Victoria Woodhull: première candidate à la présidence américaine (1872)

Non, Hillary Clinton n'est pas la première femme à se lancer dans la course à la présidence. Si certain(e)s se souvienent des candidatures à la vice-présidence de Geraldine Ferraro (Parti démocrate, 1984) et Sarah Palin (Parti républicain, 2008), la première à se lancer le fit à une période où elle ne pouvait même pas voter et elle fut incarcérée le jour de l'élection! Une histoire étonnante et fascinante!

 "Woodhull ran under the banner of the Equal Rights Party—formerly the People’s Party—which supported equal rights for women and women’s suffrage. The party nominated her in May 1872 in New York City to run uphill against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant and Democrat Horace Greeley and selected as her running mate Frederick Douglass, former escaped slave-turned-abolitionist writer and speaker. On paper, it was an impressive pick, but not really: Douglass never appeared at the party’s nominating convention, never agreed to run with Woodhull, never participated in the campaign and actually gave stump speeches for Grant.

But that’s just one more of many caveats about Woodhull, who, throughout her long life—she died in England in 1927 at age 88—never much cared for rules or regulations of a game she considered egregiously rigged against women. On inauguration day, she would have been just 34 years old. Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution requires that the president be 35 on the day “he” takes office. In the end, though, her youth was the most moot of moot points, because Victoria received zero electoral votes. (There’s no record of how many popular votes she received; though we do know that 12 years later, another woman running for president under the banner of the same Equal Rights Party racked up 4,149 votes in six states.)

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/victoria-woodhull-first-woman-presidential-candidate-116828.html?hp=m1#.VSluZ_mG81I