Name Mary Nichols | ||
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Mary Gove Nichols, née Mary Sargeant Neal (August 10, 1810 – 1884) was a woman's rights and health reform advocate, and an American writer.
Life
She was born in Goffstown, New Hampshire. At a young age, Nichols suffered from four miscarriages and a chronic illness. She became a woman's health care advocate and spread her message through lectures, clinics, and her writings. Mary Gove Nichols raised children, treated patients, published writings, and sought to live what she believed.
Nichols first marriage was to Hiram Gove, an unsuccessful businessman. Gove married Nichols expecting financial support and obedience from his wife. Nichols moved to Lynn, Massachusetts with her husband and child. In Massachusetts, Nichols ran a girls' school, and this was where she began her health reform career. Mary Gove began to lecture 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. She founded a "water-cure" clinic in New York City. In 1841 she took her daughter and moved back with her parents leaving her husband behind; he eventually agreed to the divorce. After being abused, both sexually and emotionally, she made it her life's work to inform women of their bodies and their opportunities.
In 1848, Mary remarried to Thomas Low Nichols, a writer with 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. They moved to England at the outset of the Civil War.
Nichols' surviving daughter by her first husband, Elma Gove, became a painter.