Andrea Wyatt's Journal

If you could have dinner with anyone in all of history, who would it be and why?
"If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left them to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women. Women are as much members of the nation as men are, and they have the same human right to govern themselves which men have. Men have none but an usurped right to the arbitrary control of women. Shall free, intelligent, reasoning, thinking women longer submit to being robbed of their common rights? Men fashioned a government based on their own enunciation of principles: that taxation without representation is tyranny; and that all just government exists by the consent of the governed. Proceeding upon these axioms, they formed a Constitution declaring all persons to be citizens, that one of the rights of a citizen is the right to vote, and that no power within the nation shall either make or enforce laws interfering with the citizen's rights. And yet men deny women the first and greatest of all the rights of citizenship, the right to vote.

"Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left women to do but to become the mothers of the future government? We will have our rights. We say no longer by your leave. We have besought, argued and convinced, but we have failed; and we will not fail."

Flamethrower language at its finest. It's from a speech delivered by Ms. Victoria Woodhull at Lincoln Hall in 1872. Several months after this speech, she became the first female presidential nominee, running for the Equal Rights Party, fifty years before American women won the right to vote in federal elections. Before you jump to conclusions, women's rights weren't her only platform; she advocated the eight-hour work day, graduated income tax, social welfare programs, profit sharing and much more which my current colleagues on the Hill would find familiar. But her most progressive issue certainly was the fight for social freedom for all women, not only politically, but professionally, financially, domestically, spiritually, sexually -- and medically. Woodhull believed (and articulated, mincing no words) that decisions regarding a woman's health should be left up to the woman in question. Ahead of her time? You'd better believe it.

In addition to her political career, Woodhull and her sisters were the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street, and among the first to own and operate their own newspaper (which ran for six years, with twenty thousand subscribers.)

She was also accused of being everything from a witch to a whore to a lesbian (oh, heavens forfend) but the same still goes for any woman who manages to shake up the patriarchy. (Even the ones who are neither so purposeful nor eloquent about it -- the ones who just happen to get knocked up by their ex-husbands.)

As the ranking female member of the House Ethics Committee I've been invited to lecture at the Woodhull Institute many times. I would love to attend one of their dinners with her, to show her what her spirit inspired.

Although now that I think about it, she would most likely lose her appetite completely once she learned that, one hundred and thirty-two years later, we still haven't managed to put a woman in the Oval Office.

"We rebel against, denounce and defy this arbitrary, usurping and tyrannical government which has been framed and imposed on us without our consent, and even without so much as entertaining the idea that it was or could be of the slightest consequence what we should think of it, or how our interests should be affected by it, or even that we existed at all, except in the simple case in which we might be found guilty of some offense against its behests, when it has not failed to visit on us its sanctions with as much rigor as if we owed rightful allegiance to it; which we do not, and which, in the future, we will not even pretend to do."

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