“Impudent witch.” “Vile jailbird.” “Mrs. Satan.” There’s no question that Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, was years ahead of her time, and it frequently made her a target of ridicule among her contemporaries. She made her bid for the highest office in the nation in 1872 as a nominee of the Equal Rights Party, a full 136 years before Hillary Clinton launched her first campaign. Woodhull’s life was a rich tapestry of marriages, scandal, rabble-rousing, and activism.

Born in tiny Homer, Ohio, to indigent parents in 1838, Victoria California Claflin spent much of her childhood at the mercy of her father’s moneymaking schemes. With less than three years of formal education, she worked as a child preacher, fortune teller, clairvoyant and “magnetic healer” before her first marriage, at age 15, to the disreputable Canning Woodhull, an alcoholic, morphine addict, and serial adulterer. She had two children with Woodhull before eventually divorcing him, although she kept his last name for the rest of her life.

In 1866, she married spiritualist and Civil War hero Col. James Blood. This also ended in divorce, but the union would end up being serendipitous for Woodhull. In 1868, Blood encouraged Woodhull and her sister Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin, six years her junior, to move to New York, where Blood lived part-time. The sisters secured a house on the city’s Great Jones Street and convinced shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt to hire them as his personal spiritualists. He eventually agreed to fund a brokerage firm helmed by the sisters. (It’s been rumored, but not confirmed, that Claflin was also his lover.) In 1870, the firm of Woodhull, Claflin & Co. opened on Manhattan’s Broad Street.

As one of the first two “lady stockbrokers” in the city, Woodhull experienced her first taste of the limelight when the firm opened. New York newspapers dubbed Woodhull and her sister “The Lady Bankers” and “Bewitching Brokers,” and they allegedly made $700,000 in their first six weeks of business (about $13 million today.)

But as they say, all press is good press, and the publicity only fueled the flames of Woodhull’s candidacy. It seems unlikely that she ever thought she would win, but the candidacy gave her a national platform to talk about women’s suffrage and other progressive issues. She named Frederick Douglass as her running mate, but there’s no proof that Douglass ever accepted or even acknowledged the nomination.

“Even if my bid for the presidency is not successful, it will, in fact, be an education for women,” Woodhull said of her campaign at the time.

The number of votes that Woodhull ultimately got is lost to history. She spent Election Night in 1872 in New York's Ludlow Street Jail after publishing salacious (but most likely true) gossip she’d heard from Cady Stanton accusing Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher, brother of famous abolitionist and Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, of adultery with a married woman. (Beecher Stowe was the source of the “impudent witch” and “vile jailbird” comments, incensed that Woodhull had publicly smeared her brother.)

“She was one of the most interesting women, and one of the most humanitarian-driven people, in United States history,” says Judith Dann, a historian and professor at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. Dann was involved in creating an exhibit on Woodhull at the Robbins-Hunter Museum, which will run through December 30, 2016. The exhibit includes period campaign music, 37-star flags, period drawings and newspaper articles, and some of Woodhull’s collected writings.

“Her sphere of influence spreads so far, and her name is forgotten,” Dann continues. “We just pick up these banners without thinking—of course children have rights, of course women have rights—but she’s the one who spoke up first on a lot of these. To me, she is so inspirational.”