Victoria Woodhull Quotes
I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint.
Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
This was a new idea for most Americans at the time. A century later, there were still a few politicians who did not accept this idea.
The South has always been backward compared to the rest of the nation. By the 21st century the gap had gotten narrower. However, one of the reasons that Mrs. Roosevelt was unpopular with the Southern whites was not only that she was an outspoken critic of segregation and associated with Negroes, but she would publically point out the areas of Southern backwardness. However, the upper and middle class Southerners resented anyone—especially “outsiders” publicly exposing Southern weakness.
This is a very interesting historical quotation. The House and the Senate closed the galleries because America was in the midst of the most fatal outbreak of disease in its history. It was the Flu, but that year it was a particularly virulent strain—the first time the world had seen the H1N1 strain. There was no vaccine then and about 100 million people died worldwide. In America more than ½ million people died. It was the worst Pandemic in history—it killed more people than the Black Plague even. The medical authorities did realize that the flu was spread from person to person but other than keep people from congregating in groups as in the Congressional galleries, there was little they knew about what to do.
See {642413} for the reaction of one of the major local newspapers.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for President of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35 (Woodhull's 35th birthday was in September 1873, seven months after the March inauguration). However, election coverage by contemporary newspapers does not suggest age was a significant issue; this may, however, be due to the fact that few took the candidacy seriously.
