During Victoria Woodhull’s brief public career, in the 1870s, she became a leader in the suffrage movement, the first woman to run for President, head of the American Spiritualism Association, an activist in labor circles, publisher of a successful newspaper, and a wildly popular lecturer. Toward the end of the decade, Woodhull outraged public opinion by publishing a tell-all article about the sexual misbehavior of the famous Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. In 1877, with legal and financial troubles mounting, Woodhull moved to England, where she married a wealthy Britisher and lived in relative retirement until her death in 1927.

Sandra Opdycke, Ph.D. is an historian. She has written books about the flu epidemic of 1918, the woman suffrage movement, the WPA of the 1930s, and Bellevue Hospital, as well as a biography of Jane Addams, an historical atlas of American women’s history, and several co-authored books and articles on social policy. She worked for a number of years at Hudson River Psychiatric Center, and later taught American History and Urban History at Bard, Vassar, and Marist Colleges. She serves as an occasional lecturer at the Center for Lifetime Studies in Poughkeepsie.