Mary Sargeant Neal Gove Nichols
Mary Sargeant Neal Gove Nichols was a notable health reformer, feminist, and author born in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in the early 19th century. As the daughter of a freethinker and a Universalist, she faced personal challenges growing up, including a difficult relationship with her mother. Despite these hardships, she became a prominent figure in the reform movement, advocating for health and wellness through cold-water treatments, diet reform, and education about anatomy and physiology. After a tumultuous marriage to Hiram Gove, she gained independence and established a girls' school, where she integrated her health beliefs into her curriculum.
Nichols went on to write extensively, including essays, novels, and articles, while creating a cultural salon that attracted fellow reformers and artists. Her later marriage to Thomas Low Nichols further pushed her into the realms of feminist thought and free love advocacy. The couple founded a School of Life in Ohio, drawing on utopian ideas, before eventually converting to Catholicism. Throughout her life, Nichols remained committed to health reform and feminist ideals, leaving a legacy through her literary works and reform efforts. Her contributions reflect the intersections of feminism, health advocacy, and literary culture of her time.
Mary Sargeant Neal Gove Nichols
- Mary Sargeant Gove Nichols
- Born: August 10, 1810
- Died: May 30, 1884
Health reformer, feminist, author, was born in Goffstown, New Hampshire, the second daughter and third of four children of William A. Neal and Rebecca R. Neal of Scottish and Welsh ancestry. Her father was a freethinker, her mother a Universalist. The family moved to Craftsbury, Vermont, where she grew up and experienced rejection by her mother, one of many interpersonal difficulties to cloud her early life. Shy, she read eagerly and became known as eccentric, experienced a religious catharsis at about fifteen and, subsequently, became a Quaker. By the age of eighteen she had placed her poems and stories in newspapers and was teaching school; in secret, fearing the scorn of others, she read anatomy and physiology.
She married Hiram Gove, a hatter and Quaker from Weare, New Hampshire, on March 5, 1831; they had four aborted or stillborn pregnancies and one healthy child, Elma Penn, born March 1, 1832. Hiram Gove was a domestic tyrant with an ailing business, which his wife tried to support through her needlework. She began also to do therapeutic work with cold-water treatments, and when the family moved to Lynn in about 1837 she began a girls’ school, teaching anatomy and hygiene; in 1838 she lectured in Boston for the Ladies Physiological Society, the fee for which was taken by Hiram Gove.
Gove then began to lecture and teach extensively, basing her material partly on the views of diet reformer Sylvester Graham. Her program incorporated many features common to health reformers of the period including cold bathing; fresh air; exercise; the avoidance of coffee, tea, and meat; and continued education about issues of health and sex: ignorance of these issues, she believed, was part of the problem. In 1840 she edited the vegetarian Health Journal and Advocate of Physiological Reform, published in Worcester, and in this year, possibly given confidence by her own success, she left her husband. In 1842 she published her Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology. She had become a recognized figure in the reform movement.
After failing to establish her own independent magazine, which folded after one issue, encountering difficulties with Hiram Gove over the disposition of Elma, and lecturing more in the Northeast, Gove settled in New York City. With her own water-cure center, serving vegetarian food and applying cold-water treatments, she put into practice her theory that there was a rejuvenating electrical element in water, and a basis in loving human relations for the birth of healthy children. Her Experience in Water Cure was published in 1846. And under the name “Mary Orme” she wrote short stories for magazines and a novel, the first of several, while creating a virtual salon at her home on Saturday evenings. Her gatherings included reformers, musicians, artists, and such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, about whom she wrote in the Six Penny Magazine. He himself wrote in Godey’s Lady’s Book (July 1846) that she had “keen intelligent black eyes . . . converses well and with enthusiasm.”
In 1848 Mrs. Gove, now divorced, married Thomas Low Nichols, a feminist, writer, and editor; a Swedenborgian clergyman presided. Mary Wilhelmina Nichols, born in November 1850, died of bronchitis thirteen years later. Nichols finished his medical training in 1850 and worked with his wife at a variety of vegetarian and hydropathic activities and in complementary literary work, formulating ambitious plans for a School of Life, which would be a center for the advocacy of free love. This theme appeared insistently in his Esoteric Anthropology (1853), in her Mary Lyndon (1855), and in their joint Marriage (1854). A woman had the right to bear children by the father of her choice.
However, these were extreme views even for the animated and variegated milieu that had characterized Mrs. Nichols’s salon. After moving to Cincinnati in 1855 the family established a School of Life at Yellow Springs, Ohio, based upon the ideas of the French utopian Charles Fourier. They tried to enforce chastity, penance, and other spiritual proscriptions; they had become sympathetic to Catholicism and in 1857 were baptized Catholics with Elma, a faith from which they did not deviate. They spent their remaining years lecturing, finally, in 1861, going to England, where they became increasingly mystical and continued to give water cures; there Mrs. Nichols died and was buried.
Through critical examination of physiological issues as a youth, an orientation toward rudimentary emotional and physical aspects of life (including a dose of mysticism), and her creative literary work, Mary Gove Nichols came into contact with the center of the reform intelligentsia, demonstrating its vitality, heterogeneity and openness: hydrotherapy mingled easily, for a time, with feminism and the worlds of literature and other art. From this tension, which must have been compelling, the feminist Nichols developed an apparently satisfying marriage and a yearning for religious commitment.
Her novels include Uncle John or It is Too Much Trouble (1846); Agnes Morris or The Heroine of Domestic Life (1849); The Two Loves or Eros and Anteros (1849); Uncle Angus (1864); and Jerry: A Novel of Yankee American Life (1872). See her A Woman’s Work in Water Cure and Sanitary Education (1868); E. A. Poe, “The Literati of New York City,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, July 1846; T. L. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life (2 vols. 1864); and Nichols’ Health Man ual: Being Also a Memorial of the Life and Work of Mrs. Mary S. Gove Nichols (1887). See also files of the Water Cure Journal (1845-54) and the secondary accounts S. J. Hale, Biography of Distinguished Women (1876); B-M. Stearns, “Two Forgotten New England Reformers,” New England Quarterly, March 1933, and “Memnonia: The Launching of a Utopia,” New England Quarterly, June 1942; I. T. Richards, “Mary Gove Nichols and John Neal,” New England Quarterly, June 1934; J. B. Blake, “Mary Gove Nichols, Prophetess of Health” American Philosophical Society Proceedings, June 1962; P. Gleason, “From Free Love to Catholicism: Dr. and Mrs. Thomas L. Nichols at Yellow Springs,” Ohio Historical Quarterly, October 1961; W. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union, The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980); and Notable American Women (1971).