Victoria Woodhull started life being paraded around as a child psychic by her conman father and marrying an alcoholic twice her age, but through a lot of work, luck, and audacity, she lived many lives as a stockbroker, a newspaper editor, a suffragette, the first female presidential candidate, and much more.
Victoria Woodhull is one of those interesting American characters that’s been popping up in books I’ve read set in the Gilded Age for several years. She was eccentric and scrappy, but in many ways she was also ahead of her time, with many of the positions and policies she advocated eventually becoming mainstream. However, I had never read any book which focused on her, so I was excited for this deep dive.
Woodhull is certainly worth a full biography of her own – when all her life is put all together it makes for fascinating reading, doubly so because of all the rises and falls in her fortune. I especially appreciated how Collinsworth got deeper into Woodhull’s contributions to the suffragist cause – while I’d always thought of Woodhull’s presidential run as a gimmick, Collinsworth hammers home how much attention Woodhull brought to the cause, even if her later actions got her distanced from the official narrative.
However, I thought the execution fell rather flat. The author tries to include the broader historical context surrounding Woodhull’s life, but it felt more like going on tangents, padding a slim volume. We meet Woodhull’s family, friends, lovers, and rivals, but in the end, I did not feel like I got a proper sense of who she was and what drove her, and that is always a letdown in a biography.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
