Citation

Cohen PC. J. Early Repub. 2014; 34(1): 1-20.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press)

DOI

10.1353/jer.2014.0003

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas Low Nichols, operating separately in the 1840s and then together as a dynamic partnership in the 1850s, earned national reputations as notorious sex radicals. They were public figures well known to other antebellum reformers and to the newspaper-reading public of their day. At their pinnacle of fame, they co-wrote a book titled Marriage (1854) that argued forcefully against traditional monogamy and in favor of freedom of affections in love relations. Thomas Nichols also published a frank book about the physiology of sex, called Esoteric Anthropology (1853), Mary Gove published a thinly fictionalized autobiography, Mary Lyndon (1855), and together they issued a periodical for five years, with some 20,000 subscribers, declaring their advocacy of both men's and women's sexual autonomy. They argued not only for a woman's right to say no to sex, but for her right to say yes as well, even outside of marriage. To note the obvious: No other woman in the 1840s or 1850s was so publicly a free love advocate. Famous in their own day, the pair fell into obscurity for over a century, precisely because they were considered dangerous and radioactive by their contemporaries, even their progressive contemporaries. They underwent erasure. The leading lights of the emergent woman's rights movement felt it necessary to distance and marginalize Gove. Henry Blackwell warned his wife, Lucy Stone, to keep Gove and Nichols away from the women's rights movement.