How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [111]
Now, my friends, you will bear me witness that I have said nothing about woman’s right to vote or make laws.… When I listen to Fourth of July orations … tributes of admiration paid to our fathers because they compelled freedom for themselves and sons from the hand of oppression and power. I have faith that when men come to value their own rights as means of human happiness, rather than of paltry gain, they will feel themselves more honored in releasing than in retaining the “inalienable rights” of woman.5
With custody and property rights as her priorities, Nichols was able to persuade the men at the Wyandotte convention to embed in the constitution equality regarding these two issues. Article 15 stated, “The Legislature shall provide for the protection of the rights of women in acquiring and possessing property, real, personal, and mixed, separate and apart from the husband; and shall also provide for their equal rights in the possession of their children.” The same article also provided protection for a woman’s home (or a man’s, for that matter) by declaring it to be “exempted from forced sale under any process of law, and shall not be alienated without the joint consent of husband and wife.” These two clauses rendered the Kansas constitution a historic document in the American struggle for women’s rights.
The abolitionist and feminist movements scored partial victories at the Wyandotte convention. In addition to gender-neutral property and custody protections, the delegates voted to prohibit slavery in the state. But both African Americans and women lost when it came to voting rights.
The outbreak of the Civil War resulted in a hiatus for the women’s movement, as its members turned their attention to the crisis at hand. Nichols moved to Washington, DC, where she worked in the Army Quartermaster Department and, with the end of the war, became the matron of a home operated by the National Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children. She returned to Kansas in 1866, then moved in 1871 to California, where her grown children had migrated.
Nichols did not live to see voting rights extended to women. Throughout her life, women’s influence resided primarily in their persuasive skills or, for some, the power of their beauty. Nichols’s persuasive skills combined her keen wit and her ability to reveal (in the words of her petition) “common interest” with those she sought to persuade. One such common interest—surprising, perhaps, in an ardent feminist—was her valuing of feminine beauty. But Nichols’s sense of beauty was beautifully insightful:
Can it be that we have no more lasting claims to admiration than that beauty and those accomplishments which serve us only in the springtime of life? Surely our days of dancing and musical performances are soon over, when musical instruments of sweeter tone cry, “Mother.”… Has not God endowed us with some lasting hold upon the affections? My sisters … cultivate your powers of mind and heart, that you may become necessary to his better and undying sympathies.… Then will his soul respond to your worth, and the ties that bind you endure through time, and make you companions in eternity!6
Clarina Nichols passed away in Mendocino, California, in 1885. Her viewpoints continue to be passed on.
WASHINGTON STATE
LYMAN CUTLER’S NEIGHBOR’S RIG
The British-American Pig War
Lyman A. Cutler, being duly sworn, deposes and says … that on or about the 15th of last June he shot a hog belonging to … Mr. Griffin, and immediately informed him of the fact, stating it was done in a moment of irritation, the animal having been at several times a great annoyance, and that morning destroyed a portion of his garden.… That same afternoon, Mr. Griffin, in company with [Alexander Dallas, of the Hudson’s Bay Company] came to his house.… Mr. Dallas stated this was British soil, and if Cutler did not [pay]