VICTORIA THE FIRST -- The true story of Victoria Woodhull, who rose from being an itinerant fortune teller and spirtual medium to become the first female stockbroker on Wall Street, the first woman to address Congress and the first woman to run for President (1870-72).

SYNOPSIS:

Victoria Claflin Woodhull was America’s Unsaintly Joan of Arc.

Victoria was the first woman to breech the all-male bastion of Wall Street, opening her own brokerage house and making a fortune while the men panicked. She was the first woman to address Congress, making an argument that should have shortened the Suffrage Movement by half a century. And she was the first woman to run for President, decades before women could even vote.

In her youth she was an itinerant frontier clairvoyant and spiritual medium. At the age of 14, she was sold off by her grifter father into a marriage to a drunkard. But Victoria deeply believed she was destined to be a leader, and she rose to become a transformative orator, a progressive newspaper publisher, a fearless crusader against moral hypocrisy, and a suffragist who nearly succeeded where the more sedate women had failed. She made allies of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her enemies included Susan B. Anthony, the eminent preacher Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and, most notably, his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe.

While she was conquering New York, the press hailed her as “The Bewitching Broker”. After she dared to reach for power, though, they reviled her as “Mrs. Satan.”

The story begins in 1838, as the 10-year-old Victoria lights the fire that burns down the Claflin family mill, as part of her father Buck’s insurance scam. The Claflins get thrown out of town. Five years and two children after her first marriage, Victoria leaves her husband and rejoins her family’s traveling scam show. She forms a dynamic union with Col. James Blood, a leader of the spiritualist movement of the time.

At that time, the nation was up for grabs and Victoria refused to let her gender limit her reach. Victoria and her younger sister Tennie charm Vanderbilt, an avowed Spiritualist and the richest man in the world. Vanderbilt sets up the sisters in their own brokerage house, though Tennie rebuffs his marriage proposal. Victoria makes a huge score in the turmoil of the Black Friday Panic of 1869. The sisters become celebrities before the term was even used.

Victoria gains the attention of New York’s progressive and radical elite, who make political connections that lead to her historical appearance before Congress. Her declaration of her Presidential candidacy makes her a heroine to some leaders of the Women’s Suffrage Movement – and a threat to a powerful few.

Her enemies are handed their weapon for a vicious counterattack, when an internal family squabble leads to a public airing of Victoria’s past. Friends, fame and fortune melt away. Victoria tries to make an advocate of Beecher, then the nation’s pre-eminent cleric; but he is too afraid to stand with her, even though he agrees with much of what she professes. Victoria and Blood are cast out of their home. Victoria plays her last trump card and publishes the story of Beecher’s dalliances with a married woman in his congregation. His sister, the famous author Harriet Beecher Stowe, then conspires with federal censor Anthony Comstock to have Victoria, Blood and Tennie arrested and jailed.

The denouement comes when Victoria, knowing she will be arrested again, emerges from disguise at a packed lecture hall. Her speech, billed “The Naked Truth”, transfixes the crowd and Victoria turns defeat into a triumph.

In the epilogue, Victoria and Tennie ultimately use hush money from the Vanderbilt heirs to leave for England . . . another dangerous woman silenced.

Her story is as relevant as today’s front page, with the very real prospect of a female presidential nominee, or nominees, in the next presidential election cycle.

Victoria was a woman too far ahead of her time.

Contact: Bill Osinski, 404-213-8808, billosinski@comcast.net