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from no editor or author given, Webster's Dictionary of American Women [New York: Smithmark Publishers, 1996] pp. 453-454

Nichols, Clarina Irene Howard 1810-1885       journalist and reformer

      Born on January 25, 1810, in West Townshend, Vermont, Clarina Howard was educated in local public schools and for a year at an academy. From April 1830 until her divorce in February 1843 she was married to Justin Carpenter, a Baptist preacher with whom she lived in Herkimer, New York. There about 1835 she apparently opened a girls' seminary. She returned to her Vermont home in 1839 and the next year began writing for the Windham County Democrat of Brattleboro. She married the newspaper's publisher, George W. Nichols, in March 1843. From that year she was editor of the Democrat, and over the next few years she gradually broadened the paper's range to include literary pieces and editorials in support of various reform movements. In 1847 a series of her editorials on the subject of married women's property rights led directly to the passage of legislation by the Vermont legislature providing for such rights. Subsequently clarifications and broadenings of the law were passed with her support in 1849 and 1850. In 1852 her campaign to secure the vote for women in district school elections, which she carried personally to the legislature, failed to win the requisite legislation.

      From about 1850 Nichols was in increasing demand as a lecturer and debater, mainly on questions of women's rights. She traveled as far afield as Wisconsin, where she campaigned in 1853 for a state prohibition law. The Democrat ceased publication late in 1853, and in 1854 Nichols and her two older sons accompanied a New England Emigrant Aid Company party bound for Kansas Territory. She returned shortly to Vermont and the next year brought her husband out to Kansas. He died in the summer of 1855, and after yet another trip to Vermont to arrange the estate, during which time she also lectured on the problems of slavery and statehood in Kansas, Nichols settled in Wyandotte County, Kansas. She contributed articles on women's rights to the Lawrence Herald of Freedom and the Topeka Kansas Tribune and traveled and spoke throughout the territory, from early 1859 in behalf of the newly founded Kansas Women's Rights Association. She lobbied the Wyandotte constitutional convention ceaselessly, and it was largely owing to her efforts that the final document granted to women equal rights to education, to custody of their children, and to the vote in local school matters. She campaigned for ratification of the constitution and in 1860, as the representative of the Kansas Woman's Rights Association, addressed a joint session of the first state legislature on the need for a married women's property law. (Such a law was enacted in 1867.)

      In December 1863 Nichols moved to Washington, D. C., where she worked as a clerk in the Quartermaster's Department until February 1865 and then became matron of a home operated in Georgetown by the National Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children. In 1866 she returned to Kansas, and in 1867 she joined Susan B. Anthony in the unsuccessful campaign to achieve full woman suffrage in the state. Late in 1871 she moved to Mendocino County, California, where she contributed articles to the local Rural Press. She died in Potter Valley, California, on January 11, 1885.

For More Information

      KSHS: Kansas State Historical Society

      The Forgotten Feminist by Diane Eickhoff - Special to The Star

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