page_title: Helen Nicol (suffragist)
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Helen Nicol (suffragist) / Biography
caption_attribution_description: About the Memorial The Memorial, the work of sculptor Margriet Windhausen, comprises a 3.3m by 2.1m bronze bas-relief supported by a 5m pebbled wall. The Memorial stands in a landscaped area beside the Avon River on Oxford Terrace known as the Kate Sheppard National Memorial Reserve. It is the only National Memorial in Christchurch and is the only New Zealand monument depicting the fight for women’s suffrage. The central panel depicts life size figures of Kate Sheppard and other leaders of the suffrage movement. Smaller panels depict women of the time in typical everyday settings. Bronze panels record a written history of Kate Sheppard and the suffrage movement. A time capsule enclosed in the wall contains a record of the donors and material relevant to women’s lives in 1993. The six women are Kate Sheppard (1847 – 1934), Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia (1868 – 1920), Amey Daldy (1829 – 1920), Ada Wells (1863 – 1933), Harriet Morison (1862 – 1925), and Helen Nicol (1854 – 1932).
context_page_description: Helen Lyster Nicol was a New Zealand suffragist and temperance campaigner. She is one of six suffragettes honoured in the Kate Sheppard National Memorial.
context_section_description: Nicol was born in Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland in 1854, but immigrated to New Zealand with her family at age two. She was one of ten children of Margaret (born Cairns Smith) and David Nicol. Her father was a gardener who prospered in New Zealand. She was a teetotaller and committed Presbyterian. She taught in a Sunday School and her work with the poor exposed her to the ills of alcohol and she became a committed prohibitionist and member of the temperance movement. 
  It was through her association with the New Zealand branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union that she became involved in the struggle for women's suffrage in New Zealand. She became one of the pioneering leaders of the suffrage movement in Dunedin, which was New Zealand's largest city at the time. Along with Marion Hatton and Harriet Morison, she established the Women's Franchise League; the alcohol lobby in Dunedin was particularly strong, and the three decided that a pro-suffrage organisation outside the temperance movement would be more effective. Through their efforts, Dunedin contributed more signatures to the three pro-suffrage parliamentary petitions than any other part of the country. She is one of six suffragettes memorialised in the Kate Sheppard National Memorial, a sculpture located on the banks of the Avon River in Christchurch.
  Nicol died on 22 November 1932 in Dunedin, New Zealand.
caption: Nicol (right) commemorated in the Kate Sheppard National Memorial
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