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Though John A. Quitman failed to put Cuba on the U.S. map, he himself is on the map. His name is preserved in the towns of Quitman, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas.

KANSAS

CLARINA NICHOLS

Using Boundaries to Break Boundaries

The debate [on women’s rights] was quite an animated one on the various modes to dispose of it.… Motions were made to hear Mrs. Nichols before the Convention or before the [elective franchise] committee. The hall was finally granted to Mrs. Nichols on Wednesday evening, to discuss this “vexed question.”

—NEW YORK HERALD, JULY 20, 1859

In the states created after the Revolutionary War, proposals for boundaries often originated at statehood conventions, embedded in the state constitution being drafted for approval by Congress. At the Kansas statehood convention, Clarina Nichols spearheaded the first effort to dispute certain boundaries within a proposed state boundary, among them the boundary around the voting booth that kept women (and African Americans, American Indians, and Chinese Americans) out.

Delegates to the 1859 convention at Wyandotte, Kansas, received, among the numerous citizens’ petitions submitted to such bodies, one that began with the usual frilly phrasing, but in this case lured the reader to a most unfrilly point:

We, the undersigned citizens of Kansas Territory, do respectfully submit to your honorable body that, whereas the women of the State have individually an evident common interest with its men in the protection of life, liberty, property and intelligent culture … and whereas, in virtue of these common interests and responsibilities, they have pressing need of all the legal and constitutional guarantees enjoyed by any class of citizens; and whereas, the enjoyment of these guarantees involves the possession of equal political rights: Therefore we, the undersigned, being of full age, do respectfully petition and protest against any constitutional distinctions based on difference of sex.1

Clarina Nichols (1810-1885) (photo credit 31.1)

As the representative of Kansas’s Women’s Rights Association, Clarina Nichols sat among the spectators at the convention, dutifully knitting during each session and, during any recess, collaring delegates. What brought this woman, who had lived happily and prosperously with her husband and children in New England, to this place at this point in time? Was it that, as she said, “I commenced my life with the most refined notion of women’s sphere.… But I could, even then, see over the barriers of that sphere, and see that, however easy it might be for me to keep within it, as a daughter, a great majority of women were outside its boundaries.”2 Perhaps. But it was not until Nichols found herself outside the boundaries of “women’s sphere” that she became an activist on behalf of equal rights.

She was born Clarina Howard in 1810 to a family that lived modestly, despite being among the wealthiest in West Townshend, Vermont. Her parents adhered to strict Baptist beliefs that included opposition to slavery and abstinence from alcohol. During her childhood, these two tenets formed into separate organized social movements: abolitionism and temperance. The early feminist movement in the United States was, in many respects, a result of women’s becoming involved (and politically educated) in these two movements. But a third issue provided the catalyst, one that affected all women: the absence of equal rights regarding property and child custody. Not all American women sympathized with the abolitionist or temperance movements. But the more a woman subscribed to one or both of those movements, the more likely she was to perceive a pattern of empowerment that favored white men over all others.

Nichols’s first husband, Justin Carpenter, who came from a family of similar values and affluence, did not seem to fit that pattern when she married him. He and his bride settled in Brockport, New York, where Carpenter partnered with a like-spirited man to open a private school and lending library. There they became deeply