A Speech on the Principles of Finance

Victoria C. Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President, delivered this electrifying financial treatise in 1872, and it remains a startling artifact of radical economic thought. With the audacity that defined her activism, Woodhull dismantles the sacred doctrine of the gold standard, arguing that money is not a commodity with inherent value but a representation of wealth created through social and governmental agreement. She turns her sharp intellect to the relationship between finance and individual freedom, asserting that the arbitrary valuation of gold has enslaved working people and concentrated power in the hands of a financial elite. This is not a dry economic text but a polemic, delivered by a woman who traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange while calling for the complete emancipation of women and the radical restructuring of monetary policy. For readers interested in the hidden histories of American radicalism, the evolution of monetary theory, or the life of one of history's most underestimated political pioneers, this speech offers a window into a mind that was decades ahead of its time.