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Women of History

• Melisende of Jerusalem

• Joan of Arc

• Isabella of Spain

• Elizabeth I

• Grace O'Malley

• Hannah Emerson Dustin

• Catherine the Great

• Ada Byron Lovelace

• Victoria Woodhull

• Emmeline Pankhurst

• Countess Markievicz

• Jane Digby 

• Indira Ghandi

• Sirimavo Bandaranaike

• Meena

• Fanny Pearson

• Lilian Ngoyi

  VICTORIA WOODHULL   Born 1838

She couldn't vote for herself -- women didn't have that right -- and at 34, she was a year too young to serve. Nevertheless, historians note that Victoria Claflin Woodhull was the first female to run for president in the U.S., winning the nod in 1872 from the Equal Rights Party (Frederick Douglass ran for VP). That was just one of the firsts achieved by this unconventional suffragist and free-love crusader, who started out as a psychic in Ohio, opened her own New York bank and stockbrokerage with the help of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and co-founded a radical newspaper. All her careers collapsed, though, after the paper printed charges that the celebrated minister Henry Ward Beecher had committed adultery.