Margaret Jones Burleigh: Friend to Cyrus; Wife to Mary Grew

Margaret Jones (Burleigh) Basics

b. 1817, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

d. December 12, 1871, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

m. Cyrus Moses Burleigh (1820-1855), February 3, 1855, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Life Partner was Mary Grew (1813-1896)

lived in Pennsylvania

Margaret Jones was a close friend and working associate of Cyrus Moses Burleigh, as part of the editorial team of the Pennsylvania Freeman. When Cyrus was clearly approaching death, Margaret and he married. She helped him put his affairs in order, as he died a mere month after the marriage.

Mary Grew and Margaret Jones Burleigh were consistently active in Abolition and aligned moral causes in and around Philadelphia. This aspect of their lives will be developed in later phases of this project.

The relationship between Margaret Jones Burleigh and Mary Grew so patently paralleled heterosexual marriage, that it plays a prominent role in the ground-breaking twentieth-century article by historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," which was the first published article in the feminist academic journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (v. 1 no. 1, 1975). Here is that text, as republished in Smith-Rosenberg's collection Disorderly Conduct:

Perhaps the most explicit statement concerning women’s lifelong friendships appeared in the letter that abolitionist and reformer Mary Grew wrote at about the same time, referring to her own love for her dear friend and lifelong companion, Margaret Burleigh. Grew wrote, in response to a letter of condolence from another woman on Burleigh’s death: 

Your words respecting my beloved friend touch me deeply. Evidently… you comprehend and appreciate, as few persons do… the nature of the relation which existed, which exists, between her and myself. Her only surviving niece… also does. To me it seems to have been a closer union than that of most marriages. We know there have been other such between two men and also between two women. And why should there not be. Love is spiritual, only passion is sexual.

Reference

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 73-74. Quote from Mary Grew, Providence, R.I., to Isabel Howland, Sherwood, N.Y., April 27, 1892, Howland Correspondence, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.]