On April 2, 1870, two years before the 1872 U.S. presidential election, a letter to the editor of the New York Herald appeared in its pages, announcing a campaign for the presidency against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant. The letter was signed by Victoria Woodhull.

Woodhull, who had been born poor in an Ohio frontier settlement, embodied the ethos of America, a try-anything country with radical individualism at its heart.  Despite a childhood mired in poverty and dictated by physically abusive parents, she went on to co-found a successful brokerage firm on Wall Street in 1870, making a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange, profits which she later used to launch a newspaper. The paper’s progressive contributors wrote essays and articles proposing changes that would gain traction decades later, such as the abolition of the death penalty and welfare for the poor. But the most improbable aspect among an abundance of improbabilities in Woodhull’s life was this single fact: she was a woman.

Trapped in a system that oppressed her gender in every conceivable way, Woodhull forged her success with novelty, enterprise, courage, and determination in what became a rags-to-riches story that intersected predominantly with men, among whom were Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Frederick Douglass, and the Prince of Wales.  In a time when political ambitions were believed to be only a male prerogative, she faced down restrictions that almost always crushed those had by women.  With a combination of pragmatism, imagination, and expert guile, she engineered an unprecedented meeting in front of a congressional committee to appeal to them directly on behalf of a woman’s........

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