Brie Larson to Star as ‘Victoria Woodhull,’ America’s First Female Presidential Candidate
Brie Larson is currently scheduled to play two female superstars in the near future: the first is actual superhero Captain Marvel, in Marvel’s first-ever female-led superhero movie, and the second, announced today, is Victoria Woodhull, the first-ever female candidate for U.S. President and your new favorite historical person.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Larson has signed on to Amazon’s Victoria Woodhull, a biopic about the first woman to be nominated for president in 1872. Woodhull’s legacy is, in a word, nuts. She first worked as a traveling magnetic healer before doubling down and joining the 1870s spiritualist movement — where she predicted her marriage to her second husband, Man With Best Name Ever Colonel James Blood, even though both were married to other people at the time. Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin were the first women to open a brokerage firm on Wall Street and among the first women to found a newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.
During her presidential run, she was a candidate for the Equal Rights Party, a political group that supported women’s suffrage. It’s actually up for debate whether or not her candidacy was legally viable, since she was 34 when she ran, and the minimum age for a candidate was 35. But the papers covered her run just as much as all the other candidates, if not more, so take that, pedants!
A few days before the election, Woodhull and her sister and husband were arrested on obscenity charges for publishing an account in her newspaper of the alleged adulterous affair between Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton. Woodhull published the account to highlight the double-standard between what was considered proper for men and women, and to combat those who vilified her support for the free love movement. Ulysses S. Grant ended up being reelected in a landslide that year.
So, there you have it. The first lady candidate for Commander-in-Chief who supported marriage rights, women’s rights, magnet therapy, education reform, and the press. (Unfortunately, she also supported the eugenics movement. Nobody’s perfect.) Brie Larson taking on this character is going to be wild. Can’t wait.
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