"Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!"

Nast depicts Victoria Woodhull—the first woman to run for U.S. President (1872), advocate for women's suffrage, and proponent of "free love"—as a winged female Satan in Victorian dress, horned and bat-winged, proffering a placard reading BE SAVED BY FREE LOVE. At left, a burdened wife trudges a rocky mountain path carrying an infant and a limp, bottle-clutching drunk husband across her shoulders. The caption gives the wife the decisive line: "I'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps." Nast, a firm moralist despite his reform credentials, here weaponizes domesticity against Woodhull: the suffering wife becomes the cartoon's moral heroine, and Woodhull's genuine political courage is collapsed entirely into sexual transgression and diabolism.