The story of the first women to work on Wall Street has everything.
It is a rags to riches story of two sisters who made it from a small rural town in Ohio to the Big City, with spiritualism, scandal and a presidential run included.
Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, opened a successful brokerage firm in 1870 on Wall Street, sparking a wave of sensationalist news and cartoons.
They were radical women's rights leaders, and Victoria was the first female presidential candidate. They were also the subject of numerous scurrilous rumors.
Some claimed they were prostitutes during their time as spiritualist mediums. Others insinuated that they slept with male clients at the brokerage firm.
The younger sister, Tennessee, was also linked with the railroad tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was said to have been her lover.
Scroll down to read about the sisters' rise from rags in a rural town in Ohio to riches to Wall Street.
Woodhull was born September 23, 1838, in Licking County, Ohio. She was the seventh of 10 children raised by a con man and an illiterate spiritualist. Her sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, the youngest of 10, was born in 1844.
At 11, her con-man father burned their family enterprise, a gristmill, down in order to collect the insurance benefits.
But the townsfolk caught on and the family was driven out of town instead.
According to "Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored" by Mary Gabriel
At 14, Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, then 7, were marketed by their father as mediums who could heal people and communicate with the dead. They became the family's primary breadwinners.
The father wrote to Victoria, then 14, saying: "Girl your worth has never yet been known, but to the world it shall be shown."
According to "Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored" by Mary Gabriel
At 15, Victoria married 28-year-old Canning Woodhull, her doctor who turned out to be a nobody. He had no steady medical practice and proved to be a serial adulterer and a drunkard. Quickly, the 15-year-old had her fairy-tale notions of romance dispelled.
According to "Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored" by Mary Gabriel
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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