Shameless : the visionary life of Mary Gove Nichols / Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt.
2002
HQ1413.N53 S55 2002 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
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Details
Title
Shameless : the visionary life of Mary Gove Nichols / Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt.
Author
Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L.
ISBN
0801868483 (alk. paper)
9780801868481 (alk. paper)
9780801868481 (alk. paper)
Imprint
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Language
English
Description
xii, 342 pages, 14 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Call Number
HQ1413.N53 S55 2002
Summary
"Though little known today, Mary Gove Nichols (1810-84) was once one of the most infamous and influential women in America, a radical social reformer who preached equality in marriage, free love, spiritualism, the health risks of corsets and masturbation, the benefits of the cold-water cure, and, above all, the importance of happiness. A victim of emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of her first husband, she made it her life's work to ensure that other women were better informed about their bodies and their opportunities than she had been. After leaving her first husband, she became a national figure in the 1840s and '50s by giving anatomy lectures around the country, attended by thousands of women, in which she openly discussed the needs, details, and desires of the female body. With her second husband, medical writer and social reformer Thomas Low Nichols, she embarked on an unprecedented intellectual and professional collaboration, and together they challenged the inequities of conventional marriage, demanded the right of every woman to have control over her own body, and advocated universal good health." "Considered too radical and mercurial even by their fellow reformers, especially after their conversion to Catholicism, Mary and her husband were often excluded from the very social causes they had helped to found - just as they have been from the histories of their era. In Shameless, Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt offers the first biography of this woman who paved the way for such activists as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Sanger. Drawing on the extensive public and private writings of the Nicholses and their peers, Silver-Isenstadt portrays Mary Gove Nichols's courageous life and visionary intellect, revealing the rich diversity of opinion within nineteenth-century America's social reform movements and uncovering the inspiring story of a woman who dared to live by the utopian principles she advocated."--Jacket.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-331) and index.
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Table of Contents
1 The Formative Years 11
2 A Professional Escape 45
3 Passion Unleashed 79
4 The Needful Maturation of Thomas Low Nichols 109
5 Seminal Influence 129
6 The Costs of Conviction 157
7 Spirited Encounters 188
8 Unsettling Departures 210.
2 A Professional Escape 45
3 Passion Unleashed 79
4 The Needful Maturation of Thomas Low Nichols 109
5 Seminal Influence 129
6 The Costs of Conviction 157
7 Spirited Encounters 188
8 Unsettling Departures 210.