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March 5, 1831 - Goffstown/Weare, New Hampshire Marriage of Mary Neal (1810-84) to Hiram Gove, Quakers. The couple's first decade of married life was bleak, life-sapping. Jean L. Silver-Isensdtadt in Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols outlined the options available to a woman in marital crisis in the 1830's. She might turn to her mother, her sister, her female friends, or perhaps a church leader for confidential support. "But Mary had never felt close to her mother. The older sister with whom she had been raised had died. She was 150 long miles from her father and 10 from her childhood home, surrounded by her husband's family and friends. And it was her involvement with the Quakers that had led to her most profound problems. ...Marriage required her to establish a new relationship with her body, which was no longer hers alone but was available always, by law, to her husband's desires. Her physical being had become his entitlement. Mary called her year with Hiram "an abyss of evil that I can never describe." "....Soon Mary became the only breadwinner in the family, with Hiram haunting the house and leaving his wife no solitude...He began to burn Mary's personal letters before she could read them, suspicious of her correspondence and intellectual activities. He also began to restrict her physical freedom. Twenty years later, Mary wrote that she had been forbidden from going anywhere outside the house without Hiram's permission, except to the Quaker Meeting or to a funeral. She was not allowed to read or to write creatively. Any letter she composed underwent his scrutiny and was subject to destruction should it contain a single sentence of which he disapproved. 'He arrogated the rule over my soul and body, with the utmost confidence. I was to do his bidding.' "That Mary never became energetically committed to the growing abolitionist movement bears a relationship to her own sense of marital enslavement....Though sympathetic to the cause, Mary remained distant. She despised all despotism. She did not support slavery, but her own chains distracted her from those of others. The oppressor in her line of vision was a very immediate husband, not the abstract southern slaveholder....Because neither suffragists nor abolitionists apparently intended to free Mary from Hiram, they could not attract her impassioned energy. In her mid-twenties, Mary craved a reform movement that would fight for her personal freedom and happiness."
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