Diane Eickhoff
Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women’s Rights
Quindaro Press, 2006
277 pages $15
Review by RON BRILEY
When one thinks of the nineteenth-century struggle for women’s rights, the name of Clarina Nichols does not immediately come to mind. This omission, however, is rectified in this readable biography of Nichols by Diane Eickhoff, who draws upon a somewhat sketchy collection of Nichols’s letters to draft a biography that restores her subject to the pantheon of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott.
Nichols was born as Clarina Irene Howard in 1810. Her father operated a tannery in Vermont, and the family was affluent enough to have several servants. Clarina’s mother taught her daughter such practical crafts as sewing, but the young woman was interested in education, and her father paid for one year of enrollment at a private school.
Clarina first married in 1830. She and her husband, Justin Carpenter, established a newspaper and school near Rochester, New York. Carpenter struggled financially, and the survival of the couple’s three children depended upon Clarina’s sewing skills. The marriage ended in divorce after ten years.
In 1843, Clarina married newspaper editor George Nichols. When her husband became ill, Clarina assumed the duties of running the Windham County Democrat, although her husband’s name remained on the masthead. In her editorials, Clarina Nichols championed the reforms of temperance, antislavery, and women’s rights. As a result of her writings, Clarina was asked to speak before the 1851 second National Woman’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her address to the convention focused upon “the agenda that would occupy her for the rest of her life: property rights for the married women, control of wages, custody rights, reform of inheritance laws, equal educational opportunities for females—and in one brief passage, the right to vote.”
The title of Eickhoff’s book may exaggerate how fundamentally Nichols sought to change society. She certainly challenged the gender relations of her age, but she argued that women needed equal rights in order to fully assume their responsibilities as caretakers for the family. In campaigning against alcohol and domestic abuse, she did not raise questions of culture or of changing the dehumanized conditions of workers that culminated all too often in violence against women and children. But these limits on Nichols’ radicalism don’t distinguish her from many campaigners for women’s rights, and they don’t negate the contribution she made to the fight for equality.
While Clarina usually insisted that her reform agenda could best be advanced by maintaining a ladylike demeanor, she could also be quite assertive. For example, she grew impatient with men who campaigned against bloomers and the exposure of women’s ankles, writing that males should be equally concerned with “the inches cut from the tops of ladies’ dresses.”
Her growing fame led to an 1853 speaking campaign on behalf of the temperance movement in the Wisconsin territory. This experience also aroused her interest in the West, and in 1854 she moved her family to Kansas, participating in the struggle to wrest Kansas from the slaveocracy. After the relocation to Kansas, George Nichols died, and Clarina traveled back to the East to raise funds for the antislavery movement in Kansas. Meanwhile, her two sons fought alongside the abolitionist John Brown.
Clarina returned to Kansas and settled in the small community of Quindaro, where she struggled economically, supporting herself through speaking tours. During the Civil War, she and her daughter lived in Washington, D.C., serving as matrons at a Georgetown home for Black orphans and widows. Following the war, Clarina was back in Kansas, involved in the disappointing effort to incorporate female suffrage into the state’s constitution.
In her final years, the reformer moved to California and continued to write on behalf of women’s rights. Her death in 1885 caused little comment. Diane Eickhoff is to be congratulated for resurrecting the life and career of Clarina Nichols and bringing her legacy to the attention of contemporary readers.
