Freedom! Equality!! Justice!!! These Three; but the Greatest of These Is…

Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for President of the United States, and in this electrifying 1872 speech she demands to know why justice has been postponed. Delivered in Boston and New York at the height of Reconstruction, the address takes its title from Saint Paul but substitutes justice for love - a provocation that still resonates. Woodhull argues that freedom and equality are hollow without justice as their foundation, and she spares no one: not the government that withheld Black citizenship rights, not the women's movement that often marginalized women of color, not the hypocrisy of a nation that proclaimed liberty while practicing bondage. The speech envisions what she calls an 'impending revolution' - not of violence, but of moral reckoning. This is nineteenth-century oratory at its most uncompromising: poetic, passionate, and unafraid to name the systems that perpetuate human suffering. For readers interested in the roots of American social justice movements, this speech reveals how early feminists and abolitionists understood their struggles as inseparable.