“She Will Have Science”: Ethos and Audience in Mary Gove's Lectures to Ladies

Abstract

In 1838, Mary Gove (Nichols) began lecturing on anatomy and physiology, a rhetorical act that was both new and risky because public discussion of the human body and disease was believed inappropriate for women. In order to protect her ethos, Gove used her ostensibly informative lectures to promote her reform agenda, by implying that her audience already shared her beliefs in women's right to physiological knowledge and their obligation to use that knowledge to reform society. Rather than relying only on the conventional advice to construct one's ethos based on the audience's existing values, Gove also crafted her audience's ethos, describing her listeners in ways that emphasized values conducive to her reform agenda. Her use of this strategy suggests that an audience's acceptance of nontraditional speakers is not simply a matter of “letting” them speak; it also means, to some degree, acknowledging the alternative values they represent.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Carol Mattingly, Nan Johnson, Anne-Marie Pedersen, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for feedback on previous drafts of this project.

Notes

¹Mary's first husband was Hiram Gove; after obtaining a divorce from Gove, she married Thomas Low Nichols, with whom Mary worked as a water-cure physician, editor, and teacher. I will use the name “Gove” when referring to her work before her marriage to Nichols, and “Gove Nichols” when referring to her later work, in accord with her preference for recognizing both the name under which she studied and first gained celebrity and the name under which her career continued and she was happily married (Danielson 258, n1).

²Although the form of Free Love advocated by Gove Nichols was actually very chaste, many nineteenth-century Americans perceived its principles to be an invitation to promiscuity; for this and other reasons, she gained a stronger radical reputation as her career progressed. See Joanne E. Passet (19–38) for Gove Nichols's involvement in the Free Love movement and Silver-Isenstadt's biography of Gove Nichols for a description of her entire career.

³Also known as hydropathy or hydrotherapy, practitioners of this therapeutic approach applied cold water to patients internally and externally, believing that the water would carry away the impurities that caused illness. Most water-cure physicians, including Gove, argued that “regular” medical practices such as administering drugs, bleeding, and blistering often did more harm than good.

⁴Mary S. Gove published two editions of Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology in 1842 and two editions of Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology. With an Appendix on Water Cure in 1846, which was reprinted in 1855. I use the 1842 text as the basis for my analysis, along with the reports of her original lecture series published in The Graham Journal and The New York Morning Herald.

⁵Followers of Sylvester Graham's system, which garnered most of its attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, strove to regain and maintain their health by correcting their dietary and sexual habits. They believed that eschewing meat, spices, and stimulating drinks would keep the passions calm and reduce sexual impulses, thereby avoiding the debilitating effects of engaging in too much sexual activity. In his work on Graham's role in health reform, Stephen Nissenbaum characterizes Mary Gove as “a kind of female equivalent to Sylvester Graham” (164).

⁶In the nineteenth century, amateur scientific study was a popular activity for women with the time and resources to pursue it. Suggesting that members of her audience knew about the chemical makeup of the air might, therefore, have implied that they belonged to the middle and upper classes, in addition to suggesting their intelligence and strong educational background.

⁷Although Gove did occasionally speak to mixed audiences, those lectures were on the topic of tight lacing. The delicacy of the topic of human sexuality makes it highly unlikely that she intended these lectures for an audience that included men.

⁸Although Gove perceived her time to be short, she would live to be 74 years old. She lectured on hygiene for more than twenty years.

⁹Although Gove and other reformers complained about the regular profession's monopoly over health information, many physicians supported more widespread knowledge about anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, especially for mothers. The accusation that regular physicians willfully withheld such information created an “us vs. them” attitude that increased interest in sectarian therapeutics.

¹⁰Gove's work in the rhetorical sphere also propelled her to efforts to protect her legal rights. As she was preparing Lectures to Ladies for publication, Gove learned that “a woman's manuscript was not hers” and sought advice from an attorney for securing the copyright herself so that the profits would go to her and not to Hiram Gove, whom she had supported for several years through her labors (Gove to Neal 10 August 1841).

¹¹This chapter was not part of Gove's original lecture series; she added information on diseases of the spine and education for publication.

¹²Of course, several social factors combined to make women's medical careers possible. I do not mean to suggest that Gove single-handedly altered centuries of attitudes toward women, only that she contributed to this social change by offering an alternative set of criteria by which women could be judged virtuous.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carolyn Skinner

Carolyn Skinner is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University