Frontier Feminist: Clarina Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (review)

Clarina Nichols is an important figure in nineteenth-century U.S. history, and this book does her justice. Blackwell and Oertel have provided readers with an accessible, meticulously documented, beautifully contextualized scholarly biography. Nichols has always teetered on the outer edges of the history of woman’s suffrage, but this new study places her firmly at the center where she belongs. A talented, complex woman who came to her reform sensibilities early in life and remained dedicated to them despite many challenging personal circumstances, Nichols offers readers a more nuanced and regionally diverse understanding of woman’s rights during the nineteenth century.

Thematically and chronologically organized, Frontier Feminist follows the trajectory of Nichols’s adventurous life while remaining focused on the most important subjects that dominated her life and the larger woman’s rights movement. Growing up in frontier Vermont in a town that boasted a vibrant intellectual climate, young Clarina showed talent that her parents nurtured. While interactions with girls and women and the traditional demands of domesticity dominated Clarina’s early life, she also interacted with boys and experienced public life on the streets of West Townshend. The authors provide helpful context on the woman’s sphere in the early chapters, but I would like to have seen more engagement with the new literature on the expansive and mixed-sex nature of the “public” and how this affected Clarina’s youth.

Like most women of her generation, Clarina married and embarked on a new life with her husband. She quickly gave birth to three children as the couple struggled to make ends meet. After several failed career efforts, the family moved to Manhattan where their marriage “disintegrated” (39). Clarina returned to her parents’ home in Vermont with her children, and with the help of her father, she gained a divorce. This was a turning point in her life, opening up doors but also creating a sense of shame and failure that haunted her until old age. The authors carefully trace the evolution of this experience and reveal how the divorce allowed her to pursue an independent, satisfying life even as it became her dishonorable secret. It was not until she moved to California in the 1870s that she finally came to terms with her decision.

Despite suffering from debilitating sciatica, Clarina developed a career as a journalist after her divorce and soon married her editor, a kind older man named George Nichols. When her husband began to experience his own physical disabilities, Clarina took over their newspaper and began to engage in partisan politics. Focusing on feminine concerns like family life, morality, and religion, she forged a role for herself as a passionate, articulate partisan writer. When she attended the 1850 Worcester Woman’s Rights Convention she experienced another turning point, becoming a dedicated woman’s rights activist and reformer. Nichols preferred the conservative end of the spectrum within the movement, focusing on the natural rights of mothers instead of natural equality between men and women. She lectured, wrote, petitioned, and educated her fellow citizens on woman’s rights for the remainder of her life. Never as well-known as Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Nichols nonetheless became an important voice in the movement.

In the mid-1850s Nichols moved to Kansas with her family and entered another stage of her long career as a journalist and woman’s rights reformer. Amidst the turmoil of Kansas-Nebraska and the battle over the future of slavery in the state, she constructed a role for herself as an omnipresent voice calling for both antislavery and woman’s rights. Persistently educating the North about the local and regional situation in the West, Nichols became increasingly influential at a national level. Like many women in both the North and South, Nichols suffered deprivations and illness during the Civil War, but she always remained focused on the battle to improve...