This episode charts key moments and quotes from the life of Clarina Irene Howard Nichols (1810 – 1885), one of the nation's first female newspaper editors/publishers and a prominent and highly effective human rights crusader, abolitionist and suffragette. Born in Townsend, VT she spent her early years in nearby Brattleboro, where she became the editor/publisher of the Windham County Democrat newspaper, expanding coverage to include women’s rights and equality for all. She was the first woman to address the Vermont Legislature. Left to support herself and her children after a failed marriage and divorce, she began writing for the Windham County Democrat newspapers and later married the editor, eventually taking over the role as one of the earliest female newspaper heads in the country. The episode provides an overview of her life in the first 6 minutes, then discusses her early education, her troubled marriage and subsequent divorce, places her in the bustling milieu of Brattleboro of that era, hear excerpts of her writing and address to the Vermont Legislature and in her newspaper columns including her 'character writing' as Deborah Van Winkle, her birth as an activist and suffragette at the early Women's Rights conventions and as a shaper of the new Kansas constitution and ardent abolitionist throughout the Civil War era when she moved to Washington DC for a time. Her dedication to writing and activism continued throughout her life in California, where she followed her son and eventually died. She is buried in Mendocino County.
Script, Audio Production/Editing, Narration: Donna Blackney; Production Assistance and Executive Producing: Lissa Weinmann.
Commentary/Research: Nancy Olson with additional research from: Marilyn Blackwell (U. Mass Amherst), Dan DeWalt (also original piano composition and performance) and Rolf Parker-Houghton. Voice of Clarina: Shannon Ward; Voice of Sen. Joseph Barrett: John Loggia
CLARINA HOWARD NICHOLS
HOST LISSA WEINMANN: Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
ACTRESS READING VOICE OF CLARINA (Folksy Music) 'It isn't a woman's vocation to write politics. Her sphere is at home,' says one and another. And we always say, are men astonished? Are you gentle reader? And did you think that Mrs. Nichols medals with politics because she finds their details congenial with her tastes? Or for any reason but that politics medals with the happiness of the home and its most sacred relations? We claim that man has proved himself incompetent to be the judge of our needs. His laws concerning our interests show that his intelligence fails to prescribe means and conditions for the discharge of our duties. We are the best judges of the duties, as well as the qualifications appropriate to our own Department of Labor. (applause)
DONNA BLACKNEY, NARRATOR: One of Vermont's least known but most influential literary figures is Clarina Irene Howard Nichols, a writer, editor and early women's rights activist. Born in 1810 in West Townsend, Clarina was the fortunate daughter of Chapin and Bursha Howard, who were very liberal and progressive parents by the standards of their time. They believed in education for girls as well as boys, and gave Clarina the rare advantage of literacy. Her father was responsible for distributing money to the town's poor, so as a child, Clarina became acutely aware of the extreme hardships of women and children who'd been abandoned. The combination of her enlightened girlhood education and her direct exposure to women's oppression made Clarinna uniquely positioned as an adult woman to scrutinize and challenge the patriarchal status quo. She did so with the writer's keen wit, with an editor’s sharp instinct for what readers want, and with her daughters, wives and mothers primary sense of responsibility to others.
For Clarina, that sense of responsibility led her to campaign not only for women's rights. She also joined the temperance movement to fight the abuse of alcohol and was a lifelong anti-slavery activist. (Printing press sounds) Clarina’s career as a writer and activist blossomed during Brattleboro publishing heyday. The town's first newspaper had appeared in 1797. And by the time Clarina joined the scene around 1840, several rival newspapers were keeping the town's paper mills and printers constantly busy. (train sounds) With the completion of new train tracks in 1849 and the growing popularity of the Wesselhoeft Water-cure, Brattleboro attracted intellectual firepower from far and wide, including prominent authors and journalists such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and numerous others whose work was often printed and published in the town.
Printing and publishing were one of few businesses in which educated women could aspire to succeed on their own merits. Newspapers gave women the chance to have their voices heard and in Clarina’s case, her writing led her to become the first woman ever to address the Vermont Legislature in 1852. Clarissa then gained notoriety traveling further afield as demands for women's rights and abolition intensified nationally. She became a popular speaker and lecturer alongside the better remembered activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Clarina is most fondly recalled and revered in Kansas, where she vigorously and successfully campaigned for women's rights to be enshrined in its state constitution. Today, the Brattleboro Words Trail ensures that Karina's historic accomplishments are fully recognized and celebrated in her home state of Vermont.
ACTRESS’ VOICE OF CLARINA Educate your daughters for practical life, and you have endowed them better than if you had given them fortunes. When a young girl of 14, I said to my father, 'Give me education instead of a setting out in the world. If you can give me one, if I marry and end poor in this world's goods, I can educate my children myself. If my husband should be unfortunate, the sheriff can take his goods. But no creditor can attach the capital invested here.' And my education has not been only bred, but an inexhaustible fund of enjoyment and all the rest of my life.
NARRATOR: When Clarina Howard was born in 1810, the small community of farmsteads around Townsend was already changing as the industrial revolution took hold in Vermont. Economic growth came hand-in-hand with social upheaval. Clarina’s upbringing would prepare her to play a major role in altering the social fabric of her time and place.
NANCY OLSON, RESEARCHER: Clarina had so many attributes and experiences that came together around what became her life's work. Her parents gave her as much education as was available, very unusual in her era. The parents had aspirations for their children, but also gave their children room to find out who they were. Her father was the overseer of the poor. People had to come in person to beg basically for money, and they used to come to the kitchen door. And it was mostly women telling these tales of woe, talking about how their husbands were drunkards and abusive or had abandoned the family. Clarina was allowed to sit in and listen to these women tell their stories. That was really, I think, the genesis of her realization that women were at such a tremendous disadvantage in the law. These women were absolutely desperate. They had no way to earn money or if they did earn butter and egg money, their husbands legally owned it. I think she never -- I'm sure she never -- thought to find herself in a similar position. But what she had that many of those women did not was an education. Clarina was an excellent student, loved school, loved writing. Her parents gave her a writing desk for her 12th birthday. Clarina attended the Pressey School in Townsend, and her graduation essay was entitled…
CLARINA: ‘Comparative of a Scientific and an Ornamental Education to Females’,
OLSON: ...which was a critique of the kind of education that boys received compared to the kind of education that girls received. Boys were educated for the ministry or law or medicine, and so they took mathematics and sciences and histories and girls were pretty much educated for being ornamental. So they took embroidery and French and drawing and painting to prepare them to be the appropriate wives for professional men.
NARRATOR: After graduating, Clarina tutored local students, and then in 1830, at the age of 20, she married Justin Carpenter of Guilford, Vermont. They seemed well matched in their Baptist faith and in having both taken the sobriety pledge of the temperance movement that was gaining momentum. The couple moved to the wilds of upstate New York, where they started their own school, Brockport Academy, as well as a girls’ seminary
OLSON: She had as a model her parents’ marriage. She was most intent on being the best wife and mother that she could be when she and Justin got married. They were very involved in the temperance movement together. The temperance movement, because it came often through churches and women, were the most active people in churches. Probably two thirds of an active congregation would be women. It was a way for women to become active politically in an accepted way. It gave them experience in speaking, in organizing, getting petitions, skills that became really important to them as they began to expand into the arena of women's rights. Approaching politics from the idea that women were responsible for the education of children and therefore ought to have a voice in school meetings. So there were these sort of gradual steps in her development as an activist.
NARRATOR: While her husband shared Clarina's ideals and ambitions for their family, their marriage suffered when Justin proved unable to support them.
OLSON: Justin Carpenter just couldn't make a go of it. He seemed to have been very erratic. She had a very generous dowry of $1500 that her father had given her, and Justin dissipated most of it. He was a trained lawyer. He had a college education. He started newspapers. He started schools. My personal interpretation of his behavior, he sounds pretty bipolar, but he would have these sort of manic phases where he would have all these ideas and then sink into despair and depression, and then he would disappear. Although, I mean, they did have three children, so it makes me think that relations between them were always terrible. And so it must have been very hard for her not understanding what was going on. Justin Carpenter left her providing for the family, which she did the best. She knew how because she had an education. She could write, she could read, she could teach, and those skills gave her a way out. She left her husband to go back to her parents' house with her children, which was a wrenching decision to have failed at marriage. She was very vulnerable until they were divorced. Her husband could have at any time destroyed her reputation because she had done the unthinkable. She had left her husband and taken the children. She never talked about that. She wanted to sort of draw a curtain over that and present herself as someone to be emulated, rather than someone to be talked about behind the hand.
NARRATOR: It was during this low ebb in her life when Clarina began to write in earnest. It was a way to express her feelings and became a welcome source of income to her talent for writing would in fact turn out to be life changing.
OLSON: Both her parents were willing to take care of her children. She left her children with her parents frequently and to then use writing as a way of addressing her emotional disequilibrium. Then to, in that very tentative way, start sending stuff out. That was a huge step as a woman to send her writing out to publications in Brattleboro. I'm amazed at that, that she had the courage to do that to me. To me, a sort of cree de coeur is an essay that she sent to the Vermont Phoenix was called ‘On disappointment”
CLARINA: A sensitive heart, unsupported by proportionate intellectual force, sinks beneath the rush of disappointment into insignificance. Let disappointment curdle the very springs of the soul, let the canker of undervalued affection, the chilling glance of selfish indifference blast the confidence that distills sweetness and the whole character undergoes a change, the unavoidable result of change in its hopes and motives. The effect of disappointed hopes is often seen developed in individual character, while its existence and secret influence are buried in the heart.
OLSON: That seems to me so much an expression of the sorrow and grief and discouragement she was feeling at that time. And then to get a positive response, then to start corresponding with George Washington Nichols, the editor of the Windham County Democrat. That correspondence evolved into a more personal relationship and then somewhat of a romantic relationship, according to George, Clarina pushed it in that direction. He seems to have been the kind of man that she should have married in the beginning.
He was thoughtful, he encouraged her writing as an advocate for the rights of women. And when he hired her as an editorial assistant, she could use her writing and her editorial skills to earn a living and then to have that blossom into a potential marriage. The idea that that was possible pushed her to get her divorce, which her father, who had served as a legislator, was able to help her with. Justin's family testified against him on her behalf at the hearing so she she got her divorce. And then within a month, she married George Nichols. They were married in 1843. She moved to his house in Brattleboro, leaving the kids with her parents. I mean, her parents were getting on at that point in age, so I'm sure her daughter, Boucher, had a lot of responsibility for what was going on there in the household. And basically Clarinna, from 1843, pretty much became de facto editor of the Windham County Democrat, which George was happy to have her do, and she thrived.
NARRATOR: Walking along Main Street in Brattleboro today, passing by, it's beautifully preserved Victorian buildings, it's fascinating to imagine the newlyweds Clarina and George Nichols arriving throughout the 1840s for their daily work at the Windham County Democrat.
OLSON: Clarina was one of the first female editors of a newspaper in the United States. She was an excellent writer, intelligent reader, but she didn't declare herself as the editor for many years. It was probably in the early 1850s when she finally put her name on the masthead as Mrs. C. H. Nichols.
It must have been a fascinating time. Brattleboro being this intellectual hub and of course, for her, she was such an eager intellect so interested in learning, discussing, conversing and to have the Wesselhoeft Water-cure here, to have people from the water-cure stay at her house. I mean, the house is huge. It's still there today. It's enormous. George Washington Nichols had two boys and six daughters with his first wife, and Fessenden and three of his daughters lived at the house when Katrina moved into it. And so with a new child that she and George had together – George Bainbridge Nichols was their child – she had a lot of help. And three of them were printers as well in the printing business. So there was just a lot of intellectual ferment. I mean, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stayed with the Nichols when he was a guest at the Wesselhoeft water-cure. So there's just a rich intellectual experience for her, and it must have been very heady and wonderful.
And as a printing town, there were all these printing offices and newspapers. Across the hall from the offices of the Windham County Democrat were the offices of the Semi Weekly Eagle, a very pro-slavery newspaper, whereas the Democrat, through Clarina’s editorship, took a position of abolition against slavery in a very politically active time. It gave Windham County readers a variety of viewpoints. There must have been some very lively discussions I can imagine between those two offices.
It seems to have been a characteristic of the middle and late 19th century to adopt these characters with very different backgrounds from the writer. The most well-known example of that is Huckleberry Finn. All the different dialects that Twain explores in that novel. And there were other writers and poets who did it– all men. But Clarina invented Dame Deborah Van Winkle, a country woman who gave Clarina the opportunity to ridicule, satirize and comment on the political ‘doings of the day’ without being attributed directly to Clarrina, of course, which is the whole point to having a character like that,
CLARINA SPEAKING AS DEBORAH VAN WINKLE: Mr. Editor, when I was a gal. I remember I used to hear a good deal, a dispute about whether women's intellectual faculties were equal to men's. It was the young men that always raised the question, and they used to debate it once at least every term and invite us gals to go and hear him. I used to feel kind of bad about it, but then I began to grow spunky after a while, seeing them that pretended to believe women inferior was generally the ones that always stood below us in the classes. So I resolved not to argue, but just to improve the faculties God had given me and trust to time and the growing interest in female education to prove women's equality.
OLSON: Her comments are given in this pseudo innocence, but gradually people began to realize that it was really Clarina. (Printing press sounds) In 1847, Carina ran a series of editorials that she wrote about the rights of women, the fact that women could not own property or inherit property as soon as they married their husbands owned it. Women could not have their own money. It belonged to their husbands, whether they earned it or inherited it. They could not have custody of the children. Fathers automatically had custody even if the father was abusive or abandoned the family. He still had legal custody of the children. Women were at a complete disadvantage that even the clothes that they wore belonged to their husbands. Again, drawing on her experience, listening to these stories of the women in her father's kitchen and her own experience, and just what she saw in front of her time and time again, based on that, she did a series of editorials promoting the rights of women to own property, to earn money to vote in school elections.
Clarina's unique approach was to come at this question of rights for women from the position of daughter, wife and mother. She also, as a devout Baptist, her religion was very important to her, apparently. She knew the Bible well, had read it many times and was able to counter the use of scripture by ministers and other men who quoted scripture, saying ‘This is why women don't have any rights.’ And she was able to also select from scripture support for women's rights rather than attack men for denying women's rights. She offered the idea that women as mothers had a responsibility to foster the health of their children, and anything that would help women fulfill that responsibility was worthwhile. So she was trying to persuade men to her viewpoint rather than challenging them for not providing those things
CLARINA: To the women in different towns of the county and state who are interested and to whom this may come: Sisters, reasons which I need not here specify move me to absent myself from my home field of labor for humanity. (Banjo music low in background) During a few weeks in which I had designed to make a special effort to procure signers to petitions asking for our Legislature to restore to married women their alienated property rights and the equal custody and guardianship of their children. Also to renew the petition presented last year, asking for women an equal vote in the district school meetings. There are many of you, my sisters, who have expressed a wish to do something in this cause. If only you had the ability. I now appeal to you: Will you cut out the petitions which follow?
OLSON: The series of editorials impressed Senator Larkin Mead, Senior of Vermont, so he invited her to speak to the Legislature. They were all men, of course. She talked to George about it and said, ‘You know, should I do this? Should I not?’ And he said, ‘How can you not? You have to.’ So she did. She went to Montpelier, and she was the first woman to address the Vermont Legislature. She spoke from rudimentary notes for about an hour. There was one legislator who was going to embarrass her by holding up a pair of trousers.
NARRATOR: Senator Joseph Barrett, chairman of the House Educational Committee, was also editor of The Rutland Herald, and Clarina’s bitter opponent. He taunted her before her speech, saying:
VOICE OF BARRETT: If the lady wants to make herself ridiculous, let her make herself as ridiculous as possible. But I don't believe in this scramble for the britches!
NARRATOR: But Clarina brilliantly undercut Senator Barrett and turned the tables on him.
CLARINA: In concluding my plea before the house, I said that though I had earned the dress I wore, my husband owned it, not of his own well, but by a law adopted by bachelors and other women's husbands. (gasp sounds) I will not appeal to the gallantry of this house, but to its manliness, will it not be quite time enough for them to taunt us with being after their wardrobes when they shall have restored to us the legal right to our own? (sounds of gasps and cheers)
OLSON: And that apparently the Legislature just broke out in stamping and cheering and clapping.
CLARINA: A crowd of ladies from the galleries met me at the foot of the speaker's desk, exclaiming with earnest expressions of sympathy: “We did not know before what women's rights were Mrs. Nichols, but we are FOR women's rights!”
OLSON: It was a stellar performance and really got her ready because shortly after that, she was speaking to the Women's Rights Convention.
NARRATOR: The first National Women's Rights Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850. It was a galvanizing experience for Clarina and the 1000 women in attendance. They formalized their demands for voting and property rights and to be admitted to higher education, medicine, the ministry and other professions.
OLSON: She met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She met Susan B. Anthony. She met Matilda Joslyn Gage. She met the Grimkes. It must have been an amazing experience for her. She had been working fairly much in isolation in pretty rural Vermont. And then suddenly There were hundreds of women intent on the same thing. So the first year she was a participant. The next year, she attended the second National Women's Rights Convention as a speaker, and she spoke for 90 plus minutes, basically without notes.
CLARINA: I shall say very little of women's rights, but I would lay the acts at the root of the tree. I would impress upon you women's responsibilities and the means fully to discharge them before heaven. And here, let me call your attention to my position that the law, which alienates the wives’ right to the control of her own property. Her own earnings lie at the foundation of all her social and legal wrongs. It is in behalf of our sons, the future men of the Republic, 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'. It would ill become us who are protected by love or shielded by circumstances to hold our peace while our sisters and their dependent children are mutilated in their hopes and their entire powers of existence by wrongs against which we can protest till the legislators of the land shall hear and heed! (cheers and applause sounds)
OLSON: She spoke eloquently and she wowed the crowd again. She wanted to present herself as an appropriate moral model, not necessarily superior, but a moral model of womanhood. The provider for children so that the next generation would be moral models as well.
NARRATOR; Clarina’s powerful oratory reached beyond the women's conventions. She soon found herself in demand far from home and family in Vermont. In the autumn of 1853, she was asked to be a speaker on a temperance tour of Wisconsin. She traveled 900 miles and spoke in 43 towns to an estimated total of 30,000 people.
OLSON: Just thinking of traveling in that time, it must have been excruciating by wagon and carriage and horseback, and she was very well received. She became this very popular speaker. She was very impressed with what she saw on her Wisconsin tour. The bounty of the land, these women working alongside their husbands and fathers and brothers on the frontier – that gave her a hope. She said that out West, it didn't seem that ‘women's sphere’ was limited the way it was back east. And so she she just saw it as a land of opportunity.
CLARINA: Dear Democrat, I have just returned from a trip of 50 miles into the country from Milwaukee to Delavan. I found a plank road all the way toll gates collecting at the rate of two cents a mile on our two horse carriage. I regret that I had not counted the number of teams conveying grain to Milwaukee, which we passed in our journey on some of these loads of green mountain high women tidily dressed were seated beside men, evidently their husbands or fathers, and apparently unconscious of the 'Great War of Spheres', which is being waged elsewhere with so much spirit.
OLSON: So she thought, 'Well, I could make a living lecturing, maybe. But to do that, I need to not be working on the paper.' So the last issue is December of 1853, when she decided that they would move to Kansas territory where she felt she could have more influence in a place that didn't have a state constitution yet. The success of her lecture tours, the temperance work, the evolution of that into women's rights work and anti-slavery work. Kansas getting ready to come into the union, was it going to be a slave state? Was going to be a free state? All of that persuaded her that she needed to move west. She was also, I mean, she had a reputation in Vermont. It was not all positive. There were people who criticized her for the work she was doing and she thought, well, fresh start.
The territory, when it began to work at becoming a state and to seek admission to the union as a state, they had four different constitutional conventions over several years time, but the Wyandotte Convention was the final one. And because of her writing and her reputation, and because of the work she had done out there continuing to promote voting for women rights, property rights for women, custody rights for women, she was the only woman invited to attend the convention, and she did. She sat right down front. She was there every day, knitting, listening attentively. And she managed to get into the Kansas Constitution a level of rights for women that were rare, so that they had voting rights in school affairs, child custody rights and property rights, and a right to an education. Even though she continued to write and sent letters and articles back east, it took her out of the scene. She was very active in Kansas, but all the action was in the east. I think one of the reasons that she's not well known is that she left the area and her time was taken up with other things.
NARRATOR; As the Civil War loomed, Clarina was preoccupied with the harsh realities of life on the frontier. She was 43 and her husband was 68 when they moved west. He died of an injury soon after. Clarina’s children joined her in Kansas and the family became directly active in the anti-slavery movement. Her sons took part in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and Clarina became the associate editor of an abolitionist newspaper. When war broke out in 1861, Clarina and her daughter moved for a while to Washington, D.C., where they ran a home for orphaned slave children. Clarina worked secretly to aid the Union and assisted escaping slaves. She advocated strongly her whole life for the end of slavery, an impulse attributed by some critics to her maternalism, rather than to a full commitment to racial equality. After the war ended in 1865, Clarina remained out West until her death at age 75. She never lived in Vermont again.
OLSON [00:07:48] Her son, Aurelius, was living in California, and so she moved out there to spend the last years of her life with him and his family and died there in 1885. And so while she's really well known in the West, she's not that well-known in Vermont. Her experiences in Vermont shaped her, the family that she was born into, the experiences she had and observed, the education she received here, running the newspaper, a very unusual environment in which she could develop fully. All of those experiences helped to create the person she became. In her day, she was as well known, maybe even better known than Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony. Clarina deserves more recognition than she's received.
CLARINA: In taking from us our means of self-development, men expect us to discharge our duties even as the Jews were expected to make brick without straw. If we are not fitted to be capable wives and mothers, if we make poor brick, it is because our brother man has stolen our straw. Give us back our straw brothers! There is plenty of it, and we will make you good brick.
PODCAST HOST LISSA WEINMANN: This podcast's script, audio production/editing and narration were done by Donna Blackney with assistance and executive producing by me, Lissa Weinmann. Commentary and research is Nancy Olson with additional research from: Marilyn Blackwell (U. Mass Amherst), Dan DeWalt (also original piano composition and performance) and Rolf Parker-Houghton. The voice of Clarina is Shannon Ward and the voice of Sen. Joseph Barrett is John Loggia. Thanks for listening to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.