Lois Beachy Underhill was a senior vice president of Saatchi & Saatchi, the global advertising agency, when she first came across the name of Victoria Woodhull in 1986. She was working on an ad campaign for Conde Nast magazines at the time of the 1980 elections. A series of ads were built around women who had been prominent in politics. In doing research for the series, Victoria Woodhull's name was turned up and an ad developed around her. Lois Underhill remembers thinking: "Why haven't I heard of her before?"
With that question began a 14-year investigation. The detective work led Underhill eventually to the basement of Victoria Woodhull's husband's descendants in England where she found Woodhull autobiographical notes, photographs, correspondence, documents and other original source materials never seen before by historians or other writers. And the detective work led eventually to publication of The Woman Who Ran for President. Its publication in 1995 coincides with the 75th anniversary year of women's suffrage.
Once Lois Underhill's curiosity about Woodhull was triggered by her work on the Conde Nast campaign, she began reading the few existing Woodhull biographies, dating to the 1920s and 1960s, works limited in scope and generally unsympathetic. Underhill began doing additional research in her spare time. On a business trip to Toledo, Ohio, in 1981, for example,. she arranged to make a stop in Homer, Ohio, where Woodhull had spent her childhood and where records of her family were found.
"I talked to people there who could still tell stories of her unusual family," linderhill says "I, like Woodhull, was born in Ohio and came to New York to find my future as a business woman. I felt a kinship with Woodhull and pursued her further."
"I drove to Sandisfield, Mass., where Woodhull's father, Reuben Buckman Claflin, was born," she says. "I headed for the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania, where Woodhull's mother grew up and married Claflin. I tracked Dr. Canning Woodhull, Woodhull's first husband, and his family, from Rochester, N.Y., to Cleveland, Ohio, and on to Illinois as they speculated in real estate. I sorted through Civil War records to uncover the career of her second husband, Colonel James Harvey Blood."
Underhill also found Woodhull correspondence and other related documents in manuscript collections at Southern Illinois University and the Boston Public Library. This included relevant correspondence from early suffragists and other figures of the late 19th. century.
"I found that these and three other major library manuscript collections had been assembled since the 1960s and had not yet been used for publication," Underhill says, "These sources were now available for the first time, as well as the complete issues of the newspaper Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly."
IJnderhill adds, "I came to believe that Woodhull was a remarkable woman of unique talent who had been lost to history, unjustly scorned by earlier writers. I believe the time was right for a thoughtful, accurate account of her life, carefully placed in the cultural and historical context in which it was lived, and written with the appreciation a feminist perspective can now provide."
Woodhull's third husband, John Biddulqh Martin, was an English banker who seemed to have left no trail for Underhill to follow. Woodhull had said that Martin's Bank was the oldest in England-but it had disappeared. Underhill learned that it had been purchased by Barclays Bank in the 1960s. She wrote to G. F. Miles, the man in charge of Barclays' archives. Her inquiry was answered courteously, though briefly, with the dates and terms of the purchase.
Unknown to Underhill, Miles sent a copy of her inquiry to the Robin Holland-Martin family, John Martin's descendants. They wrote to her and said that if she convinced them she was the proper, responsible person to review and perhaps write about the historical documents in their possession, they would make the family archives available to her.
This was in 1987, and at that point Underhill decided to devote herself full time to the further pursuit of the many threads of Victoria Woodhull's life. She traveled that year to England and found, in a cool basement, teak cabinets filled with documents pertaining to the bank's history. Nearby, stacked around at random, she came across dusty boxes and tin trunks containing notes and other belongings of John Martin's wife, Victoria Woodhull.
Could she remove some of these Woodhull documents for study and copying? Underhill asked. "Of course," one of the women of the Holland-Martin family replied. "She was not really a Martin, you know."
"The descendants of the Martin and Woodhull families have given me exclusive access to their family archives," Underhill says. "Woodhull's private handwritten notes, as she contemplated writing her own memoirs, are included with these papers. I am the first person outside these families to talk with them about Woodhull or see their family collections."
And so began the most productive stretch of Lois Underhill's 14-year detective story, her long quest to satisfy the curiosity roused in that 1980 ad campaign when she first encountered the Woodhull name and wondered: "Why haven't I heard of her before?"