NOTES

Prologue

1. “Iron My Shirt,” New York Times, January 7, 2008, available at http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/iron-my-shirt/; “Sexist Hecklers Interrupt Hillary: ‘Iron My Shirt!’” Huffington Post, March 28, 2008, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/07/sexist-hecklers-interrupt_n_80361.html; “Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales,” New York Times, March 16, 2008, WK 1; “Hillary’s Back,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, January 11, 2008, B7.
2. “A Woman President?” Presidential Gender Watch 2016, Center for Women and American Politics, available at http://presidentialgenderwatch.org/polls/a-woman-president/. There is a wide literature, across an array of fields, addressing women and the American presidency as well as women and electoral politics more broadly. Among the key studies are Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Erika Falk, Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Jo Freeman, We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis, Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling (New York: Scribner, 2000); Nichola D. Gutgold, Paving the Way for Madam President (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006); Anne E. Kornblut, Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: What It Will Take for a Woman to Win (New York: Broadway, 2011); Lori Cox Han and Caroline Heldman, Rethinking Madam President: Are We Ready for a Woman in the White House? (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007); Marianne Schnall, What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2013); Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson, Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2013); Janet M. Martin, The Presidency and Women: Promise, Performance, and Illusion (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2003); Deborah Jordan Brooks, He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox, It Still Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Kristin A. Goss, The Paradox of Gender Equality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Sue Thomas and Clyde Wilcox, Women and Elective Office: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
3. Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I: Or Harry Henderson’s History (New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1872), pp. 262–263. For an in-depth assessment of the gender dynamics of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 run see Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women (New York: Free Press, 2010).
4. James T. Havel, U.S. Presidential Candidates and the Elections: A Biographical and Historical Guide, vol. 1, The Candidates, and vol. 2, The Elections, 1789–1992 (New York: Macmillan, 1996). I am indebted to Nadia Fajood for her analysis of this data.

Victoria Woodhull

1. “The Correspondence between the Victoria League and Victoria C. Woodhull,” in Madeleine B. Stern, ed., The Victoria Woodhull Reader (Weston, Ma.: M & S Press, 1974), no page numbers. According to Woodhull biographer Lois Beachy Underhill, Woodhull herself was the driving force in organizing the Victoria League and the Equal Rights Party for which she served as nominee. See Lois Beachy Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull (Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Bridge Works Publishing Co., 1995), pp. 163–167. On nineteenth-century political nomination practices, see Gil Troy, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 17–18 and Chapters 4 and 5.
2. “Correspondence between the Victoria League and Victoria C. Woodhull”; Victoria C. Woodhull, Letter to the Editor, “The Coming Woman,” New York Herald, April 2, 1870, p. 8; Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1977), Chapter 1; Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Chapter 5 esp.; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 255–256; Ellen C. DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” Journal of American History, vol. 74, no. 3 (December 1987), pp. 844–847.
3. On the fate of Reconstruction, see Foner, Reconstruction; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York: Vintage, 1965); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Masur, An Example for all the Land; Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fights for Equal Rights in Post–Civil War America (New York: Holt, 2007).
4. Woodhull has been the subject of several recent biographies including Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President; Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Harper Collins, 1999); Mary Gabriel, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1998); Myra MacPherson, Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age (New York: Twelve, 2014); as well as a muckraking account published in 1929 by Emanie Sachs entitled The Terrible Siren: Victoria Woodhull, 1838–1927 (New York: Harper Bros., 1928). See also Amanda Frisken’s excellent study of Woodhull and the culture of late nineteenth-century America: Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President does develop her presidential run at length. Woodhull’s life presents tremendous difficulties of reconstruction for the historian. For penetrating discussions of the challenges see Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution, pp. 9–15; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “A Victoria Woodhull for the 1990s,” Reviews in American History, vol. 27, no. 1 (March 1999), pp. 87–97.
5. On the frivolous nature of her presidential run, see, for example, Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 147; Aileen S. Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 114; Richard Brookhiser, “The Happy Medium,” New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1998, p. 11.
6. Theodore Tilton, Victoria C. Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch (New York: The Golden Age, 1871), pp. 3–6; Underhill, Woman Who Ran for President, pp. 11–19; Goldsmith, Other Powers, pp. 13–16, 18–19, 25–27.
7. Tilton, Victoria C. Woodhull, pp. 3–6, 8–12; Underhill, Woman Who Ran for President, 15–19; Goldsmith, Other Powers, Chapters 1 and 2. Woodhull’s description of her visit by angels is quoted from Goldsmith, Other Powers, p. 25.
8. Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President, pp. 156–157; Goldsmith, Other Powers, pp. 48–49; Morton Keller, Affairs of State, p. 249; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomi...