Clarina Nichols: Frontier Crusader for Women's Rights

by Diane Eickhoff

Overview

The remarkable story of one of the early women movement’s most effective leaders, a newspaper publisher who took the campaign for suffrage to Bleeding Kansas.

In the mid-1800s brave women began breaking the taboo of remaining silent at public gatherings. They began signing their names to petitions and flexing political muscle long before they had the vote. They wrote millions of words and published some of the most influential books and journals of their day. No one represented this early struggle — the small triumphs and discouraging setbacks — better than Clarina Howard Nichols (1810-1885), the subject of Diane Eickhoff’s engaging biography for YA readers and up.

Nichols was the victim of a failed marriage, a magnet to abused and mistreated women, and as a Vermont newspaper publisher, she had a strong voice at a time when women were just learning to speak up. When Nichols felt that progress wasn’t coming soon enough, she moved west, to Bleeding Kansas, where she would make history and show the world that feminism could thrive on the frontier.

Booklist declared, “The name Clarina Nichols deserves to be placed next to those of such luminaries as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” and readers of this inspiring biography will see why.

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Product Details

BN ID:	2940164618704
Publisher:	Quindaro Press
Publication date:	10/01/2016
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Diane Eickhoff, an editor turned historian, published her first biography, Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women's Rights, with Quindaro Press in 2006. It was a Kansas Notable Book and a ForeWord Book of the Year.

Aaron Barnhart is lead critic for Primetimer.com. He was television critic for the Kansas City Star from 1997 to 2012.

—This text refers to the paperback edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 Growing Up

Vermont Girl 8

Learning Hard Lessons 15

A Promising Marriage 22

New York Trials 28

Finding George 36

Inventing Deborah 41

Part 2 Birth of a Movement

Seneca Falls 48

Coming Out 54

Worcester 60

Clarina Speaks Up 64

Gaining Courage 73

The World Is on the Move 81

Part 3 Westward for Freedom

Winning Wisconsin 92

A Country Divided 99

Meat, Mush, Molasses 106

Prairie Home 114

Part 4 The Fight for Rights

Tinderbox 124

Bleeding Kansas 128

Quindaro 139

Caroline 145

Wyandotte 152

Part 5 The Enduring Struggle

Frontier Justice 166

Interrupted by War 173

The Campaign of 67 182

There Can Be No Failure 189

Epilogue 201

A Quick History of the World's First Women's Rights Movement 203

For Further Reading 213

Acknowledgments 215

Notes 217

Index 225

About the Author 231

Editorial Reviews

11/30/2015
Eickhoff has revised Revolutionary Heart, her 2006 biography of activist Clarina Nichols, to provide teenage readers an overview of the early days of the women’s rights movement. Eickhoff traces the roots of Nichols’s activism from her compassion for women trapped in troubled marriages to her experience as a wife of a difficult and unloving husband. After remarrying a newspaper editor and beginning to write for his paper, Nichols found her first public forum for her views, going on to serve at the front lines of the fight for women’s social, political, and economic liberties. Readers will gain a sense of the bravery and conviction it took for Nichols and other women to challenge unjust and ingrained ideologies in order to ensure freedom for future generations. Ages 12–up. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Outside Vermont, Kansas, and Ukiah, California, few people have heard of Clarina Howard Nichols, even though she was just as involved in the women’s rights movement as more iconic figures such as Susan B. Anthony. Here Eickhoff adapts her well-received biography of Nichols, Revolutionary Heart (2006), for younger readers. Nichols grew up with parents who valued her education and saw firsthand the injustice most women faced in the nineteenth century. After her first marriage, she cemented her desire to change the plight of women, but it was in her second marriage that she received the encouragement, platform, and experience to become actively involved in the fight for women’s rights. Eickhoff keeps the sentences short and direct, and with pages festooned with photos of key players and historic documents, young readers learning about the suffrage movement in the U.S. will find plenty to keep them engaged. Though it’s not as flashy as other accounts of the period, its subject is unique and will satisfy students looking for something outside typical report topics.

04/01/2016
Gr 7 Up—Eickhoff introduces Clarina Nichols, an often overlooked Vermont newspaper publisher who played an important role in the beginnings of the women's movement. As a child growing up in 19th-century Vermont, Nichols was often witness to acts of injustice and abuse toward the women of her town. This provided her with the motivation to pursue a career in journalism and to use that position to advocate and become a leader for the women's rights, abolition, and temperance movements. Combining primary sources with an engaging narrative of Nichols's life, this title takes care to frame her personal struggles within the larger context of the women's movement. However, it must be mentioned that the text does nothing to address the intersection of issues facing women of color, and it fails to acknowledge that this was primarily a white women's movement. This is a problematic oversight that will require work on the part of educators when using this title in a discussion. VERDICT The relative obscurity of Nichols's life makes this a good choice for biography or women's studies collections, but beware of its limitations.—Elizabeth Nicolai, Anchorage Public Library, AK

School Library Journal