Cleopatra for President!

One of the striking aspects of American exceptionalism/parochialism (two sides of the same coin?) is how "revolutionary" the USA political elite and some so-called "ordinary voters" consider the choice of Hillary as the "womyn" presidential candidate of the Democratic party.

The first woman-president-to-be! 


Repeat over, over, and over again on your cell phone: Like, Wow!!! USA! USA! USA!

But does not a most elementary glimpse at history suggest that women have wielded, since at least Eve, political power/influence in shores not that far from the man's land of the brave and home of the free? 

Allow me to mention a few Eves from my high-school history memory: Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, Maria Theresa, Indira Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher, Michelle Obama.

So there's really nothing that "exceptional" about a USA representative of "girl power"


being a nation's "Chief Executive," except from a very narrow, parochial "reverse-view" perspective on America's putative super-special, "male/cowboy" place on our small planet.

After all, don't we frail human beings sense, in our hearts and minds, that God is a woman?


The first female candidate for the nation’s highest office was Victoria Woodhull in 1872, a half-century before American women won the right to vote.

Woodhull was nominated by the Equal Rights Party at a convention that she bankrolled. The abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass, was nominated to be her running mate.

She was born in Homer, Ohio, in 1838, and grew up poor, working as a fortune teller with her younger sister, Tennessee.

In 1868, they moved to New York, and met one of the world’s richest men, the transportation mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt. Tennessee was his lover; Victoria provided him with stock tips.

Vanderbilt gave the sisters money for what became Wall Street’s first female-owned brokerage house. It did so well that they started a newspaper.

Woodhull used her wealth and status to promote the suffrage movement: She was the first woman to appear before a congressional committee on the issue. (See our list of political milestones.)

Days before the election, her newspaper exposed the extramarital affair of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the country’s most famous preachers.

Woodhull spent Election Day in jail, charged with sending obscene materials. Her candidacy was only a blip in the voting.

Beecher’s sensational six-month trial ended in a hung jury, but the scandal ruined Woodhull. She later moved to England, where she lived most of her last 50 years until her death in 1927.