How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [110]
Fortunately for Clarina, Carpenter’s father secured her children’s return to her. Carpenter then opted to have no further contact with his children, nor to provide support. The injustice of this law became her primary concern. “I have asked learned judges why the state decrees that the father should retain the children, thus throwing upon the innocent mother the penalty which should fall upon the guilty party only,” she stated in an address to a women’s rights convention. “Say they, ‘It is because the father has the property; it would not be just to burden the mother with the support of his children.’ ”4
Clarina was fortunate not only to have had sympathetic in-laws to help her regain her children, but also parents who had previously provided her with an education and self-esteem and who later offered a home to which she could return. All this support enabled her to get back on her feet. Soon she was making a living for herself and her children through her skills as a seamstress and by writing articles for the local newspaper. Her gifts for writing and public speaking quickly propelled her to the front ranks of the newly forming women’s movement. Her talents also drew the attention of the paper’s publisher, George Nichols, who became her second husband.
Twelve years into their marriage, the second precursor of the women’s movement, abolitionism, propelled George and Clarina Nichols to move to Kansas. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act had replaced the Missouri Compromise with “popular sovereignty,” allowing a state or territory to decide for itself whether or not to allow slavery. As a result, among the droves of people moving to Kansas and Nebraska for economic opportunity, many opted for Kansas in an effort to create a majority vote for or against slavery. A key reason Kansas was more inviting to slaveholders was its adjacency to the slave states of the South. Though its immediate neighbor to the south, present-day Oklahoma, was then the Indian Territory, there were slave owners among the Cherokees and among the region’s sparse white population.
The droves arriving in Kansas for the purpose of creating a proslavery majority were followed by droves seeking to counter this effort. George and Clarina Nichols were among this second wave of arrivals, though Clarina, being female, had no vote. When not establishing their homestead or coping with a near-fatal accident that befell one of her sons, or her husband’s illness and subsequent death in 1855, Nichols worked as a journalist and activist. As the Moneka Woman’s Rights Association strategized for the statehood convention, Nichols opposed the suggestion that they attach their quest for equality to the more formidable quest for racial equality. Doing so, she feared, could result in more harm than good for both.
Reflecting the turmoil over the question of slavery in Kansas, the Wyandotte convention was the territory’s fourth constitutional constitution. The geographic boundaries of the proposed state were not at issue; the demographic boundaries were. The lines defining the status of human beings collided in the efforts to create Kansas. Finally, at Wyandotte, a bloodied and exhausted territory produced a constitution that both the territory’s voters and Congress approved.
The boundary barring women from the voting booth was only one of several boundaries Nichols sought to eliminate in the proposed constitution at Wyandotte. More immediately important to her were the boundaries that preserved child custody and all property for men. As in the later