Clarina Irene Howard Nichols

• Clarina Irene Howard Nichols
• Born: January 25, 1810
• Died: January 11, 1885

Women’s rights and temperance leader, was born in West Townshend, Vermont, the daughter of Chapin Howard, a prosperous businessman and a board director of Leland Classical and English Institute, a local Baptist seminary, and Birsha (Smith) Howard. Her paternal ancestors, who were English and Welsh, had changed their family name from Hayward, and moved from Mendon, Massachusetts, to Vermont in 1775; by the turn of the century they had become the second wealthiest family in the region.

Clarina Howard was raised a Baptist; in 1818 she and her family became members of Town-shend’s Second Baptist Church. Educated at the nearby district school, in 1827 she attended the exclusive Timothy B. Cressy Seminary for one year. As class valedictorian she spoke on the merits of an academic education for women and criticized the then popular ornamental education that concentrated on music, dancing, and domestic arts. After graduation in 1828 she taught in private and public schools in Vermont for the next few years.

In April 1830 Clarina Howard married Justin Carpenter, a Baptist minister, and settled in western New York State; they had two sons, Chapin Howard and Aurelius O, and a daughter, Birsha. In 1835 she established a seminary for young women in Herkimer, New York, but returned to Townshend in 1839 without her husband. They were divorced in February 1843; she received custody of the children.

In 1840 she accepted a position as a writer for the Windham County Democrat in Brattleboro, Vermont. Her new career opportunity was to be the turning point in her life, for it facilitated her entrance into the reform movements. On March 6, 1843, she married the newspaper’s publisher, George W. Nichols, twenty-five years her senior, who was an advocate of women’s rights. They had one son, George Nichols, born in 1844.

When her husband became seriously ill shortly after their marriage, Clarina Nichols assumed control of the newspaper, changing it from a local county weekly to a reform paper supporting abolition, temperance, and above all women’s rights. For six years she ran the Windham County Democrat in her husband’s name, before letting it be known publicly that she was really in control.

Nichols’s entry into the women’s rights movement began with a series of editorials on the legal and property disadvantages of married women that resulted in the passage of Vermont’s first married women’s property law in 1847. Her continuing efforts both in writing and in public speeches helped expand this legislation in 1849 and 1850 to legalize joint property deeds, to allow a woman to insure her husband’s life, and to extend widow’s inheritance rights. In 1852 she sent a petition to the state legislature asking for female suffrage in local school district meetings—a first step in obtaining the vote for women. Her proposed legislation failed to pass despite an impassioned personal address before the state assembly.

In 1850 Nichols took to the lecture circuit on behalf of women’s rights in New England and the Middle Atlantic states; she was a principal speaker at the national women’s rights conventions held between 1850 and 1853. Her speaking style was lively and anecdotal, and the use of biblical references to support her arguments gained her considerable clerical support.

In addition to her work for women’s rights, Nichols campaigned in behalf of the temperance movement; indeed, she argued that if women had greater legal and political rights, the problems associated with excessive drinking would greatly diminish. After a speaking tour at the behest of Women’s State Temperance Society of Wisconsin in 1853, she toured the state, speaking for adoption of prohibition and interlacing her temperance speeches with arguments for women’s rights.

In 1854 Nichols and her husband moved to Ottawa, Kansas; George Nichols died there the next year. She worked in the campaign for statehood for Kansas, and in 1859 she represented the newly founded Kansas Women’s Rights Association at the state constitutional convention held in the summer of that year. Her efforts were responsible for the inclusion in the proposed constitution of major clauses on women’s rights, including equal education for women in state schools, votes for women in school matters, custody rights over minor children, and property rights. When Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861, she addressed the state legislature on the need for protection of married women’s property, and in the same year she worked to achieve similar protective legislation in Ohio and Missouri.

During the Civil War Nichols moved to Washington, D.C., where she lived from December 1863 to March 1866, working first in the quartermaster’s department and then serving as administrator of a home run by the National Association for Destitute Colored Women and Children. In 1867 Nichols and Susan B. Anthony campaigned, unsuccessfully, to win the vote for women in Kansas. Four years later she moved to Potter Valley, California, where she continued to write and lecture. She died there at the age of seventy-four, having been in poor health for sometime, and was buried in the local cemetery in Potter Valley.

A vigorous exponent of the expansion of married women’s legal and property rights and suffrage, Clarina Howard Nichols played a major role in increasing women’s rights through legislative action in the states of Vermont, Kansas, and California.

There is no full-length biography of Clarina Nichols. The best modern account of her life appears in Notable American Women (1971). For additional information see J. G. Gambone, ed., “The Forgotten Feminist of Kansas: The Papers of Clarina I. H. Nichols, 1854-1885,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, Spring 1973-Winter 1974; S. B. Anthony and E. C. Stanton, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 1 and 3 (1881-1887); E. Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959); and B. G. Hersh, TheSlavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (1978). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1934). An obituary appeared in The New York Times on February 2, 1885.