Cause of death Tuberculosis Spouse Horace Greeley (m. 1836) Role Horace Greeley's wife | Name Mary Cheney Movement Suffrage | |
Full Name Mary Young Cheney Born 1811 or 1814 Litchfield, Connecticut Education "Privileged" (no details) Known for Wife of Horace Greeley; suffragette Children 7 (5 died in childhood) Died October 29, 1872, New York City, New York, United States | ||
Resting place Green-Wood Cemetery | ||
Mary Young Cheney Greeley (1811 or 1814 – 1872) was the wife of American newspaper editor Horace Greeley.
They married in Warrenton, North Carolina, on July 5, 1836. Little is known of her early life. She was briefly a schoolteacher, and later an intermittent suffragette and spiritualist. She is reported to have been mentally unstable for much of her life. The date of her birth is uncertain; while her tombstone reads 1811, her obituary gives it as 1814.
Early in their marriage he used her $5000 in savings to fund his first private newspaper.
The marriage was not a happy one, and her oppressive relationship with her husband colored her life. He had little say in the running of the house, and avoided his wife and their house. However, he kept her almost constantly pregnant, but took no responsibility for the children. Five of their seven children died quite young, at least some of them of neglect.
Greeley was an advocate of the Graham Diet and a Spiritualist. Her behavior suggests she may have had clinical depression and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She believed her son Arthur Young Greeley, known as "Pickie", was a spirit medium. She kept him isolated from the world and from other children, and constantly demanded that he relay communications from the afterlife. As he grew older he began to express a fierce anger towards his mother. After his death at age five from cholera, she hired the 11-year-old Kate Fox to stay at her house and contact him. Ms. Fox later wrote that she too disliked Mrs. Greeley intensely.
She suffered from "consumptive lung disease" for the last 20 years of her life, and died from it on October 30, 1872. Her husband, who was running for President of the United States at the time, died 30 days later.