Mary Young Cheney Greeley

Mary Young Cheney Greeley
Born	Mary Young Cheney 1811 or 1814 Litchfield, Connecticut
Died	29 October 1872 New York City, New York
Cause of death	Tuberculosis
Resting place	Green-Wood
Education	"Privileged" (no details)
Known for	Wife of Horace Greeley; suffragette
Movement	Suffrage
Children	7 (5 died in childhood)

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. 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. It's likely that she was clinically depressed and a sufferer of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She believed one of their children, a 4 or 5 year old boy, was a spirit medium and constantly demanded that he relay communications from the afterlife. After his death, she hired the 11-year-old Margaret Fox to stay at her house and contact him.

She suffered from "consumptive lung disease" for the last twenty 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.