Mary Gove Nichols

Contents

Mary Sargeant Gove Nichols (née Neal; August 10, 1810 – May 30, 1884), also known by her pen name Mary Orme, was an American women's rights and health reform advocate, hydrotherapist, vegetarian socialist, and writer.[1][2] Her later conversion to Catholicism caused her to abandon the free love movement and a fascination with séances, but she remained a health advocate and social progressive.

Biography

Early life

Nichols was born in Goffstown, New Hampshire.[3] Nichols and her first husband, Hiram Gove, moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where Mary ran a girls' school, and this was where she began her health reform career.[4]

After being abused, both sexually and emotionally, by her husband, Nichols made it her life's work to inform women of their bodies and their opportunities.

Career

Nichols studied the writings of Sylvester Graham and became a vegetarian around 1837.[2] She was an influential proponent in the natural hygiene movement. She lectured to all-female audiences on anatomy, physiology, and hygiene to relieve women of what she saw as unnecessary physical and mental suffering. She recommended that women exercise daily, breathe fresh air, shower with cold water, avoid the fashionable tight-laced corsets of the day, and abstain from coffee and meat.[4]

Nichols lectured for the Ladies Physiological Society, an offshoot of the American Physiological Society.[2] She has been described as the "first woman in America to lecture on topics of anatomy and physiology and she included lessons on vegetarianism, and prevention and cure of sickness."[2] Nichols believed that cancer could be cured with a vegetarian diet.[2]

In July 1848, Nichols married T. L. Nichols,[5][6] a writer who also had an interest in health reform and progressive views on women's rights. Together they planned to open a School of Health, School of Progress and School of Life in a three-story building they leased.

In 1851, Nichols and her husband founded a "water-cure" clinic, the American Hydropathic Institute in New York City.[1][4][7] It offered a fee of $50, for people to become qualified "water cure" doctors. The institute's use of hydrotherapy is cited as a historical example of quackery.[8] Nichols and her husband were advocates of bathing in cold water, fasting and occasional wet-sheet packing.[9] Nichols contributed to the Water-Cure Journal, and published with her husband Nichols’ Journal of Health, Water-Cure, and Human Progress (1853–1858).[1][10]

Nichols and her husband advocated free love and the belief that marriage was evil.[11] She was the leading female advocate and the woman most looked up to in the free love movement, and her autobiography (Mary Lyndon: Or, Revelations of a Life: An Autobiography, 1860) became the first argument against marriage written from a woman's point of view.[12] These beliefs alienated Nichols and her husband from others in the hydropathic community.[13] In 1855, they moved to Cincinnati and opened the Memnonia Institute, a "school of life" at Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1856.[11][13] The name of the institute referred to the goddess of water, reflecting their interest in hydropathy, but also promoted asceticism, fasting, and spiritual penance.[13][14] It had few members, lasting only one year.[15]

Nichols also wrote novels and stories under the pseudonym Mary Orme.[11] She wrote short stories for Godey's Lady's Book.[11] Edgar Allan Poe praised her fiction.[16] She and her husband were also socialists, being followers of Charles Fourier.[17]

Conversion to Catholicism

Nichols and her husband both attended séances, at one point daily, believing themselves to be in communication with spirits. On one occasion in 1856, a séance resulted in Nichols and her husband experiencing visions of long-deceased Jesuit priests, including the Spanish saints Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier.[18][19][20] As a result, Nichols and her husband ceased their involvement in séances and the free love movement and converted to Catholicism, receiving instruction from the Jesuits of St. Xavier College and baptism at St. Francis Xavier Church in Cincinnati in 1857. Their conversion was seen as controversial among the Church hierarchy and the wider public.[17]

Later life and death

Nichols and her husband moved to England at the outset of the Civil War.[21] She died in Brompton, London, on May 30, 1884, from breast cancer.[5]

Personal life

Nichols first marriage was to Hiram Gove, an unsuccessful businessman, in 1831. Gove married Mary expecting financial support and obedience from his wife. She suffered four miscarriages and a chronic illness In 1841, after being abused by Gove, Nichols took her daughter and moved back with her parents, leaving her husband behind;[21] he eventually agreed to a divorce in 1847 or 1848.[22] Nichols' surviving daughter, Elma Gove, became a painter.[23]

In July 1848, Nichols remarried to T. L. Nichols.[5][6]

Legacy

Herbert M. Shelton's book The Science and Fine Art of Natural Hygiene is dedicated to Gove and other natural hygienists.[24]

Selected publications

  • Experience in Water-Cure (1849)
  • Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results [with Thomas Low Nicholas, 1854]
  • Mary Lyndon: Or, Revelations of a Life: An Autobiography (1860)
  • A Woman's Work in Water Cure and Sanitary Education (1874)

References

  1. 1.[1.2][1.3]"Mary Gove Nichols". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 22 August 2015.
  2. 2.[2.2][2.3][2.4][2.5]Iacobbo, Karen; Iacobbo, Michael. (2004). Vegetarian America: A History. Praeger Publishing. pp. 37-38. ISBN 978-0275975197
  3. 3.Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L. (2002). Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-6848-1.
  4. 4.[4.2][4.3]"Portraits of American Women Writers". Library Company. Retrieved 9 December 2014.
  5. 5.[5.2][5.3]Aspinwall, Bernard (2004-09-23). "Nichols, Mary Sergeant Gove (1810–1884), campaigner for medical reform and women's rights". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/58353. Retrieved 2020-07-04. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  6. 6.[6.2]Cayleff, Susan (2010). Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women's Health. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp. 112–113. ISBN 9781439904275. Retrieved August 25, 2020.
  7. 7.Weiss, Harry Bischoff; Kemble, Howard R. (1967). The Great American Water-Cure Craze: A History of Hydropathy in the United States. The Past Times Press. p. 33, p. 75.
  8. 8.University of Toledo Libraries. Barbara Floyd, University Archivist, University of Toledo. Retrieved 1 May 2019.
  9. 9.Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L. (2002). Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 133. ISBN 0-8018-6848-3
  10. 10.Weiss, Harry Bischoff; Kemble, Howard R. (1967). The Great American Water-Cure Craze: A History of Hydropathy in the United States. The Past Times Press. p. 35
  11. 11.[11.2][11.3][11.4]Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey; Harvey, Joy Dorothy. (2000). The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: L-Z, Volume 2. Routledge. p. 941. ISBN 0-415-92040-X
  12. 12.Spurlock, John. "A Masculine View of Women's Freedom: Free Love in the Nineteenth Century." International Social Science Review 69.3/4 (1994): 34–45. Print.
  13. 13.[13.2][13.3]Morris, James Matthew; Kross, Andrea L. (2004). Historical Dictionary of Utopianism. The Scarecrow Press. p. 200. ISBN 0-8108-4912-7
  14. 14.Rokicky, Catherine M. (2002). Creating a Perfect world: Religious and Secular Utopias in Nineteenth-Century Ohio. Ohio University Press. p. 136. ISBN 978-0821414392
  15. 15.Trahair, R. C. S. (1999). Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary Greenwood Press. p. 257. ISBN 0-313-29465-8
  16. 16.Myerson, Joel. (1986). Mary Gove Nichols' Mary Lyndon: A Forgotten Reform Novel. American Literature 58 (4): 523-539.
  17. 17.[17.2]Lester, Thomas (2020-06-12). "The controversial conversion of Dr. T.L. Nichols". The Boston Pilot. Retrieved 2026-08-21.
  18. 18."Nichols, Mary Gove (1810–1884) | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2026-08-21.
  19. 19.Harrington, Mary (2024-08-02). "Mary Gove Nichols: Feminist Pre-History's Most Avant-Garde Reactionary". Fairer Disputations. Retrieved 2026-08-21.
  20. 20.Braun, Adee (2014-07-02). "Passional Affinities by Adee Braun". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2026-08-21.
  21. 21.[21.2]MacLean, Maggie (13 July 2013). "Mary Gove Nichols". History of American Women.
  22. 22.Benowitz, June Melby (2017). Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion, 2nd Edition. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. p. 407. ISBN 978-1-4408-3987-0.
  23. 23.David Bernard Dearinger; National Academy of Design (U.S.) (2004). Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design: 1826–1925. Hudson Hills. pp. 20–. ISBN 978-1-55595-029-3.
  24. 24.Shelton, Herbert M. (1994 edition, first published 1934). The Science and Fine Art of Natural Hygiene. The Hygienic System: Volume I. American Natural Hygiene Society. ISBN 0-914532-36-7