| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt. Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 342. $24.95.

Mary Gove Nichols (1810–1884), a woman currently on the fringes of history, was in actuality one of the foremothers of the women's health movement. Her somewhat controversial life, brought to historians by Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt, was both fascinating and somewhat bohemian. Born and raised in New England, Nichols early became an independent thinker. She sought out her own religion (Quakerism), which, in the first of many unexpected turns for the reader led her into an abusive marriage with Hiram Gove, a situation she tolerated for ten years before walking away. 1

During her years with Gove, Nichols began to speak publicly and write about women's health issues. Part educator, part reformer, she believed that women should know about their bodies and have control over what happened to them. Much of her ideology—that women not be sexually abused and that marriage not be a prison—evolved from her abusive relationship with Gove, a relationship that did not end with Mary's leaving. Gove, besides harassing his estranged wife and kidnaping their daughter, insisted that she support him economically. Even after she rescued her daughter and ran away to New York City, where she lived in a communal home of artists and free thinkers, Gove tracked her down and tormented her. After all, as a husband in the first half of the nineteenth century, he had legal rights to all she owned, including the copyrights on her writing. Nichols greatly resented what she termed "his right in my brain" (p. 62). . . .

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