Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2011
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:4 (Fall 2011).
Abstract
After a difficult first marriage that ended in divorce, Clarina Irene Howard Nichols became an avid supporter of married women's property rights, mothers' custody rights, and, eventually, female suffrage. She was a journalist, a newspaper editor, and in 1852 she became the first woman to speak to the Vermont state legislature, in an address in favor of women's school suffrage. By 1853, she was traveling through the Northeast and Midwest as a public lecturer on temperance and women's rights. She emigrated to Kansas in 1854 as a strong advocate of the free soil cause, but also because she had high hopes that people on the frontier would be more open-minded about women's rights than she had found them to be in "old conservative Vermont." She campaigned extensively for women's rights in Kansas and spoke in favor of women's suffrage at the state constitutional convention in 1859. While full suffrage for women did not make it into the Kansas constitution at that time, school suffrage, married women's property rights, and mothers' custody rights did. Her suffrage work was interrupted by the Civil War, but she later resumed it and continued it in California, where she moved in 1871 for health reasons.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.