Nicol was born in Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland in 1854, but immigrated to New Zealand with her family at age two.

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.

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, Nicol 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.

[1] She is one of six suffragists memorialised in the Kate Sheppard National Memorial, a sculpture located on the banks of the Avon River in Christchurch.