“Revolutionary Heart” The Life of Clarina Nichols and the
Pioneering Crusade for Women’s Rights” by Diane Eickhoff, 268p.
2008
Clarina Nichols was born on January 25, 1810, and died on Jan. 11, 1885, the unsung
women’s rights editor and leader who worked for more than 50 years on a
variety of issues.
She worked on legislature to grant married
women joint property rights and inheritance rights for widows. She also was active in prohibition circles,
health and exercise improvements, abolition of slavery, and suffrage. In 1850 she attended the first 2-day National
Women’s Rights Convention with Pauline Wright Davis, Lucretia Mott, Ernestine Rose,
Antoinette Brown, Harriot Hunt, and Frederick Douglass.
Horace Greeley
asked Lydia Fowler and Clarina Nichols to speak for a bill in Wisconsin giving mothers
control of children if fathers were drunkards.
They spoke to 30,000 people in 43 towns, and state law was passed.
By 1853 Nichols
was a full time lecturer. In 1854 she
moved to Kansas with her family and eventually Kansas was a free state in 1857.
Proslavery forces were eventually defeated.
However after a hard-fought
campaign the right to vote was defeated in 1857.
There may be other women who need to be acknowledged for
their roles in advancing women’s rights.
Please let me know about any women who may have done this so I can read
and write about their accomplishments.
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