SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

The book focuses on the institution of marriage, intermittently touching on questions of nutrition and diet, and lamenting that “men spend their lives in making diseased food of animals when the vegetable world affords a far purer and more healthful nutriment” (277). A proper diet that is in alignment with their water-cure convictions, is vegan and linked to “freedom in a true society,” the conditions for which are “habits of cleanliness, diet, and physical and mental refinement and culture” (386). The Nichols offer analogies between marriage and slavery, and the animal world. Metaphors taken from the realms of labor, agriculture, and food production are used to discuss gender relations. For example, quoting Stephen Pearl Andrews, they assert that the “existing marital system is the house of bondage and the slaughter-house of the female sex” (153). They condemn the general state of bigotry, particularly among the most progressive minds:

When a conservator of public morals, such as Horace Greeley, regards with horror the assertion that woman has the right to choose the father of her child, the fact proves much – alas! how much. It proves the low estate from which woman has just begun to emerge. She is degraded by law and custom even lower than the beasts which perish; and if one asserts her right to any ownership of herself, so-called moralists and philosophers reject the thought with horror (236-237).

A fully emancipated American woman, who makes her own choices with respect to husband and childbearing, “would not be the drudge of an isolate household, cooking pork and other edibles for a gluttonous man, ministering to the base of his brain and life, and blotting out all useful and pleasant existence for herself” (212). Such a woman “understands Water-cure well; she is a good physician and a good nurse; she lives purely and simply on a vegetable diet, and is a water drinker. She knows the worth of character and the worldly value of reputation, but she will starve sooner than be any longer a legal prostitute. Many such women are growing amongst us” (214). To properly achieve these ends, the Nichols advocate Fourierist associationism as “the natural condition of man, and the only kind of life adapted to the satisfaction of all his desires, capabilities, and passions” (422).