My thinking is that just because society didn't allow women to vote, it doesn't necessarily follow that there could never be a woman qualified for office, either appointed or elected. And if there were no specific prohibitions against it, surely at some point some ambitious woman in the country would at least throw her hat in the ring.
I assume that during the height of the women's suffrage movement there would have been many women pushing the bounds of political expression and participation. I am interested in that, but moreso in earlier American history.
In the 18th-19th century, was the idea of a woman in office (elected or appointed) unthinkable to people? Would the possibility be viewed as a peculiarity, or would people find it offensive? Did any male politicians ever discuss the qualifications or a particular woman?
The obvious example of a woman who stood for high office in this period is that of Victoria Woodhull (born Victoria Claflin), who was a candidate for the presidency in 1872.
Woodhull was a really quite remarkable character – very much a self-made woman, born into relative poverty in rural Ohio in 1838, married less than two months after her 15th birthday, barely educated (in the formal sense), and part of a family of hucksters. But she was also highly intelligent and extremely attractive and charismatic, and was able to make a living for many years selling folk medicines, fortune-telling and advice that was guided by the "spirits" with whom she and her sister were supposedly in contact. The family also sold highly dangerous cancer cures (a brother was a successful quack doctor in the Chicago area, and after 1864, the sister was on the lam for killing one of the patients she had treated in a family-run cancer clinic in Illinois).
By the late 1860s, Woodhull and her equally beautiful sister Tennie C. Claflin (really – the family made a habit of bestowing unusual names on its children; even "Victoria" was a pretty rare choice for 1838) were making a living offering spiritualistic "readings" and hands-on "magnetic healing" sessions – the latter of which, various biographers suggest, were popular not least because of the erotic charge that they delivered. Maybe – but Woodhull and Claflin were also alleged to have engaged in prostitution, which there's absolutely no evidence they did, and in general they were not only harshly judged by the misogynistic standards of their day, but also by those of at least some of their biographers.
In any case, driven to travel to New York (so Woodhull claimed) by a visitation from the spirit of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, whom she considered to be her personal spirit guide, they managed to make the acquaintance of the super-wealthy, recently-widowed robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, who proved particularly susceptible to Tennie's magnetic healing techniques and was generally believed to have funded the sisters when they set themselves up, first, as the first female brokers on Wall Street, and then as proprietors of their own newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. Although it's impossible now to establish how well they really did at their brokerage, Woodhull certainly claimed to have made a fortune of $700,000 (many millions now) by gambling on gold stocks during the Black Friday crash of 1869.
What with the backing of the Commodore, the wealth supplied by the brokerage, and the social connections generated by these and by the newspaper, Woodhull was emboldened to move into politics. Her upbringing and disastrous early marriage – to a drunk who turned out to be a lot less successful and financially stable than he had claimed to be – had made her acutely aware of how badly women were treated by the established laws and morals of this period, and in 1870 she announced her intention of running for the presidency on an equal rights platform that was scandalous to polite society not only because she advocated female suffrage but also because Woodhull was what was then termed a "sex radical", meaning a proponent of "free love".
In the 1870s, this usually meant merely the idea that women should have the same right as men to enjoy the physical side of marriage and to not be condemned any more than men were for actually having a sexuality, even if this meant having relationships before or outside marriage. But there were plenty of people willing to believe that Victoria advocated and enjoyed free love in the more modern sense of having multiple short term or concurrent sexual affairs.
The fact that she lived in a menage with her first and second husbands, and was apparently not legally married to the second, did little to dispel such tittle-tattle, though her own version of events - almost certainly true - was that she merely took care of her first husband, who was by this point an out and out alcoholic. And in the course of her campaign, Woodhull bluntly stated her position in terms that were extraordinarily radical – and controversial – for the time:
"Yes, I am a free lover! I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you or any law can frame any right to intervene."
Woodhull sought to put together a ground-breaking coalition of radicals to back her candidacy. She courted the spiritualist vote, getting herself elected president of the American Association of Spiritualists, and was closely associated with the veteran anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews, who probably wrote a lot of her articles and speeches; this gave her good contacts with the nascent labour movement. She also attracted the attention of the suffrage movement by becoming the first woman to address a Congressional committee (January 1871). In consequence – although she was unknown to the suffrage movement, had no long apprenticeship in activism, and was socially significantly inferior to all the major suffrage leaders, she was reluctantly (and only briefly) endorsed by Susan B Anthony, and formed a longer and closer association with the more pragmatic Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Members of all these constituencies came together to form a Woodhull-led "Equal Rights Party" which formally nominated her for the presidency, and even extended an offer to Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, to join the ticket as prospective vice president. (There is no record of Douglass making a reply.)
Come polling day, however, Woodhull was in prison – the product of a charge of distributing obscene material through the mail. The obscene material in question consisted of (perfectly true and accurate) articles in her newspaper denouncing the United States's most beloved and famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, for having multiple secret sexual affairs with married female parishioners, while publicly posing as an upholder of the established morality. It was the product of a feud with Beecher that's too complicated to summarise here, but, anyway... her presidential bid failed, as it must have done anyway, and Ulysses S Grant was re-elected to the presidency. Woodhull and Claflin shortly thereafter went on to remake themselves in Britain - Tennie married into the aristocracy and Victoria to a wealthy banker. She lived 50 more years in England, latterly as a widow and lady of the manor in rural Worcestershire.
Bonus fact: the actor Sam Claflin (Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games) is Victoria's great-great-great-grandnephew, being descended from her Chicago quack doctor brother.
Now, as to the prohibitions and legalities that interest you: Victoria Woodhull was essentially not taken seriously enough as a presidential candidate for her position to be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. She certainly breached at least one established requirement for presidential candidates, being only 34 years old when the 1872 election took place (the lower age limit for candidates was 35), and by long custom, not to mention in the opinion of most legal experts, women in general were ineligible to vote, and hence stand as candidates, in the United States at this point. Woodhull had a neat, but untested, legal counter to this - she argued that the 15th amendment, which gave former slaves the right to vote, also conferred the vote on women, since it merely stated that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States" without specifying those citizens' sex.
As to how well Woodhull fared at the ballot box - we simply don't know. Given the uncertainties surrounding the legality of her candidacy, and her lack of a serious party machine, her candidacy seems to have only been announced in about five states, and she doesn't appear to have actually made it onto any ballot papers. She may have received some votes as a write-in candidate, but we don't know how many - records weren't kept.
We do know that the maximum possible number of votes she could have received was about 5,000, out of about 6.4m votes cast, and we do know that most people considered her a scandalous character (more for her sex radicalism than her politics). She had only one really prominent political supporter, Benjamin Butler, a colourful former Union general and Massachusetts politician who was a supporter of women's suffrage. It will not surprise you in the least to hear that the gossip of the time held that the elderly Butler was another fan of Woodhull and Claflin's magnetic healing hands, but once again the charge is hugely unfair to both them and him; he seems to have been genuinely persuaded of Victoria's brilliance, and saw her as a possible agent for the sort of changes he was campaigning for.
Sources: There is no really good academic or even semi-academic biography of Woodhull. I find Lois Beachy Underhill's The Woman Who Ran for President to be the best-referenced and most accurate of the four or five contenders out there (though it's not well-referenced) – at least two of the others are significantly dodgy. On the academic side, Ann Braude's Radical Spirits (on the overlap between spiritualism and women's rights in the C19th) and Joanne Ellen Passett's Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality are two really helpful studies that contextualise the controversies of the time and let us understand Woodhull's intellectual hinterland.
This issue actually arose with school boards. School boards were just fundamentally a problem for anti-suffrage arguments centered around seperate spheres for the sexes. In 1874, two women were elected to the Boston School Committee, despite not being able to vote in such elections. Women had in fact already served on some small town school boards, but someone still asked the City Solicitor to weigh in on if they were eligible to serve. You can read about his opinion in this news item. They were refused their seats, but later that year successfully lobbied the state legislature for a law allowing women to serve on school boards, though they still could not vote in the elections. The coverage in the Sonoma Democrat is likely no accident: that same year, the California legislature did the same.