Maggie Gyllenhaal is reportedly working on a project focused on Victoria Woodhull, a leader of the American suffrage movement who ran for president in 1872.
No news has officially been announced, but Gyllenhaal has mentioned the project in a number of recent interviews.
In a sit-down with CBS news, she said, “I’m developing a TV project right now about Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to ever run for president in the U.S. in the late 1800s, so to come from that and see Hillary give that speech — it just put me over the edge. Not that I was ever going to vote for Trump, but now I’m full-on behind her,” she said, referring to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
With TheWrap, Gyllenhaal went into more details, describing Woodhull as someone “who in the 1860s and ’70s was a spiritualist. There was a big movement toward spiritualism then. It was after the Civil War, everyone had lost people important to them. She was probably a prostitute, a stockbroker, an adviser to Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the first woman to ever run for president.”
As for what format the project will take, Gyllenhaal thinks the small screen. “I think probably it will be a long-form television series, just like ‘The Honorable Woman,’” she predicted.
“I was really, really blown away by the script,” Gyllenhaal said, “by the spectrum of the person I could play. I’d never seen anything like that before. Not just because it is eight hours long and written by someone who was interested in women. It’s an unusual part of women not usually put on television.” No word on who penned the project.
Woodhull was married twice but then advocated for the “free love” movement. In an 1871 speech she said, “To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold . . .”
She became a newspaper editor, starting her own publication, an advocate for women’s votes, and the first woman to run for president as a part of the Equal Rights Party. Former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was her running mate. The number of votes she received is disputed. History declares that she had received zero, but more historians are saying that that is incorrect.
“She’s very intelligent, very graceful, powerful — and also, at the same time, like a tiny baby, totally disoriented and confused, Gyllenhaal observed. “She’s full of sexuality and femininity at times. And other times, not at all. She’s terrified and extremely brave, and all the things that lie in between. Like all of us actually are. There’s usually not an interest in exploring all those things.”
No word yet on what network this might land at or when, but sounds like a most interesting project and we can’t wait to hear more.
