Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols (review)

Shameless is a dual biography of Mary Gove Nichols (1810-84) and her second husband, Thomas Low Nichols (1815-1901), two ardent (and controversial) health reformers in America during the mid-nineteenth century. In many respects, the Nicholses' beliefs and activities typified the antebellum popular health movement. Mary and Thomas advocated hydropathy, vegetarianism, dress reform, and personal responsibility in health and sickness. With unflagging zeal, they wrote, lectured, corresponded, taught, and healed. They organized schools and "harmonic" communities, explored Fourierism and other social philosophies, and pondered the relationship between body, spirit, society, and nature. Overall, Mary and Thomas "encouraged their followers to be aware of the holiness and happiness attainable through moral and healthful choices in each moment of life" (p. 309).

Happiness? One might not readily associate contentment with the stern values and regimens of the antebellum health crusade. As "advocate[s] of happiness" (p. 1), though, Mary and Thomas affirmed the right of all individuals (especially women) to enjoy basic passions and sexual love, and to claim ownership of their bodies. These seemingly radical beliefs alienated many fellow reformers and the general public. Other choices struck contemporaries as perplexing, rather than repugnant; for example, Mary dabbled in spiritualism, snubbed the abolitionist cause, and converted to Catholicism late in life. A defender of slavery, Thomas regarded the Civil War as unconstitutional tyranny perpetrated by the North. The Nicholses fled to England in 1861.

What do these diverse, even contradictory, convictions mean? Where might a historian locate the Nicholses in health reform, the women's rights movement, and American thought and culture in the mid-1800s? These questions prompted Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt to rescue Mary and Thomas from nineteenth-century notoriety and twentieth-century obscurity. The result is a lively, well-researched book that will interest historians of health and medicine, women and gender, and nineteenth-century America. Silver-Isenstadt compares the Nicholses' ideas to other versions of antebellum popular health, sex education, and utopian philosophy. (Profiles of the women's rights movement and other political causes are informative, but less developed.) She concludes that Mary and Thomas were not so much outside antebellum social reform as they were ahead of it. They broached difficult issues, took courageous stances, and laid the groundwork for today's feminist movement and health consciousness.

Two of their principles seem especially bold and far-sighted to the author. First, Mary often puzzled over the "nature and social management of passion, pleasure, sex, and reproduction" (p. 48). She concluded (as did Thomas) that individuals were entitled to express—in authentic, but never destructive, ways—all human desires, including physical love. They asserted that women, in particular, had a right to "free love." This did not mean promiscuity (as many critics assumed), but true intimacy and pleasure, within and outside marriage. Happiness was not possible, however, unless individuals—especially women—had "individual sovereignty." The Nicholses' defense of women's right to self-knowledge and self-ownership never wavered. They insisted that women's choices about body, sex, and reproduction should be free of personal shame, male control, state regulation, and religious doctrine. They assailed domestic violence, marriage, and divorce laws as little more than the legalized oppression of women.

How did Mary arrive at these beliefs? Silver-Isenstadt applies, with a light hand, some psychohistory to the question. She discusses Mary's difficult and lonely childhood, the early death of a sister, Mary's loveless and abusive first marriage, and her lifelong search for peace and security. In general, though, she understands Mary's experiences and yearnings as part of the fabric of female life (implicitly white and middle-class), gender relations, and social turbulence of nineteenth-century America.

Silver-Isenstadt closes by evaluating the Nicholses' legacy. She draws familiar connections between the advice of antebellum health reformers and...