Clarina Irene Howard was born on January 25, 1810, in West Townshend, Vt., the oldest of Chapin and Birsha Smith Howard’s eight children.

Her father was a prosperous and civic-minded man, and also the town’s “overseer of the poor.” Clarina remembered listening in on his interviews with poor, desperate women who had little legal recourse if their husbands were alcoholics or abusive tyrants. These experiences, as well as her upbringing in a progressive, religious family, fueled in her a lifelong passion for both women’s rights and temperance.

Her first marriage lasted nine years, producing three children and much misery for Clarina. She separated after her husband absconded with the children and had to be tracked down. Clarina found work as a reporter for a weekly newspaper, the Windham County Democrat in Brattleboro, Vt., and discovered her talent for journalism that addressed the issues of the day. In 1843 she married the paper’s publisher and editor, George Nichols, who soon after became incapacitated and unable to continue publishing. Clarina, pregnant with her fourth and final child, quietly took over her husband’s duties but made no announcement of such in the newspaper. She needed time, she said, to win “men’s confidence in my abilities to run a political paper.”

For the next ten years she edited the Democrat and made it an early advocate of the emerging women’s rights movement. This movement grew out of women’s frustrations at being treated like second-class citizens in the temperance and anti-slavery movements where they had poured out their energies over the years.

Because of her own experiences, Nichols was one of the first to grasp the importance of economic rights for women, of the need for wives to control their property and wages apart from their husbands’ control. She helped organize the first National Woman’s Rights Conventions in 1850 and 1851 in Worcester, Mass., and afterward became one of the movement’s most sought-after speakers throughout New England and New York. Her speech, “The Responsibilities of Woman” (1851), was widely circulated.

In response to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, Nichols moved her family to Kansas Territory. Like many of the early settlers, she endured enormous hardships — including the death of her husband the following year — with the conviction that the cause of a free Kansas was worth suffering for. She was one of the Republican Party’s earliest female stump speakers and spoke nightly to standing-room only crowds in New England, Pennsylvania and New York.

In 1859, Nichols circulated a petition demanding that women be granted equal legal and political rights with men under the new Kansas constitution. Though not allowed to speak or vote at the constitutional convention, she lobbied successfully for women’s rights that were among the most advanced of any state in the Union.

To her dying day on January 10, 1885, Clarina Nichols believed that equal rights for women was inevitable. “God is with us,” she wrote in a final note to her friend Susan B. Anthony. “There can be no failure.” Clarina Nichols was buried in a simple family plot in Mendocino County, California.