If you have a heart, if you have a soul, Karen Hicks’ The Coming Woman will make you fall in love with Victoria Woodhull. -Kinky Friedman, author and Governor of the Heart of Texas What kind of confidence would it take for a woman to buck the old boy’s club of politics in 1872? More than 140 years pre-Hillary, there was Victoria Woodhull. This book takes you back with a breathtaking, present-tense bird’s eye view into a time when women’s liberation was primarily confined to one woman’s very capable, independent mind. I couldn’t put it down. —Ruth Buzzi, Golden Globe Award winner and Television Hall of Fame inductee
Sadly, too many Americans have never heard of Victoria Woodhull, let alone learned of her story: her revolutionary campaign for the presidency at a time when women weren’t even allowed to vote, her support for worker’s rights, or her feminist commitment to equality, a century before the official battle over the Equal Rights Amendment. But in The Coming Woman, Karen Hicks brings Woodhull’s efforts to life, and reminds us that some of our nation’s greatest figures aren’t always featured in the history books. It is a riveting account of an amazing woman and her struggle for justice and human dignity, told in an engaging and eminently readable style. -Tim Wise, author, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
The Coming Woman is a novel based on the life of feminist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President, 50 years before women could even vote!
Running for President wasn’t Victoria’s only first as a woman. She was also the first to own a successful Wall Street firm, the first to publish a successful national newspaper, and the first to head the two-million-member Spiritualist Association. She was the first woman to enter the Senate Judiciary Committee chambers to petition for woman’s suffrage, her argument changing the entire focus of the suffragist movement by pointing out that the 14th and 15th Amendments already gave women the vote.
In her campaign for the Presidency, Victoria Woodhull boldly addressed many of the issues we still face today: equal pay for equal work; freedom in love; corporate greed and political corruption fueled by powerful lobbyists; and the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor, to name only a few. Her outspoken and common-sense ideas may shed a new perspective on the parallel conundrums of today’s world.
This bold, beautiful, and sexually progressive woman dared to take on society and religion. To make an example of the hypocrisy in what Mark Twain dubbed The Gilded Age, she exposed the extramarital affairs of the most popular religious figure of the day (Henry Ward Beecher). This led to her persecution and imprisonment and the longest, most infamous trial of the 19th century. But it did not stop her fight for equality.
Victoria’s epic story, set in the late 1800s, comes to life in a modern, fictional style, while staying true to the actual words and views of the many well-known characters.
