Mary Gove Nichols

• Born: April 10, 1810
• Birthplace: Goffstown, New Hampshire
• Died: May 30, 1884

Biography

Mary Gove Nichols was born in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 1810 to working-class parents William A. Neal, an intellectual partisan Democrat, and Rebecca Neal, who taught her daughter the value of hard work. Education for girls was not widely available in Nichols’s community, and although she attended a small school for part of each year between ages two and twelve, she afterward received little structured education. Her formal education was completed in 1822, the year her family moved to Craftsbury, Vermont. She was drawn to the Quaker religion after reading a Quaker schoolbook at age fifteen, and around that time she began absorbing herself in a wide variety of texts in a quest for as much knowledge as possible. Among the books she most enjoyed reading were those on medical science, in which she became interested after stumbling upon Bell’s Anatomy and finding herself fascinated in her secret reading of it, secret because such medical books were forbidden by her parents, who believed the subject improper for girls. When her medical texts were discovered and removed, Nichols devoted herself to the study of French and Latin.

In 1828, Nichols began writing essays, stories, and poems for the Boston Weekly newspaper. In that same year she became a teacher and met Hiram Gove of Weare, New Hampshire, through her uncle. She married Gove on March 5, 1831, after months of incessant pressure, but the eleven-year marriage was unhappy for her, and she later referred to it as “martyrdom.” Her daughter Elma Penn was born in March, 1832, but her four subsequent pregnancies from her marriage to Gove ended in either stillbirths or miscarriages. These years were difficult and sad for Nichols, who considered suicide but found solace in her continued studies of medical books, including those on water treatments that she would use for both herself and other women.

The Goves moved in 1837 to Lynn, Massachusetts, where Nichols opened a girls’ school. Inspired that year by a lecture by health reformer Sylvester Graham, Nichols presented twelve weekly health lectures for the Ladies Physiological Society of Boston in 1838, the first such lectures by a woman. She became committed to helping women understand and improve their own health, despite the widespread disapproval of a woman taking on such a role; indeed, the Quaker community excommunicated her for these activities.

Her volume of collected lectures, Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology, was published in 1842, the same year she left her husband after recommitting herself in the previous two years both to women’s rights and to her own individual rights. She founded the Health Journal and Independent Magazine in 1843 but it lasted only one issue. In July, 1843, she discovered a lump in her breast that did not respond to treatment. In March, 1844, Gove kidnapped daughter Elma, then twelve years old, and without legal redress to regain custody, Nichols countered by kidnapping the child three months later.

In 1846, Nichols opened a water-cure house in New York City and published her first novel, Uncle John: Or, “It Is Too Much Trouble.” The water-cure house became not only a refuge for ill patients but also a gathering place for members of the literary community, including Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Stoddard, and Frances Osgood. She met writer and medical student Thomas Low Nichols late in 1847, and the two married in 1848, but only after Nichols agreed that Mary could keep her own sense of self and identity as well as her own room, into which he was not allowed entry. Nichols became pregnant at age forty and gave birth to Mary Wilhelmina. In 1851, after Thomas Nicholas had completed medical school, the coupled opened the American Hydropathic Institute, the nation’s first water-cure college.

Despite finding a happy marriage for herself, Nichols was committed to educating the public about how society’s marriage laws and expectations limited or eliminated women’s freedom. In 1854 the couple collaborated on Marriage: Its History, Character and Results, Its Sanctities, and the Profanities, Its Science and Its Facts: Demonstrating Its Influence, as a Civilized Institution on the Happiness of the Individual, and the Progress of the Race. The Nichols also founded the Progressive Union, a Society for Mutual Protection in Right. Nichols published her famed novel Mary Lyndon in 1855.

With the onset of the Civil War, Nichols and her family moved to London in 1861. Nichols continued publishing both fiction and nonfiction to support her family, and she and her husband returned to a focus on health reform in 1867. In 1868, Nichols republished her 1849 book Experience in Water-Cure as A Woman’s Work in Water Cure and Sanitary Education. In her final years Nichols was largely inactive, her body wrought with neuralgia from a badly healed leg break as well as breast cancer. She died in 1884.