Memes of Kamala Harris talking about falling out of a coconut tree, featuring clips of her laughing and dancing, are all over social media. Set to songs by this summer’s pop stars, from Charli XCX and Chappell Roan to Taylor Swift, the videos include Harris’ now-famous lines. With a laugh, she says: “You think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The quote comes from a May 2023 speech, when Harris told a story about her mother encouraging her to recognize the ways in which the wider world shaped her.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]These videos might seem like they came out of nowhere — but they could be the key to victory for Harris. They counter Republican attempts to define the vice president, especially her laughter, negatively for voters. At a rally on July 20, the day before she became the Democratic Party’s nominee, Donald Trump declared her “Laughing Kamala.” He asked his audience: “Have you watched her laugh? She is crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she’s crazy.”
The memes sweeping social media challenge Trump’s representation of the vice president. Harris appears cool in them. The popular videos give her a real chance to avoid the fate that befell the first female presidential candidate, Victoria Woodhull, in 1872. Woodhull ran as the Equal Rights Party candidate, and she aimed to model what it would look like if women enjoyed full political citizenship and had a true voice in American democracy, with voting rights and much more.
But the highest levels of American politics had always been reserved for men, and the press lambasted Woodhull for transgressing gender norms. Although Woodhull edited a weekly newspaper, she didn’t have enough of a megaphone to fight back. This doomed her chances of waging a competitive campaign.
Woodhull had broken barriers for women before waging this historic presidential campaign. Born in Ohio in 1838, Woodhull moved to New York City with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, when she was 30 years old. The pair became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street and used their profits to start Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, the first weekly newspaper edited by women in 1870.
In 1871, Woodhull was the first woman to address Congress in support of women’s voting rights. Her speech prompted leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to invite her to deliver a lecture at the National Woman Suffrage Association’s convention. Newspapers with local and wider reach reported on the wealthy female broker who also acted as a spiritual medium for Cornelius Vanderbilt.
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At the time, American society expected women to focus on domestic and maternal pursuits. Woodhull’s career challenged these gender norms, which aroused scorn from the media in addition to interest. Yet, it also garnered her a significant fan base among those who wanted to upend these social norms, from women’s-rights and civil-rights activists to spiritualists and free lovers.
In 1872, her popularity prompted the Equal Rights Party to nominate Woodhull for president — at a time when she couldn’t even vote — with the Black civil rights activist Frederick Douglass as her running mate. The ticket represented the party’s goal of racial and gender equality.
But the media’s scorn for Woodhull doomed her chances of running a competitive campaign. The popular newspaper Harper’s Weekly, for example, printed a full-page illustration of Woodhull as a devil. Thomas Nast, the day’s most famous engraver, represented her with a pair of curling wings and horns. The picture featured a mother in the background who is struggling under the weight of caring for two children and a drunken husband. She says: “Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan!” Woodhull was not behaving in the moral, maternal, home-centered manner God allegedly set forth for women. The engraving reflected what men like Nast expected women to do: ignore Woodhull and the lure of equal rights.
In addition to depicting her as evil, newspapers also printed illustrations of Woodhull and her sister as sexually available, wearing shorter dresses and showing off their ankles. The pictures implied the pair were prostitutes. Woodhull promoted free love, which only reinforced this representation. She believed that people should be able to have relationships with those they choose. By the time she ran for president, she had divorced once and married twice.
Other periodicals mocked Woodhull by portraying her in men’s clothing. She failed to be the virtuous care-giving white woman that American society — especially the white supremacist patriarchy that politicians sought to reinforce during the post-Civil War era — relied on.
Because of her newspaper, Woodhull had more reach than just about any woman at the time. Yet this platform was nowhere near enough to challenge the media’s negative portrayal of her and define her public image in a positive enough way to get taken seriously as a presidential candidate.
Woodhull did try to reframe negative stereotypes. For example, she sat for portraits by the famed photographer Mathew Brady wearing a top hat and bow tie. Cartoons had mocked her and other leading female activists by presenting them in this traditionally masculine attire, so she teased her opponents by dressing this way. Woodhull represented what they feared, but she also claimed the power associated with masculine clothing for herself. However, printers could not reproduce photographs in newspapers yet, so this visual statement did not reach nearly as many readers as Harper’s Weekly did.
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Everything might have been different had she been able to follow the advice of her cousin John Underwood, who suggested that she redefine the meaning of Nast’s picture and turn it into a positive. He recommended “obtaining the cartoon & publishing it in your own paper” because he felt “satisfied that its effect would be altogether favorable.” By reframing the engraving, it might compel viewers to empathize with the downtrodden mother. That realization, in turn, could have spurred them to see the appeal of Woodhull’s candidacy. Yet, she lacked the production capacity to reimagine the devastating image.
Woodhull’s inability to counter the caricature of her as evil and licentious doomed her campaign. Regardless of her series of important firsts and promotion of women’s rights, this reputation stuck with her. Woodhull worked the rest of her life to shape how people remembered her, distributing her preferred biography and portraits to newspapers in the U.S. and England for decades.
Today, Harris’ supporters are doing what Woodhull could not pull off: reframing Republicans’ negative attacks as positives. Harris seems to be on board with these efforts. When popular singer Charli XCX posted that “kamala is brat” on July 21, Harris’ team recognized that she endorsed the candidate using a reference to her latest album. They adapted her album’s slightly blurred font against lime green for their own social media profile. Then, on July 25 Harris joined TikTok, the platform where many of the current memes originated. Harris’ team needs to mobilize supporters like Charli XCX and her fans to define her public image to a broad audience in a way that would have made Victoria Woodhull envious.
This social media campaign — along with Harris’s advertising, speeches, and interviews—offers a chance to define the candidate’s public image before Trump and his media allies can. While her strategists no doubt will try to create their own narrative, the memes produced by Harris’ followers on social media might be just as valuable as what they produce themselves. The videos can showcase her humanity, expertise, worldviews, and blunt Republican efforts to caricature her. They have the possibility of going viral and feeling more authentic than paid advertising. If successful, they’ll empower Harris to make her own case on her own terms — something Victoria Woodhull never got a chance to do.
Allison Lange is an associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She is the author of Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and is currently researching the representations of Victoria Woodhull.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
