The First Woman to Run for President Was Too Young to Win. She Ran Anyway.

In 1872, nearly fifty years before American women won the right to vote nationwide, a woman named Victoria Woodhull ran for president of the United States.

Most people who know her name know only that one fact: first woman to run. It sits in the history books like a trivia answer, with an asterisk suggesting she was a bit of an oddity. Radicals: Echoes of the First Woman to Run for President, the new novel by Jen Knox, gives her back the whole life. It turns out to be one of the most extraordinary lives in American history.

She was born in 1838 in Homer, Ohio, one of ten children in a family that barely scraped by. Her mother was an early devotee of Spiritualism, the nineteenth-century movement built on the belief that the living could speak with the dead. Her father was a self-taught lawyer, prospector, and con man who saw what his daughter could do and put her to work. As a girl, Victoria told fortunes and held séances in a traveling medicine show alongside her younger sister, Tennessee. Knox's novel opens on her tenth birthday, when a traveling seer takes her hand and tells her she will one day lead thousands and change history. Her mother laughs. Her father does not.

What follows really happened, more or less, and that is the astonishing part. Victoria married as a teenager, to a doctor who turned out to be an addict, and found her way through California and the Midwest with two children and very little money. In 1868 she arrived in New York City with Tennessee. Within two years, with the backing of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, the sisters opened Woodhull, Claflin & Co., the first brokerage on Wall Street run by women. The newspapers called them the "Bewitching Brokers." They launched their own paper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which printed the first American edition of The Communist Manifesto. Victoria became the first woman to testify before a congressional committee, arguing that the Constitution already gave women the vote. And in 1872 the Equal Rights Party nominated her for president, with Frederick Douglass named as her running mate, though he never agreed to it. At thirty-four she was, technically, too young for the job. She ran anyway.

Then it all came crashing down. Victoria printed the story of an affair involving Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The issue sold out, and it destroyed her. The cartoonist Thomas Nast drew her as "Mrs. Satan." Days before the election she was arrested on federal obscenity charges for sending the paper through the mail, and she was behind bars when the country voted.

Knox tells all of this in Victoria's own voice, and her boldest choice is refusing to turn her into a saint. This Victoria is brilliant and fearless, but she is also ruthless, sometimes cold, and fully capable of becoming the very kind of wealthy power she once railed against. She notices it, too. That honesty is what makes the book so absorbing. You're never quite sure whether you're reading about a visionary or an opportunist, and the novel is wise enough to let you decide.

Running alongside Victoria's story is a second one, set in the same small Ohio town in 2026. Avery Jon has come home to Homer with a theater degree and no prospects. Her friends are leaving for bigger things. A data center is being built on the fields where she and her mother used to picnic. And her mother, Maggie, a former city councilwoman who once ran for mayor, is beginning to lose her memory. Then Avery stumbles across Victoria Woodhull in a misplaced library book, and starts to hear her. What begins as research becomes a play, and the line between research and haunting starts to blur.

The two stories speak to each other in surprising ways. One of the sharpest scenes has nothing to do with the nineteenth century at all: an agent offers to option Avery's story on the condition that she strip out the strange childhood, the spiritualism, the scandal, and the son, everything that makes Victoria complicated. Avery's answer is the heart of the book. So is its quiet question about who gets remembered, told through a daughter trying to recover one woman's lost story while her own mother's memories slip away.

Jen Knox is an educator and storyteller who teaches writing, leadership, and meditation. Her novel We Arrive Uninvited won the Steel Toe Books Award, and her writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post. Her research here runs deep but is worn lightly; the history never feels like a lecture.

Radicals is made for readers who love dual-timeline historical fiction and the stories of women history tried to forget, and it is built for book clubs. Hero or opportunist? You'll want someone to argue about it with.

Radicals: Echoes of the First Woman to Run for President by Jen Knox arrives November 17, 2026, in paperback. Pre-order your copy now.