluded most.

Eventually, Victoria managed to divorce her husband — something so scandalous in her era that it would later lead tabloids to headline her “The Prostitute Who Ran for President.” She continued to work as a healer, remarried, and used her income to open a Wall Street brokerage firm with her sister. At thirty-two, Victoria Woodhull became America’s first female stock broker.

She began publishing a weekly paper to advance the ideals of the suffrage and antislavery movements. But half a century after Mary Shelley insisted that “it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,” Woodhull saw that words alone were not enough to write the history of the future.

She decided to run for President.

Central to her campaign were ideas an epoch ahead of their time. In a century when only four women obtained a divorce in all of England, she insisted that in America love should be “unbiased by any enacted law or standard of public opinion,” that neither social norms nor government regulation should tamper with the freedom to marry and to divorce. In an age when maternity was considered the fulfillment of a woman’s destiny, she declared it another form of slavery and insisted that women must never “give the control of their maternal functions over to anybody,” much less the government. “It is a fearful responsibility with which women are entrusted by nature,” she wrote in what stands as a founding credo of reproductive rights, “and the very last thing that they should be compelled to do is to perform the office of that responsibility against their will, under improper conditions or by disgusting means.”

Months before the election, Woodhull published a 39-page manifesto reclaiming the real meaning of equality, justice, and freedom. On its pages, she cautioned that the young dream of democracy was already slipping into a trance of authoritarianism — a rule of law seemingly chosen by the people, but in fact the product of coercive control and manipulation by a new breed of money-men who capitalize on human vulnerability and fear. True freedom, she argued, has never existed for individuals — in all systems of government thus far, “grades and castes of people have built themselves, the stronger upon the weaker, and the people as individuals have never appeared upon the surface.”

She writes:

There has never been such a thing as freedom for the people. It has always been concession by the government. There has never been an equality for the people. It has always been the stronger, in some sense, preying upon the weaker; and the people have never had justice. When there is authority, whether it be of law, of custom, or of individuals, neither of these can exist except in name. Neither do these principles apply to the people in their collective capacity but when the people’s time shall come they will belong to every individual separately.

This revolution would come about by a “double process,” yet unfinished — “the consolidation of nations into races, and the redistribution of power to the people.” She prophesies:

These two processes will continue until both are complete — until all nations are merged into races, and all races into one government; and until the power is completely and equally returned to all the people, who will no longer be denominated as belonging to this or that country or government, but as citizens of the world — as members of a common humanity.

America, she insists, is uniquely poised for the completion of this process. In it are the kindling and the spark of “the impending revolution” to benefit all of humanity:

As in this country the future race of the world is being developed, so also will the foundation of the future government be developed, which shall become universal… And that revolution will be the final and the ultimate contest between justice and authority, in which the latter will be crushed, never again to raise its despotic head among and to divide the members of a common humanity.

Such a triumph of justice, she argues, is only possible when true equality is achieved — another notion suctioned of meaning by misuse and overuse, needful of redefinition:

Equality for the people means… that no personal merit or demerit can interfere between individuals, so that one may, by arbitration or laws, be placed unequally with another. It means that every individual is entitled to all the natural wealth that he or she requires to minister to the various wants of the body… It also means that every person is entitled to equal opportunity for intellectual acquirements, recreation and rest, since the first is necessary to make the performance of the individual’s share of duty possible; while the second and third are the natural requirements of the body, independent of the individuality of the person, and which was not self-created but inherited… And yet it should be the duty of government, since it is a fundamental portion of its theory, to maintain equality among the people; otherwise the word is but a mere catch, without the slightest signification in fact.

Having thus defined freedom and equality, she argues that the deepest meaning of justice is “to maintain equal conditions among free individuals.” A century and a half before America elected, twice, a horseman of capitalism as President, Woodhull indicts the market forces already pulsating beneath the young nation as the great enemy of freedom — a way of replacing one system of exploitation and enslavement with another, “still more insidious in its character, because more plausible.” With an eye to the income inequality such a system invariably creates, she writes:

If penury and want exist, accompanied by suffering and privation, under the rule of a monarch, he may justly be held responsible. But when it exists under the reign of freedom, there is no responsibility anywhere, unless it may be said to be in the people themselves, which is equivalent to saying responsibility without application.

Market capitalists, she argues, can only serve as ruling monarchs of this experiment in democracy by means of extreme manipulation of the people — a theater of freedom, in which we are cast as actors, only to find ourselves commodities. She indicts the railroads — the Big Tech of her day, the first great monopoly and the original social media — as a “system of huckstery” that makes magnates of middlemen. (What would Victoria Woodhull have made of the sovereignty we have willingly ceded to the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world.) More than a century before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Woodhull takes a stance of extraordinary courage, even more countercultural today:

I would rather be the unwilling subject of an absolute monarch than the willing slave of my own ignorance, of which advantage is taken by those who spend their time in endeavoring to prove to me that I am free and in singing the glories of my condition, to hoodwink my reason and to blind my perception… That system of government by which it is possible for a class of people to practice upon my credulity, and, under false pretenses, first entice me to acquiesce in laws by which immense corporations and monopolies are established, and then to induce me to submit to their extortions because they exist according to law, pursuing none but lawful means, is an infernal despotism, compared to which the Russian Czar is a thousand times to be preferred.

At the heart of her far-seeing manifesto is the insistence that a truly just system of government can take root in the soul of a people, in the souls of all people, only when we cease prioritizing wealth over wisdom; only then may humanity “join in a common effort for the great political revolution, after the accomplishment of which the nations shall have cause to learn war no more.” She writes:

The impending revolution, then, will be the strife for the mastery between the authority, despotism, inequalities and injustices of the present, and freedom, equality and justice in their broad and perfect sense, based on the proposition that humanity is one, having a common origin, common interests and purposes, and inheriting a common destiny.

But this, she auguries, will not be a smooth transition from one world order to another. It will not come to pass without the requisite upheaval of truly transitional times:

No person who will take the trouble to carefully observe the conditions of the various departments of society can fail to discern the terrible earthquakes just ready to burst out upon every side, and which are only now restrained by the thick incrustations with which customs, prejudices and authorities have incased humanity. Indeed, the whole surface of humanity is surging like the billows of the stormy ocean, and it only escapes general and destructive rupture because its composition, like the consciences of its constituent members, is so elastic. But, anon, the restrained furies will overcome the temper of their fastenings, and, rending them asunder, will sweep over the people, submerging them or cleansing them of their gathered debris, as they shall have located themselves, with regard to its coming.

Days before the election, Woodhull was arrested on obscenity charges — her paper had published an exposé of the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher’s affairs with too much detail for Victorian propriety standards. She was acquitted, but she was also disillusioned — the dream of a truly just America, she came to see, was premature, haunted by the nightmare of businessmen puppeteering politics and commodifying the commons. She eventually moved to England, where she continued lecturing on suffrage, became involved in education reform, helped establish a women’s aviation league, and founded a humanitarian magazine with her daughter Zula.

She never stood a chance, of course, in her time and place. But she opened the aperture of possibility, for a more possible future is only ever made by taking on what the present deems impossible.