Meddling in politics : Clarina Howard Nichols and antebellum political culture

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 27-63

  Blackwell, Marilyn Schultz ^a  

^a St John's School   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849519007     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (157)

1. [Clarina Irene Howard Nichols], "The Paupers' Removal," Windham County Democrat (Brattleboro), Mar. 2, 1853
2. See Sylvia D. Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman's Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Bloomington, IN, 1995), 54-55
3. For the ideology of the "true woman," see Barbara Welter, "The Cult of Tme Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), 151-75
4. T.D.S. Bassett, "Nichols, Clarina Irene Howard," in Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T.James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 2: 625-627
5. Joseph G. Gambone, ed. "The Forgotten Feminist of Kansas: The Papers of Clarina I. H. Nichols, 1854-1885," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 39 (Spring 1973), 12-25
6. See for example, Aileen Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York, 1965)
7. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, 1959)
8. Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, 1978)
9. Keith Melder, Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Woman's Rights Movement, 1800-1850 (New York, 1977)
10. Steven M. Buechler, Women's Movements in the United States: Woman Suffrage, Equal Rights, and Beyond (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), 17-23
11. Nancy Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca, 1984)
12. Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1998)
13. Hoffret, When Hens Crow
14. Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 5-42
15. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African-American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington, IN, 1998)
16. For a review of recent scholarship on women's separate culture that expands the dimensions of the movement racially and internationally, see Lori D. Ginzberg, "Re-Viewing the First Wave," Feminist Studies, 28 (Summer 2002), 419-34
17. Kathryn Kish Sklar, "'Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation': American and British Women at the World Antislavery Convention, London, 1840," in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Home (Ithaca, 1994), 302. Sklar defines women's political cultures broadly, from participation in benevolent societies, to activism promoting the advancement of women, to informal partisan politics
18. For women's political influence and the problem of partisanship in the antebellum period, see Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, 1990), 67-97
19. For women as representatives of civic virtue, see Ruth M. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs, 13 (Autumn 1987), 37-58
20. See Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, 2000)
21. Rosemarie Zagarri, "Gender and the First Party System," in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (Charlottesville, VA, 1998), 118-215
22. Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1998), 71-102
23. Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997), 13-18
24. Robert J. Dinkins, Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920 (Westport, CT, 1995), 30-50
25. Christopher J. Olsen, "Respecting 'The Wise Allotment of Our Sphere': White Women and Politics in Mississippi, 1840-1860," Journal of Women's History, 11 (Autumn 1999), 104-125
26. Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, "Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840: Three Perspectives from Massachusetts," Journal of the Early Republic, 17 (Summer 1997), 277-315
27. Janet L. Coryell, "Superseding Gender: The Role of the Woman Politico in Antebellum Partisan Politics," in Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Alison M. Parker and Stephanie Cole (College Station, TX, 2000), 84-112
28. Melanie Susan Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854-1924 (Urbana, 2001), 10-13
29. For women's political activity and nineteenth-century party systems, see Ronald P. Formisano, "The 'Party Period' Revisited," Journal of American History, 86 (June 1999), 112-19
30. Lori D. Ginzberg, "Moral Suasion is Moral Balderdash: Women, Politics and Social Activism in the 1850s," Journal of American History, 73 (Dec. 1986), 601-10
31. Formisano, "'Party Period' Revisited," 116
32. For controversy over women's antislavery activism, see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity (Chapel Hill, 2003)
33. For woman's movement activism, see Faye Dudden, "New York Strategy: The New York Woman's Movement and the Civil War," in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York, 2002), 56-76
34. Lori Ginzberg's analysis of conservative women who either dropped out or turned to institution building fails to capture the strategy Nichols chose. See Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 98-126
35. For the way political realignments opened avenues for women, see Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, 13-18
36. Formisano, "'Party Period' Revisited," 116-18
37. For the provincial middle-class, see Catherine E. Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1999), 7-17, 190-213
38. For the link between class and gender identity in the era, see Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 23-25
39. th, 1853 (New York, 1853), 57. My concept of political style is derived from, Michael McGerr, "Political Style and Women's Power, 1830-1930," Journal of American History, 77 (Dec. 1990), 865-66
40. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 52-54
41. Bassett, "Nichols," 2: 625-27
42. Gambone, ed. "Forgotten Feminist," 12-13
43. Nichols, "Dear Herald," Herald of Freedom (Lawrence), May 17, 1856, in Gambone, ed., "Forgotten Feminist," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 39 (Summer 1973), 249
44. See also, Nichols, "Editors Journal," The Woman's Journal (Boston), July 5, 1879, in Gambone, ed., "Forgotten Feminist," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 40 (Autumn 1974), 435-36
45. For a partial explanation of Nichols's first marriage, see "'The Union' and Mrs. Nichols in a New Dress," Freedom's Champion (Atchison), Feb. 25, 1860
46. Bassett, "Nichols," 625
47. "A Wife as is a Wife," The Lily, 2 (Jan. 1, 1850), 6
48. [Nichols], "For the Daughter of a deceased Friend," Windham County Democrat, June 9, 1842
49. Windham County Democrat, Dec. 30, 1847
50. For advice, see Windham County Democrat, Nov. 28, 1849; Mar. 16, 1843; Oct. 2, 1845; "Hints to Housekeepers" reprinted in The Lily, 3 (Feb. 1851), 11. Few issues of the Democrat, which ran from late 1836 to 1853, exist. Nichols edited from 1843 to 1849 without formally identifying her editorial position
51. For women's literary tradition and memorial poetry in New England, see Catherine E. Kelly, "Between Town and Country: New England Women and the Creation of a Provincial Middle Class, 1820-1860," (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1992), 373-76
52. For temperance discourse, see David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, The Serpent in the cup: Temperance in American Literature (Amherst, MA, 1997), 4-6
53. For the relationship between the antebellum temperance movement and women's rights, see Ian R. Tyrell, "Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830-1860," Civil War History, 28 (June 1992), 128-52
54. Jed Dannebaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana, 1984), 180-211
55. For rural advice literature, see Kelly, New England Fashion, 223-27
56. For politics and the press, see T.D.S. Bassett, "Vermont Politics and the Press in the 1840s," Vermont History, 47 (Summer 1979), 196-213
57. nd ed., New York, 1966), 78-85
58. Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850 (Cambridge, UK, 1987), 254-62
59. Bassett, Growing Edge, 78-79
60. For Clarina Nichols's aversion to the nomination of Lewis Cass, see Nichols to Susan B. Anthony, Oct. 30, 1880, in Gambone, ed., "Forgotten Feminist," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 41 (Autumn 1974), 448
61. For the Democratic Party in Vermont and antislavery, see Ludlum, Social Ferment, 188-98. The Vermont Liberty Party, organized in 1841, merged with the Free Soil Party in 1848
62. Edward Brynn, "Vermont's Political Vacuum of 1845-1856 and the Emergence of the Republican Party," Vermont History, 38 (Spring 1970), 113-23
63. Windham County Democrat, Dec. 30, 1847
64. For women politicos' use of pseudonyms, humor, and womanly images, see Coryell, "Superseding Gender," 96-102
65. Vermont Phoenix (Brattleboro), Oct. 29, 1847
66. Windham County Democrat, June 6, 1849
67. [Nichols], "The Paupers' Removal," Windham County Democrat, Mar. 2, 1853
68. Nichols, "For the Brattleboro Eagle," Brattleboro Eagle, Feb. 24, 1854
69. see also, Nichols "Reminiscences," in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, ed., History Of Woman Suffrage, 1: 175-77
70. Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, 62-66
71. For the connection to rights consciousness, see Elizabeth B. Clark, '"The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America," Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 475-87
72. Windham County Democrat, July 16, 1851
73. See Hoffert, When Hens Crow, 85-88
74. Martha Watson, A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910 (Tuscaloosa, 1991), 15
75. Okker, Our Sister Editors, 18-25, 204. Nichols later criticized Swisshelm, whom she found inconsistent in her views
76. See Nichols, "Women and Temperance," The Lily, 4 (Apr. 1852), 30-31
77. Windham County Democrat, Apr. 20, 1853
78. Nichols, "Reminiscences," 172. None of Nichols's 1847 exposés are extant. She and the Whigs may have been influenced by debates over women's property rights at the New York constitutional convention of 1846. Whig governor and education reformer, Horace Eaton promoted separate estates in his 1847 message to the legislature. Whig senators voted overwhelmingly for separate estates, but Whigs in the House were divided on the issue. Democrats opposed separate estates but voted for a compromise bill that exempted a wife's real estate income and profits from a husband's debts
79. For the bipartisan nature of debate over the issue in New York, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women , Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, 1982), 150-55
80. See Acts and Resolves Passed By the Legislature of the State of Vermont at their October Session 1849 (Burlington, 1849), 14-15, 17-18
81. See also Richard H. Chused, "Married Women's Property Law, 1800-1850," Georgetown Law Journal, 71 (1983), 1359-425
82. Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, 115-26, 136-61
83. For the connection between homestead exemptions and married women's property laws, see Paul Goodman, "The Emergence of Homestead Exemption in the United States: Accommodation and Resistance to the Market Revolution, 1840-1880," Journal of American History, 80 (Sept. 1993), 488-89
84. [Nichols], "Notes by the Wayside," Windham County Democrat, July 7, 1852
85. The Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention Held at West Chester, PA. June 2d and 3d, 1852 (Philadelphia, 1852), 15
86. Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, ed., History Of Woman Suffrage, 1: 355
87. [Nichols], Windham County Democrat, July 16, Aug. 27, 1851; July 7, 1852
88. For Nichols's anxieties about public speaking, see Burlington Courier, Nov. 25, 1852
89. For the political nature of women's benevolence, see Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society," American Historical Review, 89 (June 1984), 620-47
90. For party activities, see Varon, We Mean to be Counted, 71-102
91. Olsen, "Respecting 'The Wise Allotment of Our Sphere.'"
92. Lori D. Ginzberg, '"The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder': Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought," American Quarterly, 46 (June 1994), 195-226
93. Julie Roy Jeffrey, "Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres," Journal of the Early Republic, 21 (Spring 2001), 79-93
94. For challenges to temperance speakers, see Anne C. Coon, Hear Me Patiently: Tlie Reform Speeches of Amelia Jenks Bloomer (Westport, CT, 1994), 177-80
95. For an analysis of Nichols's rhetorical strategies, see Adrienne Christiansen, "Clarina Howard Nichols: A Rhetorical Criticism of Selected Speeches," (M.A. Thesis, University of Kansas, 1987.)
96. Nichols, Responsibilities, 4, 16
97. For activists' biblical defense of natural rights, see Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism, 59-62
98. See also Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 283-88
99. For the spread of the Scottish Enlightenment tradition, see Rosemarie Zagarri, "The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America," William and Mary Quarterly, 55 (Apr. 1998), 203-30
100. For the literary elaboration of this paradigm, see Sarah Robbins, "The Future Good and Great of Our Land": Republican Mothers, Female Authors, and Domesticated Literacy in Antebellum New England," New England Quarterly, 75 (Dec. 2002), 562-591
101. For women's economic claims, see Reva Siegel, "Home as Work: The First Woman's Rights Claims Concerning Wives' Household Labor, 1850-1880," Yale Law Journal, 103 (Mar. 1994), 1117-118
102. See Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830-1860 (New York, 2000), 160-162
103. For the tension between separate spheres and republican ideology, see Ellen Carol DuBois, "Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820-1878," Journal of American History, 74 (Dec. 1987), 837-40. Many of the leaders came from Quaker, Unitarian, and Universalist backgrounds, participated in abolition and/or temperance, and challenged religious authority and the sanctity of marriage
104. Buechler, Women's Movements, 17-23
105. Judith Wellman, "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks." Journal of Women's History, 3 (Spring 1991), 9-37
106. Alice S. Rossi, ed. The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (Boston, 1973), 246-250
107. For activists and religious dissent, see Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 88-101
108. Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (New York, 2000), 61-73
109. For the rising status of women in the family and reform of women's property rights, see Marylynn Salmon, "Republican Sentiment, Economic Change, and the Property Rights of Women in American Law," in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, 1989), 447-75
110. Nichols met Anthony at the Syracuse convention in Sept. 1852 and maintained a warm but sporadic correspondence with her throughout her life. See Gambone, ed., "Forgotten Feminist," 17-18
111. Ida Husted Harper. The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1898-1908), 1: 66; 2: 595
112. For the concept of self-protection, see Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 37-9, 116-19
113. Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention, West Chester, 1852, 15
114. Bassett, Growing Edge, 79, 122
115. See Roth, Democratic Dilemma, 254-55. Edward Brynn asserts that temperance split the Democrats by 1853
116. See Brynn, "Vermont's Political Vacuum," 120-23
117. For the politics of temperance in the North, see Tyrrell, Sobering Up, 254-82
118. Samuel B. Hand, Jeffrey D. Marshall, and D. Gregory Sanford, " 'Little Republics': The Structure of State Politics in Vermont, 1854-1920," Vermont History, 53 (Summer 1985), 148-49
119. Nichols, "Reminiscences," 173-74. Nichols spoke on Friday evening, Oct. 29, 1852
120. [Nichols], "Woman's Property Rights," Green Mountain Freeman (Montpelier), Nov. 4, 1852
121. Nichols, "Reminiscences," 174. Green Mountain Freeman(Montpelier), Nov. 4, 1852
122. For the temperance vote, see Vermont, Journal of the House, 1852, 106, 250-52
123. For prohibition and Vermont politics, see, Ludlum, Social Ferment, 80-85
124. Hand, Marshall, and Sanford, "'Little Republics,'"148-49
125. For the link between property rights and suffrage see Windham County Democrat, July 7, 1825
126. The Lily, 4 (Oct. 1852), 84
127. See Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, ed., History Of Woman Suffrage, 1: 356
128. For similar arguments, see Middlebury Register, July 16, 1850
129. Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention, New York City, 1853, 95. The Republican coalition comprised Whig, Free Soil, and temperance men
130. Nichols, "Reminiscences," 185-86, 193 (quotation)
131. Nichols, "To the Editor," Boston Evening Telegraph, Oct. 31, 1854
132. For the significance of gender and domesticity on the frontier, see Elizabeth Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West," in The Women's West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman, OK, 1987), 145-64
133. Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence, KS, 1988), 2-13
134. Nichols, "Reminiscences," 193
135. See Daniel W. Wilder, Annals of Kansas (Topeka, 1875), 73-83
136. For the racial component of the woman movement, see Louise Michele Newman, White Women's Rights: the Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York, 1999)
137. Nichols, "Reminiscences," 187-89. In her memoir Nichols characterized these lectures as "semi-political labors," perhaps not wanting to admit her earlier connections to the Republican Party, which became a disappointment in subsequent political battles
138. For Nichols and the Republican party, see Melanie S. Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854-1924 (Urbana, 2001), 20
139. See Wilder, Annals of Kansas, 168-82
140. William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago, 1883), Part 56
141. See also Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, ed., History Of Woman Suffrage, 2: 929. Other MWRA activists included Augustus's brother John O. Wattles and his wife Esther from Ohio
142. For pertinent sections of the To-peka (1855), Lecompton (1857) and Leavenworth (1858) constitutions, see Wilder, Annals of Kansas, 83, 143, 179
143. Wendell Phillips, treasurer of the Francis Jackson Woman's Rights Fund, agreed to support the Kansas campaign after Augustus Wattles sought his aid. Only three delegates voted for black suffrage at the convention; see G. Raymond Gaeddert, The Birth of Kansas (Lawrence, KS, 1940), 49-57
144. New York Daily Times, Aug. 1, 1859
145. Gaeddert, Birth of Kansas, 10-16. Both parties supported the Homestead Act, providing 160 acres of land to settlers. The Republican platform advocated free soil in the territories, no interference with slavery where it exists, an end to the slave trade, no restrictions on naturalized citizens, and federal aid for railroad construction and other internal improvements
146. Herald of Freedom (Lawrence), July 2, 1859
147. Nichols, "Reminiscences," 190
148. Nichols to Wattles, July 14, 1859, Moneka Women's Rights Association Papers
149. See Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 16-24
150. Dudden, "New York Strategy," 57-61
151. Carolyn DeSwarte Gifford, "Frances Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's Conversion to Woman Suffrage," in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR, 1995), 117-33
152. Michael Lewis Goldberg, An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore, 1997), 86-126
153. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 120-49
154. Eileen Boris, "The Power of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the 'Political,'" Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 2 (Fall 1989), 25-49
155. For the 1867 campaign, see Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 79-104
156. Sandra A. Madsen, "1867 Campaign for Woman Suffrage," (Ph.D. diss. University of Kansas, 1975)
157. For the ideological shift in the woman movement, see Dubois, "Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers," 848-52