Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/424

CHAPTER XXXVI.

VERMONT.

Clarina Howard Nichols—Council of Censors—Amending the Constitution—St. Andrew's Letter—Mr. Reed's Report—Convention Called—H. B. Blackwell on the Vermont Watchman—Mary A. Livermore in the Woman's Journal—Sarah A. Gibbs' Reply to Rev. Mr. Holmes—School Suffrage.

After the miseries growing out of the civil war were in a measure mitigated, there was a general awakening in the New England States on the question of suffrage for women, and in 1868 one after another organized for action. What Nathaniel P. Rogers was to New Hampshire in the anti-slavery struggle that was Clarina Howard Nichols^[1] to Vermont in early calling attention to the unjust laws for woman. From 1843 to 1853 she edited the Windham County Democrat, in which she wrote a series of editorials on the property rights of women, and from year to year made her appeals in person to successive legislatures. Her patient labors for many years prepared the way for the organized action of 1868. The women of that State can never too highly appreciate all that it cost that noble woman to stand alone, as she did, through such bitter persecutions, vindicating for them the great principles of republican government.

And now, after a quarter of a century, instead of that one solitary voice in the district school-house and the State cafjitol, are heard in all Vermont's towns and cities, echoing through her valleys and mountains, the clarion voices of a whole band of distinguished men and women from all the Eastern States. The revival of the woman question in Vermont began with propositions to amend the constitution. We are indebted to a series of letters, written by a citizen of Burlington, signed "St. An-

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1. No woman in so many varied fields of action has more steadily and faithfully labored than Mrs. Nichols, as editor, speaker, teacher, farmer, in Vermont, New York, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, and California where she spent the closing years of her life; and though always in circumstances of hardship and privation, yet no annual convention was held without a long letter from her pen, uniformly the most cheerful and able of all that were received. A great soul that seemed to rise above the depressing influences of her surroundings! The last letter she ever wrote us was in January, 1885, a few days before she passed away. See Volume I., page 171.