Born in 1838 in Homer, Ohio, Victoria Claflin Woodhull was an outspoken and controversial figure whose legacy as a trailblazer for women's rights, gender equality, and sexual freedom endures to this day. Not only was she a suffragist and women's rights advocate, but she also was the first woman to run for President of the United States — at a time when women still didn't have the right to vote. What's more, she and her sister, Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin, became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street and founded a newspaper together. Have you heard of this remarkable, successful and open-minded American women who was way ahead of her time?

Despite a tumultuous childhood and a first marriage at age 15 (to Canning Woodhull, a 28-year-old doctor with whom she had two children), Woodhull went on to carve her path in history by embracing unconventional beliefs, including spiritualism and free love, while advocating for the rights of women, laborers, and the poor. In 1871, Woodhull gave a speech at New York City's Steinway Hall called "The Truth Shall Set You Free." In it, she said, "I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere." Do you think her speech "The Truth Shall Set You Free" given 154 years ago is still very relevant today in many aspects?

Thanks to valuable stock tips from Vanderbilt, Woodhull and her sister were able to amass more than $700,000 (around $16 million today), which they used to start their brokerage firm, Woodhull, Claflin, and Company, in 1870. As the first financial firm on Wall Street owned and operated by women, the company was a shocking novelty, and the press took to calling the sisters the "Bewitching Brokers" and "Queens of Finance." The sisters went on to found a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, which gave Woodhull another platform to support her causes of free love, political reform, and women's rights. Do you appreciate that she used her wealth to support all the good causes that she believed in?

Woodhull's run for President in 1872, 50 years before women gained the right to vote, may have seemed like a publicity stunt to many. Lacking the financing to mount a proper campaign, she forged ahead anyway, running on the Equal Rights Party ticket. She campaigned on a platform of women's suffrage, an eight-hour workday, welfare for the poor, the nationalization of railroads, the regulation of monopolies, and other reforms. Based on her campaign's platform, would you vote for her to be POTUS if she was a presidential candidate today?