Clarina Howard Nichols
Her father was the town’s “overseer of the poor.” Clarina listened to his interviews with poor desperate women who had no legal recourse if their husbands were alcoholics or abusive. These experiences contributed to her lifelong passion for women’s rights.
She was a journalist and public speaker involved in the major reform movements of the mid-19th century: temperance, abolition, and the women's movement, which basically emerged from the first two.
Clarina married Justin Carpenter at the age of twenty, and they had three children. Their marriage lasted nine years, and was a constant source of misery. She left her husband after he kidnapped the children and had to be tracked down.
To earn a living, Clarina found work as a reporter for a weekly newspaper, the Windham County Democrat in Brattleboro, Vermont, and discovered her talent for journalism, and writing about the issues of the day.
Soon after divorcing Carpenter in 1843, Clarina married the newspaper’s editor and publisher, George Nichols, who was twenty-eight years her senior. They had one son, George.
When her husband became disabled, Clarina quietly took over her his duties, but made no announcement of the change in editorship. She wanted time, she said, to win “men’s confidence in my abilities to run a political paper.”
For the next ten years she edited the Democrat. Through the newspaper, became an early advocate of the emerging women’s rights movement, which developed because women were allowed little voice in the temperance and antislavery movements.
Because of her own experiences, Clarina was one of the first to grasp the importance of economic rights for women, and the need for wives to be able to control their own wages. She wrote a series of articles criticizing property restrictions placed on married women. She and other women’s rights reformers succeeded in changing the statutes in New York and Vermont by 1852.
She helped organize the first National Women’s Rights Conventions in 1850 and 1851 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and became one of the movement’s most popular speakers. Her speech, “The Responsibilities of Woman,” was widely circulated.
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 threatened to establish slavery in the western territories, Clarina uprooted her family and became a pioneer and activist in the Kansas Territory, partly so that her sons could establish new free-state homesteads.
Like many of the early settlers, she endured enormous hardships, but believed that the fight for a free Kansas was worth suffering for. She was one of the Republican Party’s earliest female stump speakers and spoke every night except Saturday to standing-room only crowds.
But her real passion was always women’s rights. She lobbied male Kansas legislators to give women basic legal rights. Her efforts helped her adopted state become a frontrunner in the issue of women’s rights, and gained her the respect and support of such women as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Clarina’s husband died in 1855, and she spent much of 1856 campaigning for support for Kansas and John C. Fremont, the Republican presidential nominee.
In the spring of 1857, she moved her family to Wyandotte County, where she became associate editor of the Quindaro Chindowan, an antislavery newspaper.
In 1859, Clarina circulated petitions demanding that women be granted equal legal and political rights with men under the new Kansas constitution. Though not allowed to speak or vote at the constitutional convention, she lobbied successfully for women’s rights.
The final version of the Kansas Constitution included three provisions that Clarina fought fervently for: women's rights in child custody, married women’s property rights, and equality in matters pertaining to public schools.
When the Kansas campaign for women’s right to vote was launched in 1867, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Olympia Brown joined Clarina in a valiant but futile effort. Kansas voters rejected amendments for both female and African American suffrage.
Clarina left Kansas in 1871 to live with two of her children in California, where she died on January 11, 1885. She was buried in Mendocino County, California.
Clarina Howard Nichols had devoted her life to improving the lives of women. Two years after her death, Kansas women won the right to vote in municipal elections, and in 1912 they succeeded in their efforts to gain equality at the polls.
Copyright © 2007 Maggie MacLean
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