This 1850s feminist spoke out against marriage, and still married the man she loved

On first glance, the wedding that took place in New York City in 1848 was an ordinary, albeit slightly bohemian affair. The bride wore jasmine, white roses, and geranium leaves in her hair. In lieu of food, flowers were passed out to the guests. The minister recited the Lord’s Prayer.

But then came the vows. Mary Gove Nichols began, “In a marriage with you, I resign no right of my soul. I enter into no compact to be faithful to you. I only promise to be faithful to the deepest love of my heart … If my love leads me from you, I must go.” More than 80 years before Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, Mary added, “I must have my room into which none can come, but because I wish it.” Her groom, Thomas Low Nichols, agreed. He would later write, “the model husband gives to his wife her rights as a human being.”

They were advocates of “free love,” a social movement that rejected conventional marriage on the grounds that it enslaved women, and that people should be free to love whomever they wanted for however long they wanted, so long as they weren’t impeding the rights of others. The state, they argued, shouldn’t meddle in love.

It was a radical idea for a time when matrimony was defined by a wife’s subservience and forfeiting of legal rights. Divorce was nearly impossible. Mary was a feminist, novelist, and physician, who championed women’s health, outdoor exercise, and the healing powers of cold baths. Thomas was a social reformer, journalist, and physician, who seemed as ardently committed to feminism as his wife.

The period before the Civil War was an era of reformist exuberance. Self and community improvement projects abounded. Americans practiced the “water cure,” which advocated healing through bathing, and adhered to Sylvester Graham’s “vegetable diet.” (Graham was a proponent of whole grains; his work inspired the graham cracker.) Socialist communes sprang up, and radical ideas about education, women’s rights, and marriage were discussed animatedly in salons. Undergirding this self-improvement enthusiasm was the idea that if Americans could nourish themselves, a new society would flourish and fairness would reign supreme.

Mary’s theories on freedom and women’s rights were formed in the crucible of her first marriage. Her first husband, Hiram Gove, burned her prized letters. He required her to ask permission to buy books, despite the fact that he hardly worked, suffering from what she described as “a spiritual paralysis that made him unable to act for any useful purpose.” She earned the majority of their money by lying in bed sewing in a state of depression. Hiram was prone to belligerent tantrums whenever she spoke to another man. She wrote that during this marriage, “I followed no attraction of my nature.” Her only consolation was her young daughter and literature, especially medical books, which she consumed voraciously. “I began to see that I was a being — that I had the right first to live, and second to enjoy life in some degree.”

She gave lectures at the American Physiological Society. During her first lecture, she writes, “I stood in the pulpit as if in a mist.” She told the audience, “No woman asks what can I do? but what may I do?”

Audiences at her lectures swelled regularly to four or five hundred. “Loosen the death grasp of the corset,” she told a crowd of at least 2000, “and send the now imprisoned and poisoned blood rejoicing through the veins of woman.” Her speaking tours in Boston and New York were standing room only. Hiram only tolerated her work if he got to collect the speaking fees.

Perhaps roused by her success and her new ideas, she resolved to leave Hiram. After hearing of the separation, publishing houses and schools that had welcomed her before shunned her. But Mary was immersing herself deeper in a school of radical utopians, socialists, and health proponents. She opened her first hydrotherapy clinic not long after her separation.

When she first met Thomas, she dismissed him as a “mere dandy,” until they began exchanging letters. He complimented her: “All I read of your writing tells me that you are the apostle of woman. How deeply do you sympathize with your oppressed and injured sex,” and “Oh! I have so longed from my infancy, for such a friend as you … You divine all that I am.” To him, she wrote, “My love has been my life — my power.”

They honed their philosophy by founding health journals and schools, writing books together and separately, and giving lectures. The couple was greatly influenced by Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist, who is widely credited with coining the term “feminism.” Fourier argued that the suppression of passion was harmful not just to the individual, but to society as a whole. Freedom was the Nichols’s gospel, individual sovereignty essential to flourishing. Love need not be limited to one person. In their 1854 book, Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results, they wrote, “some like a single flower or a single dish — others will have a bouquet or a feast.” Free love and feminist ideology were deeply enmeshed. Marriage was, as Mary wrote, “the annihilation of woman.” Though she and Thomas were married, they imagined a different kind of marriage, “true marriage,” where they were sovereign individuals.

Edgar Allen Poe was a member of their coterie and commented on Mary’s writing, “Her style is quite remarkable for its luminousness and precision — two qualities very rare with her sex.”

In his book Esoteric Anthropology, Thomas described sex in full anatomical detail, calling it, “the last, fullest, and most perfect action of the amative passion; that which consummates the life and happiness of the individual, and governs the destiny of the race.” In a true demonstration of the polarity of sex, the book was roundly denounced, but also sold thousands of copies. The health community, which had tolerated discussions of feminism and women’s rights, felt they had crossed a line with “free love.” Journals they had worked closely with refused to publish them.

But the couple was intellectually fluid. Whether it was out of fearlessness or capriciousness, they embraced ideas wholly, only to abandon them. There is no clearer example of this than what happened in 1857.

Mary had always been a bit of an ecstatic, known to make appeals to the spirit world for guidance. That year, during a seance, she claimed the spirit of St. Ignatius of Loyola had led her to Catholicism. The Nichols’ both quickly converted, abandoning a commune they had been organizing, turning their attention to Catholic endeavors instead. They continued their health work, but “free love” drifted from their focus. It was an incomprehensible about-face, a swerve that historians would never satisfyingly reconcile. They remained married until Mary died of breast cancer in 1884.

In 1962, historian John Blake remarked that many of Mary Gove Nichols’s ideas were still controversial over a century later: “Very few Americans today are vegetarians, marriage laws still exist, and Amelia Bloomer’s costume would arouse as much comment on Fifth Avenue today as it did in 1850.” While there are more vegetarians today, marriage is legally fairer, and the sight of a woman striding down Fifth Avenue in pants is entirely unremarkable, “free love” still raises eyebrows. On the face of it, marriage would seem to be one of our most unbudging institutions.

The Nichols’ marriage was defined by paradox. They advocated for marriage’s abolition while married. They argued for the institution’s transience, but heeded the traditional vow, “till death do us part.” Theirs was a story of unconventional ideas breeding conventional actions. Traditionalists might argue that this proves the supremacy of marriage — it’s here to stay. But it’s just as easily argued that for as long as there has been marriage, there has been ambivalence.