The year: 1861. The defendant: Clarina Nichols, an upstanding citizen of Quindaro, Kansas. The charge: Kidnapping a neighbor’s children and returning them to their mother, an abused wife whose husband had absconded with the children. With this introduction to our remarkable subject, we delve into her life story.

Chapter Two: A Vermont Childhood

Clarina Howard’s childhood and adolescence in small town Vermont in the early years of the 19th century. Personal experiences awaken sympathy in young Clarina and cause her to question the laws that leave many women poor and powerless.

Chapter Three: New York Trials

Clarina and Justin Carpenter migrate to western New York state. These are some of the most difficult years of her life, but they are also the foundation for her later ability to empathize with women in similar circumstances.

Chapter Four: In Print and in Love

After her second husband, George Nichols, becomes chronically ill, Clarina Nichols quietly takes over a newspaper in Brattleboro, Vermont. After writing editorials calling for reform of married women’s property rights laws, she is instrumental in the passage of Vermont’s first law granting married women limited property rights.

Chapter Five: The Road to Worcester

The chapter traces the early beginnings of the antebellum women’s movement from the 1840 antislavery convention in London to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester two years later. The Worcester convention marks Clarina Nichols’s entrance into public life.

Chapter Six: ‘On the Responsibilities of Woman’

Nichols gives a major speech at the Second National Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. Her speech is remembered for its appeal to both logic and emotion and for its inclusion of memorable anecdotes that illustrate her points.

Chapter Seven: Bloomers and Trousers

At the beginning of this chapter, Nichols meets the young Susan B. Anthony, who will become a lifelong friend and comrade. The chapter takes its title from two items that become highly politicized symbols of the new movement.

Chapter Eight: The World Is on the Move

This chapter is set in New York City in 1853, the year that it hosted the first World’s Fair on U.S. soil. All three of the big reform movements -- temperance, antislavery, and women’s rights -- are holding conventions in New York City during one volatile week in September, and Nichols is in the midst of the tumult.

Chapter Nine: Winning Wisconsin

After touring Wisconsin on behalf of the new temperance law, Nichols is impressed with the openness of “Westerners” to new ideas.

Chapter Ten: A Country Divided

Nichols considers her future path as the nation polarizes over the westward expansion of slavery.

Chapter Eleven: Mush and Molasses

Nichols and her two older sons travel by train, steamboat, and stagecoach to Lawrence, Kansas, where she delivers the first lecture on women’s rights in Kansas Territory and sketches the “embryo city” she sees before her. Clarina returns to Vermont to prepare the rest of her family for moving west.

Chapter Twelve: Life and Death on the Prairie

Back in Kansas with her whole family, Nichols is soon hard at work, helping construct a simple log cabin and putting in crops. Health problems dominate her early months in the territory, while the territory’s political climate heats up with skirmishes between pro-slavery and antislavery settlers. John Brown arrives.

Chapter Thirteen: Bleeding Kansas

Nichols, who has returned to Vermont to settle her father’s estate, reacts to events in Kansas by lecturing in Pennsylvania to promote the new Republican Party. Worried over the fate of her boys, who have joined John Brown’s small band of guerrilla fighters, she denounces the present administration in Washington and predicts disaster for the country over the slavery issue.

Chapter Fourteen: Quindaro

The boom town of Quindaro on the extreme eastern edge of Kansas Territory is Clarina’s new home in 1857. Here she becomes involved with the fugitive slave network, helps organize an integrated school, and continues to work as a journalist.

Chapter Fifteen: Woman on a Mission

Nichols has the opportunity to do what she came to Kansas to do: influence lawmakers to include rights for women in Kansas’s new constitution. She creates a petition and canvasses the territory to exclude the word “male” from the constitution.

Chapter Sixteen: ‘A Vast Army of Widows and Orphans’

The coming of civil war brings a halt to the women’s rights movement and financial hardship, physical danger, and uncertainty to the early pioneers in eastern Kansas. With her children scattered to the four winds, Nichols carries on alone, serving as doctor to others in Quindaro, then moving to Washington, D.C., in 1863 to work in government posts left vacant by the war’s need for soldiers.

Chapter Seventeen: With Liberty and Suffrage for All

After the war’s end, Nichols returns to Kansas and participates in the historic suffrage campaign of 1867. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton arrive in the fall of 1867, but even their exhaustive efforts have little effect. During the campaign Nichols focuses on religion’s role in blocking suffrage.

Chapter Eighteen: ‘Grant! Grant! Grant!’

Nichols witnesses the end of Indian life in eastern Kansas and meets presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant. With mixed feelings Clarina decides to emigrate with her youngest son, George’s family, to California.

Chapter Nineteen: Third Class to California

By late 1871 Nichols is on her way to California, where great beauty and further hardships await.

Chapter Twenty: ‘The Heart of a Loving Woman’

As Nichols’s physical world begins to contract, she remains committed to her causes and continues to look outward; “I believe my interest in the progress of affairs all over the world keeps me alive,” she says.

Epilogue

Appendixes

•The Antebellum Women’s Movement: An Overview (Note: this section is downloadable for educational use)
•Preamble and Constitution of the Moneka Women’s Rights Association
•“The Birds” (Clarina Nichols humorous piece)
•Mrs. Nichols v. Rev. Blachly: An Imagined Debate
•The Family of Clarina I.H. Nichols

Notes and Index

Looking for links?

Here are links referenced in the footnotes of Revolutionary Heart:

page 255: “Six Months in Kansas” and “Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life”

page 262: Tappan letter to Higginson re: underground railroad in Kansas

page 264: “The Kansas Emigrant Song”