Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
History is by necessity an abbreviated view of the past. If we left every story in, it would be impossible to decipher what was important. In the effort to simplify, however, important stories sometimes get overlooked.
Until recently, one such story was the life of Vermonter Clarina Howard Nichols. During the mid-to-late 1800s, Nichols was among the nation’s most prominent social reformers, fighting for women’s rights, temperance, and the abolition of slavery.
Nichols’ early experiences seem to have set the course for her life, according to scholars Marilyn Blackwell and Kristen Oertel, whose biography of Nichols is titled “Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood.”
Born in 1810 into a respectable family in West Townshend, Clarina showed her intelligence from a young age. Her parents made sure not to squander it, giving her a solid, if somewhat basic, education, an opportunity not afforded to many girls of the era. She proved an adept learner and outshone her brothers in the classroom.
At the age of 20, Clarina married Justin Carpenter of Guilford. Justin seemed a good catch. He was 10 years her senior, a college graduate, from a prominent family. With his education and apparent ambition, and her intelligence and $1,500 dowry, the couple’s prospects looked bright. They moved to western New York state, where Carpenter launched a newspaper. But the paper lost money and soon folded.
Carpenter tried running a girls’ boarding school, which also failed. Then the couple moved south to Manhattan, where Carpenter sought to become a lawyer. The family, which now included two sons and a daughter, was in debt. Carpenter’s failures forced Clarina to work to support the family, while also raising the children. She ran a boarding house for “professional men and their wives,” took in sewing and worked for a hat shop.
Carpenter was not only feckless; he was apparently also abusive, at least psychologically. Clarina had had enough. Fearing that her husband would take the three children, as was his right under law, she fled with them to her parents’ home in Vermont. And, though it was almost unheard of at the time, she sought a divorce.
Vermont’s divorce laws were among the country’s most liberal. Unlike other states, Vermont allowed divorces in cases of cruelty, but the cruelty had to have occurred in Vermont, which wasn’t true in her case. Her father, Chapin Howard, explained the situation to Townshend’s representative to the Vermont House of Representatives, who managed to have the law changed.
The law, however, still required a three-year wait for the divorce to become final. Clarina’s experiences demonstrated some of the legal difficulties women faced, particularly regarding property. Once married, women surrendered their property to their husbands. How, she wondered, could women fulfill society’s expectation of them as mothers if they had no economic rights to protect their children?
Once she became a women’s rights activist, Clarina usually couched her arguments this way: limited rights hindered women’s roles as mothers. She practiced what the authors call the “politics of motherhood.” It was a more conservative argument than was made by the next wave of women activists, including Susan B. Anthony, with whom Clarina often corresponded.
While she waited for her divorce to become final, Clarina wrote for the nearby Windham County Democrat in Brattleboro. The paper’s editor, George Nichols, was impressed by her work and asked her to help select stories for the newspaper. The two grew close and married soon after Clarina’s divorce. Though 25 years older than Clarina, George proved a better choice than Justin Carpenter. Throughout their lives together, he approved of his wife’s active career, a rare trait in a 19th century husband. In fact, when George’s health faded, the couple agreed that Clarina would take control of the paper. For years, the shift remained secret. Many people wouldn’t have accepted the idea of a woman running a newspaper.
Clarina proved persuasive, both in the paper’s pages and on the lecture circuit. A series of articles she wrote helped persuade the Vermont Legislature to grant women the right to own, inherit and bequeath property.
In 1852, she became the first woman to speak before the entirely male Vermont Legislature, and argued forcefully for the right of women to vote at local school meetings. As her reputation grew, Clarina received invitations to speak at major women’s conferences along the East Coast and as far west as Wisconsin.
While traveling to a conference in Templeton, Massachusetts, Clarina was sitting in the train’s “Ladies Saloon” when an older man and a sheriff entered the car. They were hunting for the man’s young granddaughters, who were cowering beside their mother. They planned to seize the girls, whose father was claiming custody, as was his legal right.
Unfortunately for the men, Clarina Howard Nichols was watching. She delivered an impromptu lecture to the car’s passengers about the wrongs of these “kidnappers” and informed the shame-faced sheriff that since he was from Vermont, he had no jurisdiction now that the train had passed into Massachusetts. A male passenger caught the grandfather, who had exited the train with one of the girls, and returned her to her mother.
Even as her fame spread as Vermont’s “grand reasoner” in the cause of reform, Nichols was not content to stay put. The year was 1854, and the country was aflame over the issue of slavery, specifically whether new territories should enter the Union as slave states or free. Hopelessly divided, Congress left it to the white settlers of each territory to determine the answer through a vote. Nichols set out with her sons for Kansas, believing the territory needed more settlers to vote against slavery. (George, in ill health, remained behind in Vermont. He would join them later, but died soon afterwards.)
“Nichols viewed Kansas as a blank slate on which she and other settlers could draw the outlines of real change,” wrote Blackwell and Oertel. But Kansas was no paradise. The territory was rife with violence. Slavery supporters attacked anti-slavery communities. One of Nichols’ sons was wounded defending their settlement. The radical abolitionist John Brown and his followers responded by murdering five pro-slavery men.
Nichols fought for abolition and women’s rights the way she knew best, with her words. She submitted letters to newspapers, then took a newspaper job and continued to argue for the causes that mattered most to her.
In 1859, as delegates gathered to draft a constitution for Kansas so it could join the Union, Nichols argued against any “constitutional distinctions based on difference of sex.” In the end, her effort fell short, but women did gain the right to vote on school matters. That might seem a small accomplishment, but the act made Kansas one of the first states to guarantee women any form of suffrage when it entered the Union in 1861.
That same year, the Civil War erupted. As fighting neared Nichols’ home, she was ready to flee if necessary, keeping “(c)arpet sack & camp pail packed.”
Despite the peril, Nichols risked helping a woman who was fleeing slavery. She hid the frightened and injured woman in the cistern outside her home. To keep an eye on the hiding place, Nichols created a ruse. She placed a “sickbed” nearby and had one of her sons lie in it all night, so she could check on the woman occasionally without raising suspicions. The next morning, Nichols helped the woman reach another sympathizer to get her safely out of the area.
Eventually, Nichols decided that the danger of living in Kansas during the war was too great. She moved to Washington, D.C., in 1863 and took a job as a clerk at the Quartermaster General’s Office. Later, when a scandal erupted over the dismal conditions at a home for poor African-American women and children in nearby Georgetown, she took a sizeable pay cut to become the home’s director.
After the war, Nichols returned to Kansas and watched as the United States granted suffrage to formerly enslaved people, so long as they were male. Women would have to wait another half century for the right to vote.
In 1871, Nichols moved to California, where one of her sons had settled. Though only 61, she felt old. “The years are few to look ahead,” she wrote. Nichols would live another 14 years, continuing the fight for women’s suffrage, an activist to the end.