Mrs. Satan for President - Victoria Woodhull and the Fever Dream of Reconstruction America #978565

In 1872, while most American women could not vote, Victoria Woodhull ran for president. She had been a child clairvoyant, a teenage bride, a mother, a divorcee, a Wall Street broker, a radical newspaper publisher, a free love advocate, and one of the most scandalous women in America. Then, just before Election Day, she was arrested for obscenity after publishing allegations against the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher.

Mrs. Satan for President tells the story of Woodhull as more than a historic first. It follows her through the strange fever of Reconstruction America, where spiritualism, Wall Street speculation, women’s rights, sexual reform, tabloid journalism, censorship, and political reinvention collided. This was a country still wounded by civil war and suddenly full of people asking what freedom really meant.

Mireille D’aureville presents Woodhull not as a saint or a caricature, but as a dangerous American original. Brilliant, theatrical, wounded, ambitious, courageous, and often reckless, she understood that freedom required more than speeches and laws. It required money, publicity, sexual autonomy, the right to leave, and the power to survive scandal.