The Responsibilities of Woman: A Speech by Mrs. C. I. H. Nichols, at the Woman's Rights Convention, Worcester, October 15, 1851 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Responsibilities of Woman: A Speech by M...)
Excerpt from The Responsibilities of Woman: A Speech by Mrs. C. I. H. Nichols, at the Woman's Rights Convention, Worcester, October 15, 1851
I would say, in reference to the rights of woman, it has come to be forgotten that, as the mother of the race, her rights are the rights of men also, the rights of her sons. As a mother, I may Speak to you, freemen, fathers, of the rights of my sons of every mother's sons - to the most perfect and Vigorous development of their energies which the mother can secure to them by the appli cation and through the use of'azz her God-given powers of body or of mind. It is in behalf of our sons, the future men of the re public, as well as for our daughters, its future mothers, that we claim the full development of our energies by education, and legal protection in the control of all the issues and profits of' ourselves, called property.
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Clarina Irene Howard Nichols was an American reformer, editor, and publicist.
Background
Clarina Irene Howard Nichols was born on January 25, 1810 in Townshend, Vermont, United States. She was of English and Welsh ancestry. Clarina was the daughter of Chapin and Birsha (Smith) Howard and the grand-daughter of Levi Howard or Hayward who removed to Townshend from Milford, Massachussets, about 1775.
Education
Clarina Howard was educated in Vermont public schools and for a year at an academy.
Career
She became a teacher in public and private schools and is said to have founded a young ladies' seminary in Herkimer, New York, about 1835.
Her husband's illness forced her, soon after their marriage, to take the financial and editorial control of his paper. It was in these columns that she began the work for woman's rights that marked the whole of her long career. She wrote editorials from 1843 to 1853, when the paper was discontinued.
A series of articles, published in 1847 and addressed to the voters of Vermont, dealt with the property disabilities of women and were important in influencing the passage, in 1848, of the Vermont law to secure to a wife the real estate owned at marriage or thereafter acquired by gift, devise, or inheritance even against the debts of the husband, with the corollary right of disposing of her property by will as if "sole. "
In 1850 she began speaking for woman's suffrage in her native state, in New Hampshire, and in Massachusetts. In September and October 1853 she traveled 900 miles in the state of Wisconsin as agent of the woman's state temperance society.
In October 1854, with her two eldest sons, she joined a company of 225 emigrants to Kansas.
She went directly to Lawrence and at once began lecturing and speaking on woman's rights. Her husband followed with another party but died a few months after his arrival.
She returned to Vermont to settle his estate and, while in the East, lectured on Kansas and its problems. In the winter and spring of 1856 she also wrote for the Herald of Freedom, published at Lawrence, Kansas, a series of articles dealing with women's legal disabilities.
Upon her return to Kansas in 1857 with her daughter and her youngest son she went to Wyandotte County, where for some years she made her home. When in 1859 the constitutional convention for Kansas met at Wyandotte, she, knitting in hand, the only woman present, sat through its sessions, "watching every step of the proceedings, and laboring with members to so frame the Constitution as to make all citizens equal before the law".
After the Kansas woman's rights association was formed in 1859, as its representative she attended the session of the first state legislature at Topeka in 1860 and by invitation addressed both houses. For the two years preceding this legislative session she had spoken in the towns and hamlets of Missouri that lay along the Kansas border.
In 1860 and 1861 she lectured in Wisconsin and Ohio.
From December 1863 to March 1866 she was in Washington, D. C. , writing in the military and revenue departments, and acting as matron in the home for colored orphans.
She returned to Kansas in 1869 and two years later removed to Mendocino County, Calalifornia.
(Excerpt from The Responsibilities of Woman: A Speech by M...)
Personality
"A good writer, an effective speaker, and a preeminently brave women, " she was "gifted with that rarest of virtues, common sense. " She "may be said to have sown the seeds of liberty in three states in which she resided, " Vermont, Kansas, and California.
Connections
On April 21, 1830, at Townshend she was married to her first husband, Justin Carpenter. On March 6, 1843, she was married, also at Townshend, to George W. Nichols who was the publisher of the Windham County Democrat at Brattleboro.